The book is divided into two parts.  The first is a letter to his nephew describing the death of his nephew’s father and the racial situation in which the boy finds himself; the second a letter to the general audience from the discourses of Baldwin’s mind.  In this essay, for this is very much an essay, not a story, he illustrates the shortcomings of not just white Christians – as many authors are sadly often prone to doing – but also the faults of the Jews, Muslims, and blacks of the time.  He explores behind the façade of which racial prejudices hides mainly through retelling of events in his life, and attempts to illuminate what he has glimpsed in that dark corner to the common reader.

As a young man Baldwin became a Pentecostal preacher, but quickly realized the hypocrisy in the Church at the time.  Christians, who are supposed to love one another as they do themselves, instead subjugate and repress a portion of their population, relegating the blacks to a lower class state while at the same time revealing glaring hypocrisy between the way that they preached and the way that they behaved.  This division in practice and theology was so bad it led to an eventual “splitting” of God – the blacks saw him as black and the whites, white – which further kept the blacks and whites from the realization, which is Baldwin’s main purpose in writing this essay, that just as God is neither black nor white neither should a person’s love for another be based on such an irrelevant factor as the color of one’s skin.

The reaction to this “division” of God was a movement no one could have foreseen, blinded and bound as they were by their worldly preconceptions and prejudices.  The Black Islamic movement, led by Elijah Mohammed and Malcolm X, rose to prominence in America, calling for the exonerations and ascendancy of all blacks while decrying the whites as the Devil’s creation, a creation that had run its course and was now ready to be destroyed.  Having finally met with the movement’s leader, Baldwin came to the conclusion – if he had not already decided before – that the idea of complete genocide of all whites was ridicules, concluding that the creation of what was known as the “American Negro” was in fact an essential part of the past and identity of said culture.  The Negro’s past is a key with which the Negro finds his identity as a human, as a being equal to those around him.  The Negro, Baldwin says, has no misconceptions of any higher standard to which he must hold.

The whites of that day, on the other hand, were sadly bound by the fact that they had held themselves to a standard of superiority to which they could not, and never would, achieve.  A standard that required, as Baldwin writes:

 “The American Negro has the great advantage of never having believed that collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure.”

Throughout this discourse runs the fluid theme of love, a love that is colorless and beautiful, wonderful and healing.  A mutual love between all races that is necessary for the continual survival of America.  If this love does not occur, warns Baldwin, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”