In the book The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin, the author and narrator of the book, writes about his childhood in Harlem and what he witnessed and learned. as he grew. When Baldwin was fourteen, he saw Harlem in a completely different way. He saw that the terrible influence of the street was gradually trying to infiltrate him and take hold of him. The people around him contributed to these influences, such as his father who told him he was going down this path as well as his friends. The only people who blocked these influences were the good churchgoers and the girls who saw the influence of the streets and wanted to be God's decoy by saving the souls of boys through marriage. The influence of the streets is one way they may have shaped Baldwin's identity. This could have given him the worst of it if he had completely succumbed to it. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay. James Baldwin wants to discover that shaping and defending our identities is more real to us than realizing our humanity. James Baldwin's idea of ​​humanity is that we must accept others and truly love them as individuals. Our identities are one of the most important things a human being can have and relate to in some way. It gives us a foothold in the world we live in and helps us in our social lives. You can immediately identify with a person who has the same identity as you, for example if they are of the same race as you, this gives you a certain sense of understanding of the person and you can guess what they have experienced in the life. Our identities primarily tell us who we are as a person in relation to others, but the only problem is that our identities are sometimes shaped not by us but by other people. James Baldwin describes in his book how the identities of African Americans were not shaped by them but by whites or "white liberals" in the United States. The most notable way that white people shaped the identity of African Americans is when they took their last name and gave them their last name instead. For example, Baldwin was probably the last name of the slave owner of James Baldwin's ancestors. For most African Americans, the last name does not tell them who they are or where they come from. It only tells them that during a dark time in their ancestry, they were held as an object and not treated as a human being. From this understanding of African American identity, I can understand why Elijah Muhammad changed his last name and founded the Nation of Islam. movement. Elijah wanted to return to the roots of his ancestors and not become a Christian because Africans before being captured and brought to the colonies believed in Islam. Elijah Muhammad wanted to shape his own identity instead of maintaining the one given to him by white men. Unfortunately for Elijah, this new identity made him lose part of his humanity. The new ideology he has for the Nation of Islam leaves no room for any love for white men because they can only surrender to them. “But the police no longer did anything. Obviously, it was not because they had become more human but because they were under orders and because they were afraid. And indeed it was, and I was delighted to see it. They stood there, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub uniforms and with their Cub faces, totally unprepared, as is the case with American men, for whatevercould not be settled with a club, a fist or a gun. I might have felt sorry for them if I hadn't found myself in their hands so often and discovered, through some horrible experience, what they were like when they had power and what they looked like when you held power. The behavior of the crowd, its quiet intensity, is the other thing that forced me to re-evaluate the speakers and their message. Trying to retain the ideals and demands of the Nation of Islam instead of forcing the Nation to Islam to abandon its ideals. The police or authorities are not doing this because they might accept the demands and ideals of the Nation of Islams, they are holding them back because they are afraid of what would happen if they retaliated by doing what they did to every other black movement at the time. The Nation of Islam movement is different from others because it does not try to find a peaceful solution to the problem but rather demands that white men give them land to live in their own community and become mostly self-sufficient. To white men, it appears that African Americans in The Nation of Islam might resort to violence if attacked. Thus, this ideology of Elijah for the Nation of Islams gives no opportunity for white men to accept African-Americans but only to fear them. This is why Elijah lost his humanity because he cannot accept white men. When James Baldwin was growing up in Harlem, he was a Christian like his father and everyone else in the neighborhood. Baldwin didn't ask to be a Christian or care about being a Christian, he was only a Christian because his family and everyone around him chose Christianity for him. He never heard of other religions at a young age and therefore was never in an environment where he could choose or find the religion that suited him. Christianity was part of Baldwin's identity, whether he liked it or not. “One Saturday afternoon he took me to his church. There was no service that day and the church was empty except for a few women cleaning and other women praying. My friend took me to the back room to meet his pastor, a woman. She sat there in her robes, smiling, an extremely proud and beautiful woman, with Africa, Europe, and American Indians mixed together on her face. She was perhaps forty-five or fifty years old at that time, and in our world she was a very famous woman. My friend was about to introduce me when she looked at me, smiled and said, “Whose little boy are you?” This is precisely the expression that the pimps and racketeers of the Avenue use when they suggest, with both humor and intensity, that I “hang out” with them. Maybe part of the terror they made me feel was because I definitely wanted to be someone's little boy. I was so scared and at the mercy of so many puzzles that inevitably, that summer, someone would have taken over from me; In Harlem, you don't stay long at an auction market. “Baldwin was seen as a Christian and belonged to someone else's church simply because he was a black man living in Harlem. The way the pastor said who your little boy was made Baldwin think about what pimps and racketeers would say to someone. This made Baldwin feel like the churches owned him simply because he was a Christian. Being a Christian made Baldwin feel like a slave. Baldwin thinks that if he hadn't been a Christian, someone else would have taken it over anyway, because when you're in Harlem, you don't stay long at a sale.”.