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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

The willingness of so many of our fellows to toss aside any semblance of commitment to democracy—to embrace cruel and hateful policies—exposes the idea of America as an outright lie.

That ugliness isn’t just Donald Trump or murderous police officers or loud racists screaming horrible things. It is the image of children in cages with mucus-smeared shirts and soiled pants glaring back at us. Fourteen-year-old girls forced to take care of two-year-old children they do not even know. It is sleep-deprived babies in rooms where the lights never go off, crying for loved ones who risked everything to come here only because they believed the idea. It is Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his twenty-three-month-old daughter facedown, washed up on the banks of

In No Name, when Baldwin recalls his first visit to the South, he says that he “felt as though [he] had wandered into hell.” He wasn’t talking about the hellish lives led by black southerners, but rather how the racial dynamics of the region had hollowed out white southerners. The lies and violence had so distorted and overtaken the private lives of white people in the region that their lived lives felt empty.

“People who imagine that history flatters them,” he wrote in Ebony, “are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world.”

But here we are, bookended by the likes of Reagan and Trump with, of all things, a black president pinched in the middle, and wondering what will happen next. We stand in the ruins. Modern conservatism has collapsed. Its claims about the value of small government, the importance of tax cuts for the rich, and the benefits of deregulation and privatization have resulted in most Americans drowning in profound uncertainty about their future and their children’s future and have left the planet mortally wounded. All that is left of this once-vaunted ideology are appeals to our lesser angels in order to divide Americans along the fault lines that have been a part of this democratic experiment since the very beginning: “We must keep the proverbial niggers and those like them in their place.” It worked.

ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

George Santayana, the Spanish-born American philosopher, was right to point out that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But what he didn’t say is that those who willfully refuse to remember become moral monsters.

And as Samuel Beckett wrote in his 1983 novella Worstward Ho, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”