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Love And Acceptance In James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time

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As a first generation Latinx, society made personal prosperity feel intangible or like something I shouldn't be striving for. The profoundly personal essays in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time engages the reader to feel the pain, despair, and even the hope, through the Negro man. The intimacy of the opening letter struck my being, disclosing to me that “this innocent country set you down in a ghetto (...) in which it intended for you to perish” and that “the limits of your ambitions were set forever.” I fell victim to stereotypes set forth for first generation Latinxs, and I didn’t allow myself “to aspire for excellence: I was to make peace with mediocrity.” Baldwin's solutions of love and acceptance however, heightened the value I saw

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