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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

the place you call home? That wasn’t quite the right way to put it: I never really had faith in the United States in the strongest sense of the word. I hoped that one day white people here would finally leave behind the belief that they mattered more. But what do you do when this glimmer of hope fades, and you are left with the belief that white people will never change—that the country, no matter what we do, will remain basically the same?

Political scientists had already seen a pattern developing in our national politics, where racial attitudes were closely aligned with partisan identification: How one felt about black people or Muslims or immigration mapped onto how one voted.

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.

The point wasn’t to declare ourselves color blind. We would have to fight it out in order to finally rid ourselves of the assumptions about who was valued more than others. That may have to involve black people celebrating their blackness, because it shatters their interior agreement with the lie. In this sense, one can only transcend color by passing through it, and uprooting the lie along the way:

Still, once he got to France, Baldwin came to understand that leaving America behind would not be so simple. “It turned out that the question of who I was was not solved because I had removed myself from the social forces which menaced me—anyway, these forces had become interior, and I had dragged them across the ocean with me. The question of who I was had at last become a personal question, and the answer was to be found in me.” America, and its racist assumptions, had indelibly shaped who Baldwin was. But, he insisted, we are not the mere product of social forces. Each of us has a say in who we take ourselves to be. No matter what America said about him as a black person, Baldwin argued, he had the last word about who he was as a human being and as a black man. This conclusion was the result of what Socrates called the examined life, and it served as the foundation for Baldwin’s broader witness. Just as we must examine our individual experiences and the terrors that shape how we come to see ourselves, together as a country we must do the same. The two are bound together. Such a realization set the stage for Baldwin to become the kind of poet he imagined himself to be—someone who could transform the daily experiences of being black in the world into the stuff of art; someone who could mold his individual suffering—even the vexed relationship with his stepfather—into a universal statement about what it means to be a fragile and fallen human being.

The editors did not see how the moral burden of America’s racial nightmare rested not with the black people rioting in the streets but with those white people who insisted on holding so tightly to the belief that they were somehow, because of the color of their skin, better than others who were not white. These people, Baldwin argued, had to see themselves otherwise. Passing new laws or declarations of unending sympathy or acts of racial charity would never be enough to change the course of this country. Something more radical had to be done; a different history had to be told.

Now Baldwin spoke directly to the editors—and, by extension, to white America. I imagine his brow furrowed, with a slight smile in the beginning, only later turning to an intense gaze: I’m not trying to accuse you, you know. That’s not the point. But you have a lot to face….All that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history…which is not your past, but your present. 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.

Reception matters too. Given their views of black people, I don’t have to accept George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Walt Whitman as my democratic heroes. They can’t be stuffed down my throat. Declarations of their historical significance aren’t enough. Baldwin put it this way in No Name in the Street: “One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions of people, this history…has been nothing but an intolerable yoke, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave.” Because we have been forced to accept the lies, the histories themselves, Baldwin argued, have little value in the battle over the meaning of our history, because “we have never been free to reject [that history].” Being free to reject the stories, for Baldwin, is the precondition to becoming open to accepting them on one’s own terms. That is unsettling for some, especially for white Americans who expect that black people should all be grateful patriots.

All of this is hard work, almost Sisyphean labor, in a country so wedded to its legends and so in need of its illusions. Black folk have sacrificed generations trying to fight it all, and here we are in the second decade of the twentieth-first century, with Charlottesville and so much more in our rearview mirror and in front of us, still fighting for an understanding of American history that will finally set white folk free.

