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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

I’m talking about what happens to you if, having barely escaped suicide, or death, or madness, or yourself, you watch your children growing up and no matter what you do, no matter what you do, you are powerless, you are really powerless, against the force of the world that is out to tell your child that he has no right to be alive. And no amount of liberal jargon, and no amount of talk about how well and how far we have progressed, does anything to soften or to point out any solution to this dilemma. In every generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving

have invented the nigger. I didn’t invent him; white people invented him. I’ve always known, I had to know by the time I was 17 years old, that what you were describing was not me and what you were afraid of was not me. It had to be something else, you had invented it so it had to be something you were afraid of and you invested me with….I’ve always known that I am not a nigger. But, if I am not the nigger, and if it’s true that your invention reveals you, then who is the nigger? I am not the victim here….So I give you your problem back. You’re the nigger, baby, it isn’t me.

me, in their distinctive ways, to understand