It's good to see how the victims have finally been "humanized" after they were reduced to statistics of "drug addicts" by the Duterte administration.

Disclaimer: I started reading this book and making a review with minimal and surface knowledge of the historical context. Non-American reader.

“The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another - or others - always has been and always will be a recipe for murder."

James Baldwin’s essays are still relevant today in the year 2025. The abovementioned quote, for instance, remained true with different actors - Israel to Palestinians, and Russia to Ukraine.

The essays touched upon several historical and socio-political lessons every society can learn from. One such lesson is how religion can be used to segregate people based on their skin color. Baldwin’s imagery of a white god for Christianity and of a black god for the rising Black Muslim movement is the perfect way to demonstrate how religion is used for this purpose. Baldwin’s visceral experiences from a Christian upbringing to non-religious, then suddenly whipped to the loving, welcoming embrace of Islam, shows that a person’s experience can shape which religion a person can cling to. However, Baldwin turned away from these religions because they ‘debase’ another to uplift their own, which he opposed. After all, “whoever debases others is debasing himself.” Instead, Baldwin countered that in destroying racial tensions, love should be the first step:

“Love removes the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest, daring, and growth. And I submit, then, that the racial tensions that menace Americans today have little to do with real antipathy – on the contrary, indeed – and are involved only symbolically with colour."

I think this is a radical point of view, yet a logical and feasible one. Love, after all, can dissolve the barriers we set up to separate us from other.

Baldwin also discusses that fear’s role in segregation and identity - that through the mechanisms of fear and terror where you can put a chokehold to divide the people by their skin color, and in turn, create their own identity through it. As a result, they immobilized themselves in the assigned cupboards, from which they had difficulty being released. From Baldwin’s point of view, this is how liberation is impossible. Throwing away that fear is how the liberation begins - whites and blacks need each other to give their nation an identity.

Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time is more than just a critique of American racism — it is also a reminder that hatred and domination corrode both the oppressor and the oppressed. Even for a non-American reader, his words resonate in today’s world, where new forms of division and violence continue to arise. Baldwin’s insistence on love as the starting point for change makes his message timeless and urgent, echoing well beyond the era in which he wrote.

[I actually finished reading on August 25, 2025. I forgot to update this here]