The song “Black Tie, White Noise” from the 1993 album of that name is one of Bowie’s least elliptical lyrics and represents perhaps his most personal statement on the subject of race. Hiding from the 1992 LA riots in a hotel room, the recently married Bowie and Iman are having sex. But in the thick of this intimate moment Bowie looks into his Somali wife’s eyes and wonders if, despite being a well-meaning white liberal, he really understands her blackness, or if he’s living in a Benetton-advert multicultural fantasy world. He hints that he is scared himself, as a famous white man, by the rioting black crowds below. Assuming there’s a part of Iman that shares their anger, is any of it directed at him? In an astonishing line which he repeats three times, Bowie reassures himself that Iman—and by extension Al B. Sure!, with whom he is duetting and who functions as a sort of proxy for Iman in the song—will not kill him. Then he admits he sometimes wonders why she won’t, given white people’s appalling racism and mistreatment of black people through the centuries.
Of course, the reason Iman won’t kill him is because she loves him. And as James Baldwin assures us in The Fire Next Time, one of the wisest polemics ever written, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
The book, which is in two parts, had its roots in a letter to Baldwin’s nephew on the centenary of black America’s “emancipation.” The elegance of Baldwin’s sentences, with their teeming subclauses and rich biblical cadences, is a function of anger, the same anger that energized the LA rioters. It is also a desperate need to cancel out the real white noise—the spurious national mythology white people invoke to convince themselves that their ancestors were wise, fair-minded heroes who always treated their neighbors and ethnic minority populations honorably.
Baldwin has news for his nephew: it’s not for white people to decide it’s within their gift to accept him. Nor should he try to impersonate them in any way or be tempted to believe that he is what the white world thinks he is—inferior. Why should black people have respect for the standards by which white people claim to live when it’s clear those standards are illusory?
He sounds implacable. Yet Baldwin, like Bowie, believes that the future has to be postracial. Hybrid. Tolerant. There can be no frisson of shock, no disapproval on either side, when it comes to interracial marriage and mixed-race children. When, in the book, Baldwin meets with Elijah Muhammad of the separatist Nation of Islam, he understands the doctrine of black self-sufficiency and self-respect Muhammad preaches but is suspicious of the groupthink he inspires in his followers. Baldwin has white friends he would trust with his life. Can he set this fact against the historic evilness of white people? Muhammad would say no. But for Baldwin there is no other way forward.
There is an invented aspect to racial difference, Baldwin felt. Which is how it becomes a tool of oppression: “Color is not a human or a personal reality. It is a political reality.” Views like this set him apart from the radical black movements of the late ’60s and early ’70s, some of whose followers and leaders—Eldridge Cleaver, for example—saw Baldwin’s homosexuality as deeply suspect, even treasonous. Baldwin had no wish to be typecast, or to be a spokesman—hence his move to France at the age of twenty-four.
Plenty of the books on Bowie’s list are thrilling, fun, or informative. Many of them are important. The Fire Next Time is essential.