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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

I want there to be repair in this country not just for communities of color that have been victimized by bigotry and discrimination, I want it to be for all of us. I don’t think we can get free until we are willing to tell the truth about our history. I do believe in truth and reconciliation. I just think that truth and reconciliation are sequential: That you can’t have reconciliation without the truth.

“Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.”

“When I speak of doing one’s first works over,” he wrote in his last book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, “I am referring to the movement of the human soul, in crisis, which, then, is forced to reexamine the depths from which it comes in order to strike water from the rock of the inheritance.”

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.

But, in the end, he wanted us to see that whiteness as an identity was a moral choice, an attitude toward the world based on ugly things. People can, if they want to, choose to be better.

Even in the darkest moments in his life and in that of the country, Jimmy always believed we could be better than what we are. He also understood that the battle to choose life was fought every day, and imagination was one of his most potent weapons.