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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

There will be no moral appeals on my part to this country’s moral conscience. It has none.”

A reinvigorated Baldwin told the Times reporter, “The tangible thing that happened to me—and to blacks in America—during that whole terrible time was the realization that our destinies are in our hands, black hands, and no one else’s.”

In America, I was free only in battle, never free to rest—and he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle.

The fact that black people were already “in but not of” America, Baldwin believed, placed them in a state of exile, and it was from that position that he, as a black man, chose to leave the country.

if you’re lonely enough, you can perish from being lonely.

He never turns his back on America, even in these darkest of hours in his life and in that of the country. He refused to cede the argument over the country to those who wanted Dr. King dead and cleaved to the idea of being white. After King’s death, he admitted that his strategy had to change, but he never tossed the country aside. Instead, Baldwin criticized America, as he wrote in No Name, “out of a passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life.”

One of the more insidious features of Trumpism is that it deliberately seeks to occupy every ounce of our attention. In doing so, it aims to force our resignation to the banality of evil and the mundaneness of cruelty.

To invoke T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, Trump aims to “distract us from distraction by distraction.”

He greedily intrudes on our time, seeking our adoration or our scorn. It becomes, at least for me, next to impossible to turn him off, but I ...

We are told constantly we must remedy this anxiety: Who is speaking for the white working class? Who represents rust-belt America? Who is talking to the so-called forgotten American? Every time I hear the question asked, especially by white liberals, I sink deeper into a kind of depression or rage, because these are just nice ways of saying that white people matter more than others. Nice ways of saying that the only way we can defeat Trumpism is to leave behind, or put aside, concerns about justice with regard to black and brown people or women or the LGBTQ community because all of that is just bad identity politics.

We have to find and rest in a community of love. That community doesn’t have to take any particular shape or form; it simply has to be genuine. It can be made up of family or people who hold similar commitments or those who make us laugh with full-belly laughs and those without whom we could not imagine living. Here genuine mutuality serves as the basis for a broader, more collective expression of mutuality necessary for a vibrant democracy.

In our time, with so much hatred and venom in our politics and our culture, we must actively cultivate communities of love that allow us to imagine different ways of being together. That means pulling people we love closer; opening ourselves to the unexpected pleasure of meeting and knowing someone new; and retreating into the comfort of their company as a material counterweight to the ugliness of our politics.

It seems to me that a large portion of white America today, especially white men, has lost its mind—figuratively, of course. These are the “troubled Americans” that Baldwin referred to in 1969. Still, they are not going to listen; they don’t want to know or hear the truths about the situation of black people. Theirs is a narrow concern, a familiar conceit: For them, this country must remain white. To face this kind of thinking again, in 2020, is profoundly depressing; to see its deadly consequences is frightening.

One can easily say, as my great-grandmother once told me, “You know white folks ain’t gon’ change.”

as historian Vincent Harding wrote, “the soul of America had not been redeemed. As a matter of fact, its deepest character had only been fully revealed and all the long-held suspicions of black people concerning the nature of racism North and South were confirmed.”

“The horror is that America…,” Baldwin wrote, “changes all the time, without ever changing at all.”

Reagan declared, “Let’s make America great again,” and the majority of white America got in line. The consolidation of a new age, in which a certain conservative economic and political philosophy would dominate the imagination of the country for decades, was fast coming to seem like common sense. Small government, marked by the dismantling of the so-called welfare state, deregulation, privatization, being tough on crime, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a strong military were features of this view. The culture wars gave it all added fuel. Meanwhile, the modest gains of the black middle class and the end of legal segregation in the South led some to believe that sufficient progress had been made in the country with regard to race matters.

Reagan’s attack on affirmative action, his calls for constructive engagement with apartheid South Africa, his eventual evisceration of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, all in the name of color blindness, signaled a hard change in the tone and substance of racial politics in the country. Calls for law and order (and the war on drugs it would unleash), demands for smaller government, and pleas for personal responsibility as a replacement for government “welfare programs” became part of an arsenal of code words and dog whistles for white resentment and racist retrenchment.

Reagan was exactly the kind of president that allowed white America to be secure in its commitment to the value gap. His smile, his down-home charm, exuded exactly the opposite of the vitriol of loud, southern bigots. Reagan’s was genteel racism and, politically, he knew exactly what he was doing: playing on the fears and hatreds of some white people, especially in the South, the West, and the suburbs, for political gain. Throughout his career, Reagan subtly exploited the resentments of white Americans who resisted the black freedom movement of the sixties and seventies.

Reagan was making America great again. But for black America, Reagan triggered traumas.

To maintain this illusion, Trump has to be seen as singular, aberrant. Otherwise, he reveals something terrible about us. But not to see yourself in Trump is to continue to lie.

As white people have made their way back, we have been accused of “barbecuing while black,” “moving in while black,” “trying to enter our own apartments while black,” “playing go-go music while black.” We have been accused of being in spaces where we are obviously not wanted. In the end, Americans will have to decide whether or not this country will remain racist. To make that decision, we will have to avoid the trap of placing the burden of our national sins on the shoulders of Donald Trump. We need to look inward. Trump is us. Or better, Trump is you.

If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the law’s protection the most!—and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person—ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that in order for human beings to live full lives we must cultivate our ability to forget. “It is possible to live with almost no memory,” he said, “but without forgetting, it is quite impossible to live at all.”

When we make Trump exceptional, we let ourselves off the hook, for he is us just as surely as the slave-owning Founding Fathers were us; as surely as Lincoln, with his talk of sending black people to Liberia, was us; as surely as Reagan was us, with his welfare queens.

We have to understand our own anger and disappointments and figure out for ourselves how to pick up the pieces, to hold off the temptations of hate and despair, and to fight the battle once again.

I mentioned in the introduction that we have previously reached in our history two critical moments of moral reckoning where we faced the daunting challenge of beginning again; both times we failed. The first was during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the second was the black freedom struggle of the mid-twentieth century. These moments are connected insofar as the black freedom struggle, what scholars call the Second Reconstruction, sought, among other things, to complete what was left of what the historian Eric Foner describes as the unfinished revolution.

On one level, what Stevens and others did was exactly what Baldwin calls us to do: They went back to where we started. They understood that the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause had tilted the balance of power to the slaveholding states; that the Constitution did not live up to the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality; that the actions of states and of the courts consolidated a view of black people that mandated their inferior place in American society. With the Civil War amendments, they aimed to begin again. But the country, just as it did with the Second Reconstruction, turned its back.

George Santayana, the Spanish-born American philosopher, was right to point out that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But what he didn’t say is that those who willfully refuse to remember become moral monsters.

What we need is a third American founding, to begin again without this insidious idea of the value gap that continues to get in the way of a New America.

Instead, we should set out to imagine the country in the full light of its diversity and with an ho...

Samuel Beckett wrote in his 1983 novella Worstward Ho, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Put aside the fairy tale of America as “the shining city on the hill” or “the redeemer nation,” and recast the idea of perfecting the Union not as a guarantee of our goodness but a declaration of the ongoing work to address injustice in our midst.

We have to begin a serious conversation about what form and shape repair will take. That can start with something really basic: passing H.R. 40, which establishes a commission “to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.”

We don’t have to save white people. We just have to keep working to build a better world where the color of one’s skin matters little in the quality of life one chooses to live.

“If you’re scared to death, walk toward it,” he said.

“Salvation is not flight from the wrath of God,” he declares, “it is accepting and reciprocating the love of God. Salvation is not separation. It is the beginning of union with all that is or has been or will ever be.”

James Baldwin’s words. “You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain,” he wrote in “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” in 1963, “and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.”