We have those who are desperately holding on to a vision of the United States that has never really made sense, at least to me, and those who are fighting for the birth of a new America. But, even in the fight, the divisions in the country feel old and worn. Today feels like we are fighting old ghosts that have the country by the throat. In his reflections on Dr. King, Baldwin wrote that we were witnessing the death of segregation as we knew it, and the question was how long and how expensive the funeral would be. If only he knew. We are still in that funeral procession. To be sure, a world is dying, but we have been slow-walking to put it in the grave, and the costs are mounting. How many of our children are languishing in failing schools? How many of our loved ones are rotting in prisons and jails? How many are breaking their backs trying to make ends meet only to fall deeper and deeper into holes full of economic quicksand? How many have we put in the ground? And how many souls have been darkened because of the corrosive effects of America’s original sin? Something has died. But the ghosts will not leave us alone. True freedom, for all Americans, requires that we confront them directly. Maybe tell a different, better story about how we arrived here. Tell the ghosts to go on and rest; we’ve got this now. All of which requires that we work even harder for a better world; that we put aside the old fears and the histories that justify them in order to finally bury that old ...

The fact of growing up, of coming of age, in a place that holds all sorts of negative stereotypes about who you are and what you are capable of, along with the country’s racist history of torture, rape, and murder and its supposed ideals of democracy—all of it inevitably distorts your sense of self. Baldwin maintained that navigating this contradiction was the true “Negro problem”—not a problem of black people, but a problem for black people presented by the problem with white people. The fact that we have to work so hard to prevent this nonsense from taking root in our children has little to nothing to do with us, he argued. It is a consequence of white America’s problem. We are simply trying to keep our heads above water and prevent our babies from drowning. Contrary to what we are told, then, the race problem does not involve understanding the pathologies of black culture, the failures of black families, or the so-called dim intellect of a race. The problem does not entail the question of what black people want. For Baldwin, the problem rested at the feet of white America. All they had to do was look down.

This is Baldwin’s revolutionary act: to shift or invert the “white man’s burden.” The problem is not us. Instead Americans must understand as best we can, because our lives depend on it, the consequences of this deadly projection. Through this lens, the “black man’s burden” is the brutal behavior of white people in thrall to a lie. By way of the horrors of slavery, black people became the depository for many of the dangers and terrors white America refused to face. We are made the sexualized beasts, the violent criminals, the reckless and shiftless primitives ruled by passions with no regard for Christian restraint.

Americans than black people. In Baldwin’s early formulation of the problem, the solution rested partially on the shoulders of black America. If black people were ever to break loose from the image projected onto us, we had to help white Americans put aside the false image of themselves.

try not to hate him; for the sake of your soul’s salvation and for no other reason. But let’s try to be better, let’s try—no matter what it costs us—to be better than they are. You haven’t got to hate them, though we have to be free. It’s a waste of time to hate them.

It was and will always be a question about who we take ourselves to be. Hatred, in the end, corrodes the soul. And as Baldwin said, “I would rather die than see the black American become as hideously empty as the majority of white men have become.” The shibboleth of an essential blackness or mindless rage could lead us there. Only love can fortify us against hatred’s temptations.

Much is made today of the necessity to reach out to the disaffected Trump voter. This is the latest description of the “silent majority,” the “Reagan Democrat,” or the “forgotten American.” For the most part, we are told, these are the high-school-educated white people—working-class white people—who feel left out of an increasingly diverse America. These are the voters left behind by a Democratic Party catering to so-called identity politics—as if talking about a living wage and healthcare as a right, or affordable education, or equal pay for women, or equal rights for the LGBTQ community, or a fair criminal justice system, somehow excludes working-class white people. We are often told they are the heartbeat of the country, and we ignore them at our peril. But to direct our attention to these voters, to give our energy over to convincing them to believe otherwise, often takes us away from the difficult task of building a better world. In some ways, they hold the country hostage, and we compromise to appease them.

Tending to “the Trump voter,” in that generalized sense, involves trafficking in a view of the country that we ought to leave behind.

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.

“Nothing has altered in America, except that white people have simply raised the price, and raised it so high that fewer and fewer black people will be willing to pay it.”

It began to be very clear to black people in the United States that what Time magazine calls “the troubled American” is not going to listen, does not want to know, does not want to hear the truth about the situation of the American black. And one of the results of that is that everybody involved in it has to rethink his situation, to rethink his strategy.

