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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

“When I speak of doing one’s first works over,” he wrote in his last book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen, “I am referring to the movement of the human soul, in crisis, which, then, is forced to reexamine the depths from which it comes in order to strike water from the rock of the inheritance.” We

We are living in a world in which everybody and everything is interdependent. It is not white, this world. It is not black either. The future of this world depends on everyone in this room. And that future depends on to what extent and by what means we liberate ourselves from a vocabulary which now cannot bear the weight of reality.

George Santayana, the Spanish-born American philosopher, was right to point out that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But what he didn’t say is that those who willfully refuse to remember become moral monsters.

And as Samuel Beckett wrote in his 1983 novella Worstward Ho, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

A new story doesn’t mean that we discard all of the elements of the old story, nor does it mean that we dwell only on our sins. Instead, we narrate our national beginnings in light of our contradictions and our aspirations. Innocence is left aside. But who we aspire to be, without the safety of the lie, should always organize the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. I say this because our stories carry moral weight. Who and what we choose to exclude exposes the limits of our ideas of justice. Our stories can make some people the center of the plot and make of others latecomers and objects of charity and goodwill or of scorn and derision. Ours should be a story that begins with those who sought to make real the promise of this democracy. Put aside the fairy tale of America as “the shining city on the hill” or “the redeemer nation,” and recast the idea of perfecting the Union not as a guarantee of our goodness but a declaration of the ongoing work to address injustice in our midst.

It is worrisome that there is deep sentiment in some quarters of this country for nothing more than a return to American life before Trump. I find this feeling dangerous, because often it is not merely a response to the damage that Trump has wrought on the country—and on the American psyche—but also more subtly a reaction to all the long-standing and difficult questions Trump’s presidency has brought into view. The way he treats black people prompts open discussion of the way black people are treated in America generally; it makes the painful confrontation with the value gap unavoidable. The horror he visits on immigrants at the border necessitates a broader conversation on the role of immigrants in American life. Trump makes it impossible to turn away. And for as many people who find his conduct abhorrent, there may be just as many who simply do not want to experience daily reminders of suffering and injustice. It explains the seductive appeal of Democrats whose sole promise is to steer toward calmer waters.

This was one of the lessons I learned digging through the rubble Baldwin left behind. We don’t have to save white people. We just have to keep working to build a better world where the color of one’s skin matters little in the quality of life one chooses to live.

Americans must walk through the ruins, toward the terror and fear, and lay bare the trauma that we all carry with us. So much of American culture and politics today is bound up with the banal fact of racism in our daily lives and our willful refusal to acknowledge who benefits and suffers from it.

This place, as I imagine it, would be a country where black children are not born in exile, where they don’t have to endure a thousand cuts and slashes that wound their spirits and require their parents to engage in daily triage to protect their souls. A new America, no longer tethered to the value gap, would make it possible for millions of black people like myself to finally feel at home without the concern that the nation’s contradictions might very well drive us mad. That unsettling feeling of being “in but not of” this country would be no more. Everyone could rest for a while, because we would no longer need the lie to hide our sins. This is the America I imagine coming into being. This is the idea of America that Trumpism has by the throat. What we decide to do in our after times will shape another generation. The choice is that momentous. I pray we don’t choose safety, again.

We need to gather ourselves, for we are in the eye of the storm. We must find the courage to make the bold choices necessary for these after times. And we cannot shrink from our rage; it is the fire that lights the kiln. We have to look back and tell a different story, without the crutch of our myths and legends, about how we have arrived at this moment of moral reckoning in the country’s history. We must do our first works over, and this requires an imaginative leap of faith. I reached out for Jimmy to help us.

Yours was the courage to live life in and from its belly as well as beyond its edges, to see and say what it was, to recognize and identify evil but never fear or stand in awe of it. It is a courage that came from a ruthless intelligence married to a pity so profound it could convince anyone who cared to know that those who despised us “need the moral authority of their former slaves, who are the only people in the world who know anything about them and who may be, indeed, the only people in the world who really care anything about them.” Yours was a tenderness, of vulnerability, that asked everything, expected everything, and like the world’s own Merlin, provided us with the ways and means to deliver.

“You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain,”