In other words, destruction is not only about the weapons that people use to maim, kill and destroy other human beings. Just as contemplation is ultimately rooted in the heart and spiritual practices of love, so the seeds of destruction are rooted in people's hearts and in spiritual practices that create relationships of superiority and inferiority. Merton intentionally invites a contrast between his book Seeds of Destruction and his Seeds of Contemplation. Thomas Merton understood Baldwin's point and drew upon it. The entire white world - the norms by which white Christian churches and society live - creates death and destruction for people of color as whites live a fantasy of innocence and superiority. I tell you this because I love you, and please don't you ever forget it."īlack survival means learning to affirm your own dignity and worth as the white world threatens it. In this context, Baldwin advises his nephew, "You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger. Franklin Frazier called "the cities of destruction." Simply put, cities of destruction isolate and impoverish black Americans and communicate a devastating message: Black lives do not count. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime." So wrote Baldwin in an open letter to his nephew, titled "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation," which constitutes the first part of his book The Fire Next Time.īaldwin introduces his nephew to what sociologist E. It is "not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. As the Ferguson October protests shut down three Wal-Marts - in support of John Crawford's family, a black teenager recently shot by a police officer in an Ohio Wal-Mart - among other actions, the church and people of faith need to attend to "the fire next time," to echo the warning of James Baldwin's classic.
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