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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Slavery would be banished from view or seen as a mistake instead of a defining institution of systemic cruelty in pursuit of profit. That history would fortify our national identity, and any attempt to confront the lie itself would be sabotaged by the fear that we may not be who we say we are. For white people in this country, “America” is an identity worth protecting at any cost.

He urged Americans, as he always did, to plunge beneath the surface of the race problem and examine our interior agreement with ways of thinking that trapped us in the lie.

But, in Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown was shot and killed and where a working-class black community captured the attention of the nation, seven activists died over the next few years after the cameras had been put away and reporters left town. The authorities reported that these activists had committed suicide, but some believed they were killed.

Barack Obama was off vacationing on some island. He grew a nice beard, and Michelle Obama wrote her autobiography. Their symbolic significance quickly became the stuff of nostalgia. The Republican Party morphed into some monstrosity and became the Party of Trump, as if a recessive gene had been activated. All the while, 40 percent of America delighted in Trump’s presidency. They had told themselves the lie that black and brown people threatened their way of life, and now they were poised to make America white again.

What might an honest reckoning with the country look like now? How do we muster the courage to keep fighting in the face of abject moral failure? To not abdicate our responsibility to fight for our children and for democracy itself? Baldwin’s later writings are saturated with these questions. He sought to answer them while grappling with his own trauma, grief, and profound disillusionment with the moral state of the country and in the people who repeatedly choose the safety of being white over a more just society.

even good laws are distorted by the persistence of the value gap, meaning that changes in laws, no matter how necessary, will never be sufficient to produce a healthier society. Only addressing the deeper fears can accomplish that. “Backlash” mistakenly views demands for fundamental dignity as demands for privileges, and, worse, suggests that creeping incrementalism is a legitimate pace of change when it comes to remedying the devastation of black lives.

In these moments, the country reaches the edge of fundamental transformation and pulls back out of a fear that genuine democracy will mean white people will have to lose something—that they will have to give up their particular material and symbolic standing in the country. That fear, Baldwin understood, is at the heart of the moral psychology of the nation and of the white people who have it by the throat. That fear, not the demand for freedom, arrests significant change and organizes American life. We see it in the eyes of Trump supporters. One hears it in the reticence of the Democratic Party to challenge them directly.

Baldwin saw clearly what he was up against; he fully understood the power of the American lie. It is the engine that moves this place. It transforms facts and events that do not quite fit our self-understanding into the details of American greatness or features of our never-ending journey to perfection. The lie is the story that warps reality in this country, which means that resisting it involves telling in each moment a truer story, one that casts the lie into relief, showing it for what it is. And so Baldwin saw his role as that of bearing witness; that witness becomes a resource for what’s possible.

had told my mother that I did not want to see him because I hated him,” he wrote of his stepfather in “Notes of a Native Son.” “But this was not true. It was only that I had hated him, and I wanted to hold on to this hatred. I did not want to look on him as a ruin: It was not a ruin I had hated. I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”

The resulting spectacle, at once foolish and dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate observation that “the Negro-in-America” is a form of insanity which overtakes white men. In this long battle…the white man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity.

These, then, are the twined purposes at the heart of Baldwin’s poetic vision. He is not only motivated to transform the stuff of experience into the beauty of art; as a poet he also bears witness to what he sees and what we have forgotten, calling our attention to the enduring legacies of slavery in our lives; to the impact of systemic discrimination throughout the country that has denied generations of black people access to the so-called American dream; to the willful blindness of so many white Americans to the violence that sustains it all. He laments the suffering that results from our evasions and refusals and passes judgment on what we have done and not done in order to release ourselves into the possibility of becoming different and better people. He bears witness for those who cannot because they did not survive, and he bears witness for those who survived it all, wounded and broken.

Narrating trauma fragments how we remember. We recall what we can and what we desperately need to keep ourselves together. Wounds, historical and painfully present, threaten to rend the soul, and if that happens, nothing else matters. Telling the story of trauma in fits and starts isn’t history in any formal sense. It is the way traumatic memory works: recollections caught in “the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting.” Facts bungled on behalf of much-needed truths. We try to keep our heads above water and tell ourselves a story that keeps our legs and arms moving below the surface.

It has never been America’s way to confront the trauma directly, largely because the lie does not allow for it. At nearly every turn, the country minimizes the trauma, either by shifting blame for it onto fringe actors of the present (“These acts don’t represent who we are”), relative values of the times (“Everyone back then believed in slavery”), or, worst, back onto the traumatized (“They are responsible for themselves”). There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day or pointing to the election of Barack Obama, and in the process doing further damage to the traumatized through a kind of historical gaslighting.

