“No one is more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The history of the United States as seen through the eyes of the “American Negro,” to use the now dated literary term, is both bleak and cruel. A country of racial intolerance and hostility is, according to James Baldwin's literary notions, unhealthy for both the oppressor and the oppressed. In his nonfiction topic The Fire Next Time, among other works, Baldwin, enraged by the ongoing racial stalemate in mid-20th-century United States, explores the psychological impact of institutionalized racism and segregation as it relates to American identity . problem” was as much an identity crisis for America as it was a wholly American issue, forcing the nation to reflect not only on its history as a slave-driven economy but also on its founding principles of equality and freedom. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin argues that the prevailing American standard, which has dictated the country for hundreds of years, needed desperate reform of character, morals, and justice if national order and stability were to be preserved through racial integration: “I am far from being convinced that it was worth being freed from the African sorcerer if I am now… destined to become dependent on the American psychiatrist… Whites cannot… be taken as models of how live. Rather, the white man himself is in desperate need of new standards, which will free him from his confusion and place him…in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being” (sections 95-96). The prevailing American standard of the time was threatened by a people who, for several hundred years, were disenfranchised and enslaved simply because of their skin color. America was facing an identity crisis, as Baldwin alludes to, as the American standard itself was under attack by black power and the black desire for freedom, forcing white Americans to examine not only themselves and their conditions, but also those they inflicted on black Americans. and the universal human suffering that every race has endured. Furthermore, Baldwin attributes America's identity crisis to its reluctance to see itself as a “mixed” and incredibly diverse nation. “…White Americans have assumed that “Europe” and “civilization” were synonymous – which they are not – and have been distrustful of other standards and sources of vitality, especially those produced in America itself, and have attempted to behave in every matter as if what was east for Europe was east for them too” (sections 92-93). America, Baldwin argues, aspired to Eurocentric standards; failing to realize and embrace their cultural and racial diversity. As the various civil rights and black power movements grew stronger, however, Baldwin recognized the rapidly transforming identity of the United States as blacks moved further into America's cultural, political, and economic spheres central, which was moving further and further away from that in much of Western Europe. homogeneous racial plateau, stating that “The point is that if we, who can hardly be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decadence.” (section 93). Overall, as Black Americans became more politically active and demanded freedom from institutionalized oppression, such as the.