THE FIRE NEXT TIME by James...

THE FIRE NEXT TIME by James Baldwin (Vintage: $8; 106 pp.). Thirty years after their initial publication, James Baldwin’s essays have lost none of their angry power. The intervening decades have done little to improve the situation he described in a essay-letter addressed to his teen-aged nephew in Harlem: “You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence; you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.” Most of “Fire” is devoted to Baldwin’s reflections on religion, including his meeting with Elijah Muhammad. He rejects Muhammad’s doctrines as racist, insisting that hatred oppresses both the perpetrator and the victim, and concludes with a challenging call for true equality: “The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the black people--the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.”