“What is most terrible is that American white men are not prepared to believe my version of the story, to believe that it happened,” Baldwin declared. “In order to avoid believing that, they have set up in themselves a fantastic system of evasions, denials, and justifications, [a system that] is about to destroy their grasp of reality, which is another way of saying their moral sense.” The marks of Oedipus’s thongs remain, and some, like a Greek chorus, can see exactly where all of this is leading us.

The terror was not rooted in a fear for his safety or a fear of dying at the hands of racist bigots. Instead, what shook Baldwin at his core was a “realization of the nature of the heathen.” The white southerner had to lie continuously to himself in order to justify his world. Lie that the black people around him were inferior. Lie about what he was doing under the cover of night. Lie that he was Christian. For Baldwin, the accumulation of lies suffocated the white southerner. So much so that Baldwin reached for Dante’s Inferno to express his feelings about it all: “I would not have believed that death had undone so many.”

The powerful white man, who with a phone call “could prevent or provoke a lynching,” lived a desperate lie, not only about race, but about his desire, and the result of it was that he could not genuinely love because he was blind to the actual human being right in front of him.

This is what you were here to do. Y’know, to translate somehow, if you could, by whatever means you could find, the way I see it—in any case, you know, I found myself in the deep South, looking at the eyes of a black boy or girl of 10. Y’know? To make it real. To force it on the world’s attention.” In so many ways, these last two sentences best illustrate what Baldwin means by being a witness. Tell the story. Make it real for those who refuse to believe that such a thing can happen/has happened/is happening here.

In short, shatter the illusion of innocence at every turn and attack all the shibboleths the country holds sacred.

We are told every day not to believe what we see happening all around us or what we feel in the marrow of our bones. We are told, for example, that Trumpism is exceptional, a unique threat to our democracy. This view that Trump, and Trump alone, stresses the fabric of the country lets us off the hook. It feeds into the lie that Baldwin spent the majority of his life trying to convince us to confront. It attempts to explain away as isolated events what today’s cellphone footage exposes as part of our everyday experience. Exceptionalizing Trump deforms our attention (it becomes difficult to see what is happening right in front of us) and secures our self-understanding from anything he might actually represent. If anything, Trump represents a reassertion of the belief that America is, and will always be, a white nation. Today, our task remains the same, no matter its difficulty or the magnitude of the challenge. Some of us must become poets, but we all must bear witness. Make the suffering real and force the world to pay attention to it, and not place that suffering all at the feet of Donald Trump, but understand it as the inevitable outcome in a country that continues to lie to itself.

Nobody cares what happened in the past. One can’t afford to care what happened in the past. But your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself and save yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history.

After Charlottesville, American historians weighed in on the debate. They showed that the statues were not erected as contemporaneous historical memorials of the Civil War. Most were built many years later, either between the 1890s and the first decades of the twentieth century (when most of the Confederate veterans began to die) or in the 1950s, with the demand for racial equality intensifying. They were monuments to an ideology—physical representations of the superiority of white people and a way of life that reflected that fact. This was the “Lost Cause” erected in public space: the claim that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery but was a heroic and admirable defense of the southern way of life.

In rejecting the historical scholarship of Dunning and his students, Du Bois put it this way: “We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans.” Du Bois’s devastating criticism notwithstanding, their lies held firm.

Even America’s bard, Walt Whitman, expressed such sentiments in 1874. “As if we had not strained the voting and digestive caliber of American Democracy to the utmost for the last fifty years with the millions of ignorant foreigners,” he declared, “we have now infused a powerful percentage of blacks, with about as much intellect and caliber (in the mass) as so many baboons.”

The nation had clearly refused to concede to the demands of the civil rights movement. Moreover, the refusal itself, at least from the vantage point of those disaffected with Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolence, revealed that moral appeals did little to transform the circumstances of black people’s lives, since white Americans did not seem to view the issue of race in moral terms. In fact, white people seemed to give less than a damn about the sinfulness of racism. Power was at the heart of the matter, the Panthers maintained, and power should be pursued, morality be damned. Who controlled government, who controlled the economy, who controlled and dictated the prospects of our futures—that was all that mattered. Moral appeals like Dr. King’s only distracted from that fact and from the need for the wretched of the earth, with the Black Panther Party as the vanguard, to overthrow it all.

White liberals weren’t loud racists. They were simply racial philanthropists who, after a good deed, return to their suburban homes with their white picket fences or to their apartments in segregated cities with their consciences content. Baldwin was not shy about calling this out. “I am a little bit hard-bitten about white liberals,” he said in New York City in 1969 as he sat alongside Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, at a House select subcommittee hearing on a bill aimed at establishing a national commission on “Negro history and culture.” “I don’t trust people who think as liberals….I don’t want anybody working with me because they are doing something for me.”

