Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Since the publication of Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin had insisted that the country grapple with the contradiction at the heart of its self-understanding: the fact that in this so-called democracy, people believed that the color of one’s skin determined the relative value of an individual’s life and justified the way American society was organized.

The lie is more properly several sets of lies with a single purpose. If what I have called the “value gap” is the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by which the value gap is maintained. These are the narrative assumptions that support the everyday order of American life, which means we breathe them like air.

Baldwin placed the lie at the heart of the country’s founding. The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t…anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn’t, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble.

Walt Whitman’s 1871 treatise Democratic Vistas. For Whitman, out of the ashes of the Civil War emerged a nation bustling with the energy of commerce, “endowed with a vast and more and more appointed body” but “with little or no soul.”

The elevation of a black man to the presidency, such a story suggested, represented the notion that all constraints had fallen away, that if a black man could hold the highest office in the land, then surely we as a country had finally and definitively overcome our racist past. In this story, what King began in Montgomery in 1955, Obama finished in triumph at Grant Park on election night 2008.

I would propose a different story, one in which Obama’s presidency sounded not an ending but a beginning, the opening of a new moment when the lie and its dreadful consequences might once again be interrogated as it was during the civil rights movement, when the energy of activists and common citizens might be marshaled to bring forth a new country.

Even in the darkest moments in his life and in that of the country, Jimmy always believed we could be better than what we are. He also understood that the battle to choose life was fought every day, and imagination was one of his most potent weapons.

The lie is the lifeblood of Trumpism. Anything that does not corroborate its reality is dismissed as “fake news.” Anyone who doesn’t fit the view of America as a white nation or refuses to submit to it is cast as a traitor or as someone who hates America.