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.