In our after times, our task, then, is not to save Trump voters—it isn’t to convince them to give up their views that white people ought to matter more than others. Our task is to build a world where such a view has no place or quarter to breathe. I am aware that this is a radical, some may even say, dangerous claim. It amounts to “throwing away” a large portion of the country, many of whom are willing to defend their positions with violence. But we cannot give in to these people. We know what the result will be, and I cannot watch another generation of black children bear the burden of that choice.

“As an exiled American…I am faced with a choice of exiles,” he told John Hall when asked about his extended stays abroad. What did he mean by “a choice of exiles”? It was a way of suggesting that he, like all black people, was already exiled from birth, because the country believed that white people mattered more. We were, in a sense, natally exiled.

The American’s real frame of reference is Europe. He has at the same time to make the world center on him. And the only way he can do that is to prove he is not a savage like me and the Red Indian. The price of being American is my flesh. My exile pays for his.

I prefer the language of elsewhere to that of exile when talking about Baldwin’s movement around the world. It better captures the nuances of his position in places like Istanbul and Paris. Exile carries with it the idea of living in between a home to which you perhaps cannot return and another place that can never quite be home. This is not what Baldwin meant or what he experienced. Instead, he repeatedly sought out places that allowed him to reorient himself toward America.

Who represents rust-belt America? Who is talking to the so-called forgotten American? Every time I hear the question asked, especially by white liberals, I sink deeper into a kind of depression or rage, because these are just nice ways of saying that white people matter more than others. Nice ways of saying that the only way we can defeat Trumpism is to leave behind, or put aside, concerns about justice with regard to black and brown people or women or the LGBTQ community because all of that is just bad identity politics.

But Baldwin worried that tributes to King served to obscure a deeper truth. People could ignore what was happening in black communities across the country and instead celebrate the so-called legacy of Dr. King. They could pin King’s wings to the page. In this sense and for that purpose, Baldwin lamented, the memorials and the named streets perfumed the carnage. They hid in plain sight what actually happened to many of the movement’s survivors and their children.

Throughout his career, Reagan subtly exploited the resentments of white Americans who resisted the black freedom movement of the sixties and seventies. In 1966, in his race for the California governorship, he denounced open housing and civil rights laws. In his 1976 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he invoked the image of the “welfare queen” who bilked the federal government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. What happened in Neshoba County was not a political misstep, but a tactical decision by Reagan and his operatives to exploit racism for political purposes, and it reveals how that decision, along with a host of other choices, gave modern conservatism its dark, racist undertones. This is the soil in which Trumpism grows.

But human beings are much more complicated than these stories suggest. Trump cannot be cordoned off into a corner with evil, racist demagogues. We make him wholly bad in order to protect our innocence. He is made to bear the burdens of all our sins, when he is in fact a clear reflection of who we actually are. As with Reagan in 1980, with Trump white America reached for an image—a Hollywood-generated fantasy—on which to project their hatreds and fears. In this sense, Trump is best seen as a child of Reagan.

Progress, in this country, is always freighted with lies. “We have lived through avalanches of tokens and concessions but white power remains white,” Baldwin wrote in the introduction to The Price of the Ticket. “And what it appears to surrender with one hand it obsessively clutches in the other.”

is normalcy all over our country which leaves the Negro perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity….The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy that recognizes the dignity and worth of all of God’s children. As I thought about Dr. King’s words and about how the cry for normalcy still rings out today,

“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.

But to view Trump in the light of the lynching memorial in Alabama is to understand him in the grand sweep of American history: He and his ideas are not exceptional. He and the people who support him are just the latest examples of the country’s ongoing betrayal, our version of “the apostles of forgetfulness.” When we make Trump exceptional, we let ourselves off the hook, for he is us just as surely as the slave-owning Founding Fathers were us; as surely as Lincoln, with his talk of sending black people to Liberia, was us; as surely as Reagan was us, with his welfare queens.

If we, and I mean all of us who are committed to a new America, organize and fight with every ounce of energy we have to found an America free from the categories that bind our feet, implement policies that remedy generations-old injustices, and demonstrate in our living and political arrangements the value that every human being is sacred, we can build a New Jerusalem where the value gap cannot breathe.

This place, as I imagine it, would be a country where black children are not born in exile, where they don’t have to endure a thousand cuts and slashes that wound their spirits and require their parents to engage in daily triage to protect their souls. A new America, no longer tethered to the value gap, would make it possible for millions of black people like myself to finally feel at home without the concern that the nation’s contradictions might very well drive us mad. That unsettling feeling of being “in but not of” this country would be no more. Everyone could rest for a while, because we would no longer need the lie to hide our sins. This is the America I imagine coming into being. This is the idea of America that Trumpism has by the throat. What we decide to do in our after times will shape another generation. The choice is that momentous. I pray we don’t choose safety, again.