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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

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.