“The tangible thing that happened to me—and to blacks in America—during that whole terrible time was the realization that our destinies are in our hands, black hands, and no one else’s.”

‘A place where I can find out again—where I am—and what I must do. A place where I can stop and do nothing in order to start again.’ ” He went on to say that “to begin again demands a certain silence, a certain privacy that is not, at least for me, to be found elsewhere.”

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. Because of the lie, black people were relegated through law, public policy, and social norms to the margins of American society; they were forced to struggle daily to keep from believing all that the country said about them in order to hold off madness and rage, and to resist soul-crushing sycophancy. The fact that black people were already “in but not of” America, Baldwin believed, placed them in a state of exile, and it was from that position that he, as a black man, chose to leave the country.

“If one is trying to become an individual in that most individual of countries, America, one’s really up against something,” he said. To try to think for oneself, and act for oneself, and have as little regard as I was forced to have for the architecture of my prison…to go into battle with all of that is to be very lonely. It’s a sort of exile, and if you’re lonely enough, you can perish from being lonely. It is a wonderful concept Baldwin sketches here, the loneliness inherent in the process required to create oneself apart from the assumptions of who one is supposed to be in America. This supposition is a prison, containing the assumptions held by both black and white Americans. In this light, the very act of self-creation within this prison involves rejecting those suppositions, and that act, in turn, creates the distance that allows us to think of ourselves differently.

“I leave and I go back. I leave and I go back….My whole effort is to try to bear witness to something which will have to be there when the storm is over. To help us get through the next storm.”

Trump’s followers are all too often consumed with a debilitating anxiety about the current trajectory of the country, as they are told repeatedly by Fox News and in Trump rallies that America has been overrun by those who don’t look like them. That anxiety seeps into every nook and cranny of our politics and demands everyone’s attention. We are told constantly we must remedy this anxiety: Who is speaking for the white working class? 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. As I watch the vitriol of Trump’s rallies, listen to the deafening silence of Republicans in the face of his racist demagoguery, and navigate my own anxieties about living in a place where white hatreds and fears are at a fever pitch, I can’t help but think, as Jimmy did after the disaster of 1968, of an elsewhere, a refuge to get myself together, because all of this shit can drive you mad. The work we must do of seeing ourselves and America anew can seem overwhelming in the face of our demands to respond to these day-to-day a...

I believe an elsewhere can and must be found here: in our efforts to refuse to accommodate and adjust to the status quo and in those very small moments when we make choices that place us outside of the norms and expectations that confine us, when we cultivate the capacity to say no. In both instances, we stand askance to the way things are. That affords us the critical distance to imagine our lives and, hopefully, the country differently.

In those spaces, I saw and heard people saying no. In their pursuit of a more just America, they made a choice to not adjust themselves to the status quo and to put their bodies on the line for a different America where black people and those on the margins of this society might flourish.

the one “who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle,”

We have to find and rest in a community of love. That community doesn’t have to take any particular shape or form; it simply has to be genuine.

“The way home we seek is that condition of [one] being at home in the world, which is called love, and we term democracy.”

In our time, with so much hatred and venom in our politics and our culture, we must actively cultivate communities of love that allow us to imagine different ways of being together. That means pulling people we love closer; opening ourselves to the unexpected pleasure of meeting and knowing someone new; and retreating into the comfort of their company as a material counterweight to the ugliness of our politics. We must try as best as we can to find the space, however fleeting, that makes possible the utter joy expressed in Jimmy’s face on the balcony looking out on Taksim Square.

the unexamined life was not worth living. To live and move about the world without questioning how the world has shaped and is shaping you is, in a way, to betray the gift of life itself, Baldwin argued. In our after times, in the full light of the country’s latest betrayal, we have to find the courage to confront honestly the lies that rest in us, if we are to confront and change the lies that confound the nation. Baldwin

We have to work on ourselves, if we are to live up to the kind of world we want to create.

