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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

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.