In 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois famously declared: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.’ He meant not only in the United States but also elsewhere in the world. As for this century, in America, at least, we can now say it remains the dominant problem. The very fact, for instance, of a movement named ‘Black Lives Matter’ – now a decade old – speaks to something unspeakable: an obvious and overt racism that is driving America to a reckoning.

This abysmal situation would not surprise James Baldwin, whose centenary is being celebrated – or at least marked – this year (he was born on 2 August 1924). Beginning with his 1953 novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, and up to the end of his life, the colour line was his subject, the object against which he aimed his polemics. In The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin warns, ‘A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay.’ He cites Du Bois’s remark and then calls it ‘[a] fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world – here, there, or anywhere’. The root of the problem, as he analyses it in ‘Stranger in the Village’, ‘is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself’. In other words, it’s not a black problem, but a white one – a dialectical inversion typical of Baldwin. He goes on:

And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans – lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession – either to come to terms with this necessity, or to find a way around it, or (most usually) to find a way of doing both these things at once.

This leads to a sentence that clinches the argument with a clutch upon our attention: ‘The resulting spectacle, at once foolish and dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate observation that “the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men”.’

Baldwin is at his best in diagnosing this illness, in laying bare the ignorance, hypocrisy, and sheer inanity of American culture and politics as it relates to American blacks. In this, Baldwin speaks from his own experience and gives rein to his anger and anguish in a way that implicates the reader, whether white or black. Baldwin makes us uncomfortable. He sees it as his job. Eddie Glaude admits in his book Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its urgent lessons for our own (2020) that Baldwin was someone he evaded for a long time: ‘Baldwin’s essays forced you to turn inward and confront whatever pain was there, and I did not want to do that. I damn sure didn’t know what to do with my pain philosophically. Moreover, and this mattered most, I could not read him with my white colleagues without having to manage whatever he made them feel.’ In the end, Glaude had to come to terms with Baldwin and, therefore, with himself. It’s not just the content but the urgency and intimacy of Baldwin’s style that tears at the reader’s defences so that one either embraces Baldwin or pushes him away, or tries to do both simultaneously. The very coolness of his rage can be discomfiting:

It is a fact that every American Negro bears a name that originally belonged to the white man whose chattel he was. I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white, Protestant country, and this is what it means to be an American Negro, this is who he is – a kidnapped pagan, who was sold like an animal and treated like one. (The Fire Next Time)