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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Plus, Baldwin insisted that it was outside of the United States that he came to understand the country more fully.

What do you do when you have lost faith in the place you call home? That wasn’t quite the right way to put it: I never really had faith in the United States in the strongest sense of the word. I hoped that one day white people here would finally leave behind the belief that they mattered more. But what do you do when this glimmer of hope fades, and you are left with the belief that white people will never change—that the country, no matter what we do, will remain basically the same?

A moral reckoning is upon us, and we have to decide, once and for all, whether or not we will truly be a multiracial democracy.

The willingness of so many of our fellows to toss aside any semblance of commitment to democracy—to embrace cruel and hateful policies—exposes the idea of America as an outright lie.

Baldwin wanted Kennedy to see what was at the root of all of our troubles: that, for the most part, human beings refused to live honestly with themselves and were all too willing to hide behind the idols of race and ready to kill in order to defend them. His insight remains relevant today because the moral reckoning we face bears the markings of the original sin of the nation.

The deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., became symbolic of a broader and more systematic betrayal by the country.

These men “were deliberately created by the American Republic,”

America simply doubled down on its ugliness, in different ways.

because of the country’s latest betrayal: The promise of the election of the first black president had been met with white fear and rage and with the election of Donald Trump.

Malcolm X, in town by happenstance, dropped in to hear Jimmy hold forth. “Whenever I hear that this little brother is going to speak in any town where I am,” he said, “I always make a point of going to listen, because I learn something.”

“It is the responsibility of the Negro writer to excavate the real history of this country…to tell us what really happened to get us where we are now,” he boldly declared from the stage at Howard. “We must tell the truth till we can no longer bear it.”

I’ll make you a pledge. If you will promise your elder brother that you will never, ever accept any of the many derogatory, degrading, and reductive definitions that this society has ready for you, then I, Jimmy Baldwin, promise you I shall never betray you.”

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.

One set of lies debases black people; examples stretch from the writings of the Founding Fathers to The Bell Curve. According to these lies, black people are essentially inferior, less human than white people, and therefore deserving of their particular station in American life.

But the lie’s most pernicious effect when it comes to our history is to malform events to fit the story whenever America’s innocence is threatened by reality. When measured against our actions, the story we have told ourselves about America being a divinely sanctioned nation called to be a beacon of light and a moral force in the world is a lie.

Taken as a whole, then, the lie is the mechanism that allows, and has always allowed, America to avoid facing the truth about its unjust treatment of black people and how it deforms the soul of the country. The lie cuts deep into the American psyche. It secures our national innocence in the face of the ugliness and evil we have done.

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.

Slavery would be banished from view or seen as a mistake instead of a defining institution of systemic cruelty in pursuit of profit. That history would fortify our national identity, and any attempt to confront the lie itself would be sabotaged by the fear that we may not be who we say we are. For white people in this country, “America” is an identity worth protecting at any cost.

What Baldwin saw in the eyes of the young people in that cramped little apartment in 1963, he felt in his bones. He knew the country was poised to betray them on behalf of the lie.

“Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy of justice.”

Yet just as it did in response to the civil rights movement, the lie moved quickly to reassert itself.

Both Obama and Black Lives Matter indicated a significant shift in the political climate of the country. And millions of white Americans did not like what they saw.

“When a black man, whose destiny and identity have always been controlled by others, decides and states that he will control his own destiny and rejects the identity given to him by others, he is talking revolution.”

backlash covers in a cloak of innocence white fears and the politics that exploits them. Those fears throw us back into the pit and make tar babies of us all.

fear, Baldwin understood, is at the heart of the moral psychology of the nation and of the white people who have it by the throat.

How can the American Negro’s past be used? The unprecedented price demanded—and at this embattled hour of the world’s history—is the transcendence of the realities of color, of nations, and of altars.

Some thirty years after Baldwin’s death we are still wrestling with the fact that so many Americans continue to hold the view that ours is a white nation.

I think that’s why Stokely Carmichael said Baldwin never betrayed us. Carmichael knew that no matter what happened, even when Baldwin disagreed with Black Power, Jimmy never conceded an inch to the lie. His witness remained true. And now, as then, someone must bear witness to the truth in the dark.

This conclusion was the result of what Socrates called the examined life, and it served as the foundation for Baldwin’s broader witness. Just as we must examine our individual experiences and the terrors that shape how we come to see ourselves, together as a country we must do the same.

“I am not talking about the crime: I am talking about denying what one does. This is a much more sinister matter,” he wrote in “The White Problem.”

Baldwin thought doomed every American’s attempt to establish an identity free from the category of race that imprisoned us in the first place. As he wrote in his poignant 1953 essay, “Stranger in the Village,”

At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to live with himself.

As Emerson said, “the poets are liberating gods.” They “unlock our chains, and admit us to a new scene.”

“What one does not remember,” he reminds the reader, “is the serpent in the garden of one’s dreams.”

It has never been America’s way to confront the trauma directly, largely because the lie does not allow for it.

There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations.

in the process doing further damage to the traumatized through a

kind of historical gaslighting.

“What is most terrible is that American white men are not prepared to believe my version of the story, to believe that it happened,” Baldwin declared.

“In order to avoid believing that, they have set up in themselves a fantastic system of evasions, denials, and justifications, [a system that] is about to destroy their grasp of reality,

The marks of Oedipus’s thongs remain, and some, like a Greek chorus, can see exactly where...

The complex web of race and sex immobilized the South.

Black people had to navigate this reality.

being a witness. Tell the story. Make it real for those who refuse to believe that such a thing can happen/has happened/is happening here.

In short, shatter the illusion of innocence at every turn and attack all the shibboleths the country holds sacred.

This view that Trump, and Trump alone, stresses the fabric of the country lets us off the hook. It feeds into the lie that Baldwin spent the majority of his life trying to convince us to confront.

Exceptionalizing Trump deforms our attention (it becomes difficult to see what is happening right in front of us) and secures our self-understanding from anything he might actually represent.

Some of us must become poets, but we all must bear witness. Make the suffering real and force the world to pay attention to it, and not place that suffering all at the feet of Donald Trump, but understand it as the inevitable outcome in a country that continues to lie to itself.

Baldwin’s introduction of Dr. King was all about America’s betrayal, not a story about America’s

progress on racial matters.