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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

But we cannot become numb.

“I would like us to do something unprecedented,” Baldwin wrote in 1967, “to create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy.”

Sure, policy mattered. Power mattered. But in the end, for Jimmy, what kind of human beings we aspired to be mattered more.

It is up to white people to release themselves from their own captivity.