It seems to me that a large portion of white America today, especially white men, has lost its mind—figuratively, of course. These are the “troubled Americans” that Baldwin referred to in 1969. Still, they are not going to listen; they don’t want to know or hear the truths about the situation of black people. Theirs is a narrow concern, a familiar conceit: For them, this country must remain white. To face this kind of thinking again, in 2020, is profoundly depressing; to see its deadly consequences is frightening. You have to work hard to hold off what W.E.B. Du Bois called the temptation of despair, as we find ourselves fighting this battle over and over again. One can easily say, as my great-grandmother once told me, “You know white folks ain’t gon’ change.” No matter. That fact should not resign us to our fate. We must search for an elsewhere to start anew—to love, to critically assess who we are and who we aspire to be, and to seek refuge in the margins in order to fortify our imaginations so that we can rejoin the battle.

“What then, about hope?” Baldwin’s response is instructive for us as we live through another shameful period in the life of the nation: “Hope is invented every day.” And, God be my witness, we desperately need hope today. If we are not able to summon it, we may find ourselves where Jimmy found himself only a few years later—at the end of the after times, with the vicious cycle about to begin once more.

Lord, History is weary of her unspeakable liaison with Time, for Time and History have never seen eye to eye: Time laughs at History and time and time and time again Time traps History in a lie.

Michelle Obama’s declaration that “for the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.”

Americans are always sincere, it is their most striking and appalling attribute….Nixon was perfectly sincere when lying about Watergate, the military were perfectly sincere when lying about Vietnam and Cambodia, Helms is perfectly sincere when he says that he is not a racist, and the late J. Edgar Hoover was sincere when he called the late Martin Luther King, Jr. the biggest liar in America. This sincerity covers, and pardons all, [and] is the very substance of the American panic.

“Memory is powerful, it is a powerful force in the way a society evolves,” Stevenson said in his documentary True Justice. We have a constitution that talks about equality, liberty, and justice for all and for decades, for centuries we tolerated enslavement of other human beings. We tolerated abuse and violence against people. We tolerated bigotry and discrimination….I think there is a kind of smog in the air that’s created by the history of slavery and lynching and segregation, and I don’t think we’re going to get healthy, I don’t think we can be free…until we address this problem. But to get there we’re going to have to be willing to tell the truth.

“We live by lies” in this country, and those lies can be seen and heard all around us. “We’re living in a region where the landscape is littered with the iconography of the Confederacy,” Bryan Stevenson said in True Justice. “When I look around and I see the iconography of the glory of enslavement and the era of lynching, I say we’re not in a very healthy place.” The drive along Highway 65 gave me a sense of that, and of the scale of the task before us. 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.”

As I walked back toward the Legacy Museum, I saw a quotation from Maya Angelou emblazoned across the side of the building: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

The past is not past; “history is literally present in all we do,” he wrote in “The White Man’s Guilt.”

“Thousands of African Americans are unknown victims of racial terror lynchings whose deaths cannot be documented, many whose names will never be known. They are honored here.”

“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. When we are surprised to see the reemergence of Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and other white nationalists, we reveal our willful ignorance about how our own choices make them possible. The memorial confronts both Trumpism and those who would never imagine themselves in sympathy with it, with the truth and trauma of American history. It exposes the lie for what it is and makes plain our collective complicity in reinforcing it.

“People who have opted to be white congratulate themselves on their generous ability to return to the slave that freedom which they never had any right to endanger, much less take away. For this dubious effort…they congratulate themselves and expect to be congratulated.” The expectation was that he should feel “gratitude not only that my burden is…being made lighter but my joy that white people are improving.”

Here Baldwin invokes Revelations 2:5: “Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.” In the mode of poet-prophet, Baldwin called the nation, in his after times, to confront the lie of its own self-understanding and to get about the work of building a country truly based on democratic principles.

To do your first works over means to reexamine everything. Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.