Review of 'The Fire Next Time' by James Baldwin

A beautifully written, insightful book about race in America, though one that has not aged particularly well. Much has changed about race relations in America (there's an African-American middle class, for a start) and much has stayed the same - racism is still fundamental to American class relations, even though it's not the same as it was in the mid-1960s. The 'fire' that Baldwin seems to have been predicted has not come, though.

Parts of this are really interesting - I particularly liked the description of his meeting with Elijah Muhammad of the 'Nation of Islam', a slightly mad sect that doesn't have all that much to do with Islam, and which once looked like it might become important. Unfortunately my copy is missing a few pages of this section, so I missed his discussion of where the Nation got its money from and its sometimes-cozy relationship with White Supremacists.