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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

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

In critical moments of transition, when it seems as if old ways of living and established norms are fading, deep-seated fears emerge over loss of standing and privilege.

They do not really know what it is they are afraid of, but they know they are afraid of something, and they are so frightened that they are nearly out of their minds.

we are still wrestling with the fact that so many Americans continue to hold the view that ours is a white nation.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”

The question of who I was had at last become a personal question, and the answer was to be found in me.”

No matter what America said about him as a black person, Baldwin argued, he had the last word about who he was as a human being and as a black man.

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.

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.

He laments the suffering that results from our evasions and refusals and passes judgment on what we have done and not done in order to release ourselves into the possibility of becoming different and better people.

the story we tell ourselves about what the country is and thus who we are, shapes the world we make going forward.

In every generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving this particular world, some way to make the child who will be despised not despise himself.

We are simply trying to keep our heads above water and prevent our babies from drowning.

Only love can fortify us against hatred’s temptations.

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.

Ralph Ellison was right: “The way home we seek is that condition of [one] being at home in the world, which is called love, and we term democracy.”

Love takes off the mask and when experienced deeply, it fortifies the soul and offers a cure for what ails our living together.

When we imprison our fellows in categories that cut off their humanity from our own, we end up imprisoning ourselves.

in accepting the beauty and ugliness of who we are in our most vulnerable moments in communion with each other.