What are the solutions that James Baldwin supplies in the book?

Baldwin's
is both an analysis of his own feelings and beliefs regarding race
relations and a message to those outside the African American community that the U.S. has
reached a crisis point and that attitudes need to be changed if we are to survive as a
nation.

Despite some dated elements, the book is astonishingly relevant
today, over fifty years after Baldwin wrote it. Nowhere in it can he be said to have proposed
direct or clear-cut "solutions" to the problems he describes. This would,
unfortunately, have been simplistic. It's perhaps more by understanding his description of those
problems that the reader can infer what must be done to avert the catastrophe alluded to in the
title.

Writing in 1963 when the Civil Rights movement was still in its
infancy, Baldwin recognizes that change is already occurring, to a degree, and places it in the
context of international politics. Both decolonization by the British and other European powers,
as well as the Cold War, in which the Russian "enemy" is seen to be wooing the newly
independent African nations, are factors that have led to the white world no longer being able
to take for granted its false sense of racial superiority. Yet Baldwin points out, accurately
for his time and to some extent still so today, that most of white America is living under a
delusion, failing to understand its history and incapable of realizing that a truly
multicultural society is the only possible way out of the problem. Only if white America
acknowledges the historical and continued oppression of black people and changes the situation
will the U.S. have a future.

At the same time, Baldwin was critical of Elijah
Mohammed's Nation of Islam which, in his view, unrealistically sought to claim land from the
U.S. and break away to form an independent country. To Baldwin, Mohammed's views, like those of
white racists, were based on a myth of racial superiority. In Baldwin's opinion the Nation of
Islam, though it appeared to give hope and the possibility of empowerment, was a self-defeating
organization whose ideology he considered a mirror image of the beliefs of neo-Nazis such as
George Lincoln Rockwell.

Baldwin ultimately stressed the need for everyone,
black or white, to come to an honest understanding of the past and to realize that unless all of
us get beyond preconceived notions of racial superiority and separation, it will be impossible
for us to survive. One hopes that today we are, in fact, creating the truly multicultural nation
he dreamed of.