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
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