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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

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.