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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Perhaps even more than the death itself, the manner of his death has forced me into a judgment concerning human life and human beings which I have always been reluctant to make….Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.

We have invented the nigger. I didn’t invent him; white people invented him. I’ve always known, I had to know by the time I was 17 years old, that what you were describing was not me and what you were afraid of was not me. It had to be something else, you had invented it so it had to be something you were afraid of and you invested me with….I’ve always known that I am not a nigger. But, if I am not the nigger, and if it’s true that your invention reveals you, then who is the nigger? I am not the victim here….So

So I give you your problem back. You’re the nigger, baby, it isn’t me.

But to direct our attention to these voters, to give our energy over to convincing them to believe otherwise, often takes us away from the difficult task of building a better world. In some ways, they hold the country hostage, and we compromise

to appease them. It reminds me of General Kelly’s belief that the Civil War happened only because of an unwillingness to compromise—he wanted to compromise with the slaveholding South! But, all too often, that compromise arrests substantive change, and black people end up having to bear the burden of that compromise while white people get to go on with their lives. American history is replete with examples of attempts to convince those who reject substantive change in the country and what happens as a consequence. C. Vann Woodward’s famous formulation in The Strange Career of Jim Crow poignantly characterizes one example that General Kelly would have done well to remember: “Just as the Negro gained his emancipation and new rights through a falling out between white men, he now stood to lose his rights through the reconciliation of white men.” Tending to “the Trump voter,” in that generalized sense, involves trafficking in a view of the country that we ought to leave behind. We can’t compromise about that.

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. We must try as best as we can to find the space, however fleeting, that makes possible the utter joy expressed in Jimmy’s face on the balcony looking out on Taksim Square.

I have taken the title of this book from a passage in James Baldwin’s last novel, Just Above My Head. In light of the collapse of the civil rights movement and the consolidation of the after times with the election of Ronald Reagan, Baldwin offered these words for those who desperately sought to imagine a way forward: “Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.” Begin again is shorthand for something Baldwin commended to the country in the latter part of his career: that we reexamine the fundamental values and commitments that shape our self-understanding, and that

we look back to those beginnings not to reaffirm our greatness or to double down on myths that secure our innocence, but to see where we went wrong and how we might reimagine or re-create ourselves in light of who we initially set out to be. This requires an unflinching encounter with the lie at the heart of our history, the kind of encounter that cannot be avoided at places like the Legacy Museum.