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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

As I looked out onto the ruins and thought of the election of Donald Trump and the ugliness that consumed my country, I asked myself: What do you do when you have lost faith in 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?

For decades, politicians stoked and exploited white resentment. Corporations consolidated their hold on government and cut American workers off at the knees. Ideas of the public good were reduced to an unrelenting pursuit of self-interest. Communities fractured. Demographics shifted. Resentments deepened. The national fabric frayed, and we are all at one another’s throats.

moral reckoning is upon us, and we have to decide, once and for all, whether or not we will truly be a multiracial democracy.

The willingness of so many of our fellows to toss aside any semblance of commitment to democracy—to embrace cruel and hateful policies—exposes the idea of America as an outright lie.

same.” Baldwin wanted Kennedy to see what was at the root of all of our troubles: that, for the most part, human beings refused to live honestly with themselves and were all too willing to hide behind the idols of race and ready to kill in order to defend them. His insight remains relevant today because the moral reckoning we face bears the markings of the original sin of the nation.

No matter how hard he tried, no matter how often he prophesied doom, the country refused to change. America simply doubled down on its ugliness, in different ways. White Americans, he concluded, had to save themselves. This

Ours, like the moments after the Civil War and Reconstruction and after the civil rights movement, requires a different kind of thinking, a different kind of resiliency, or else we succumb to madness or resignation. Baldwin, I believe, offers resources to respond to such dark times and to imagine an answer to the moral reckoning that confronts us all.

What I have learned over these three decades is that Baldwin’s way of translating what he saw and making it real for others still has something to say to us. His understanding of America and his particular insights about its contradictions and failures endure and offer ways of seeing the country afresh.

The American idea is indeed in trouble. It should be. We have told ourselves a story that secures our virtue and protects us from our vices. But today we confront the ugliness of who we are—our darker angels reign. That ugliness isn’t just Donald Trump or murderous police officers or loud racists screaming horrible things. It is the image of children in cages with mucus-smeared shirts and soiled pants glaring back at us. Fourteen-year-old girls forced to take care of two-year-old children they do not even know. It is sleep-deprived babies in rooms where the lights never go off, crying for loved ones who risked everything to come here only because they believed the idea. It is Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his twenty-three-month-old daughter facedown, washed up on the banks of our border. Reality can be hard and heartless.

Baldwin insisted, until he died, that we reach for a different story. We should tell the truth about ourselves, he maintained, and that would release us into a new possibility.

When the dream was slaughtered and all that love and labor seemed to have come to nothing, we scattered….We knew where we had been, what we had tried to do, who had cracked, gone mad, died, or been murdered around us. Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.

“It is the responsibility of the Negro writer to excavate the real history of this country…to tell us what really happened to get us where we are now,” he boldly declared from the stage at Howard. “We must tell the truth till we can no longer bear it.”

Jimmy Baldwin, as a black writer, must in some way represent you. Now, you didn’t elect me and I didn’t ask for it, but here we are.” All eyes were fixed on him. “Everything I write will in some way reflect on you. So…what do we do? I’ll make you a pledge. If you will promise your elder brother that you will never, ever accept any of the many derogatory, degrading, and reductive definitions that this society has ready for you, then I, Jimmy Baldwin, promise you I shall never betray you.”

“It is, alas, the truth that to be an American writer today means mounting an unending attack on all that Americans believe themselves to hold sacred,” Baldwin wrote in 1962. “It means fighting an astute and agile guerrilla warfare with that American complacency which so inadequately masks the American panic.”

Since the publication of Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin had insisted that the country grapple with the contradiction at the heart of its self-understanding: the fact that in this so-called democracy, people believed that the color of one’s skin determined the relative value of an individual’s life and justified the way American society was organized.

this debasement and definition of black people,” Baldwin argued, white people “debased and defined themselves.”

The lie is more properly several sets of lies with a single purpose. If what I have called the “value gap” is the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by which the value gap is maintained. These are the narrative assumptions that support the everyday order of American life, which means we breathe them like air. We count them as truths. We absorb them into our character.

According to these lies, black people are essentially inferior, less human than white people, and therefore deserving of their particular station in American life.

According to these lies, America is fundamentally good and innocent, its bad deeds dismissed as mistakes corrected on the way to “a more perfect union.” The United States has always been shadowed by practices that contradict our most cherished principles.

But the lie’s most pernicious effect when it comes to our history is to malform events to fit the story whenever America’s innocence is threatened by reality. When measured against our actions, the story we have told ourselves about America being a divinely sanctioned nation called to be a beacon of light and a moral force in the world is a lie. The

Taken as a whole, then, the lie is the mechanism that allows, and has always allowed, America to avoid facing the truth about its unjust treatment of black people and how it deforms the soul of the country. The lie cuts deep into the American psyche. It secures our national innocence in the face of the ugliness and evil we have done.

The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn’t…anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn’t, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble.

Slavery would be banished from view or seen as a mistake instead of a defining institution of systemic cruelty in pursuit of profit. That history would fortify our national identity, and any attempt to confront the lie itself would be sabotaged by the fear that we may not be who we say we are. For white people in this country, “America” is an identity worth protecting at any cost.

From Baldwin’s point of view, Black Power was perhaps the only possible, or at least reasonable, response to the country’s unwillingness to give up the lie.

Much of his nonfiction writing after 1963 involved warning the nation of the costs of ignoring the demands of the black freedom struggle. He urged Americans, as he always did, to plunge beneath the surface of the race problem and examine our interior agreement with ways of thinking that trapped us in the lie.

He sought to understand what happened after the collapse of the civil rights movement (especially after Dr. King’s murder in 1968), the emergence of Black Power, the significance of the rise of the black middle class and the so-called black underclass, and the scope of white America’s commitment to resist fundamental change.

I take that phrase, “after times,” from Walt Whitman’s 1871 treatise Democratic Vistas. For Whitman, out of the ashes of the Civil War emerged a nation bustling with the energy of commerce, “endowed with a vast and more and more appointed body” but “with little or no soul.” In this context, national rage and fury served as warning signals that were “invaluable for after times.” The phrase refers, at once, to the disruption and the splintering of old ways of living and the making of a new community after the fall. The after times characterize what was before and what is coming into view. On one level, it is the interregnum surrounded by the ghosts of the dying moment, and on another, the moment that is desperately trying to be born with a lie wrapped around its neck.

As a critic of the after times, Baldwin is like a blues singer who sings about the crossroads. He stands at the railroad junction, where he can go in multiple directions. He is betwixt and between possibilities. The crossroads or the railroad junction is a way station of the blues: a place where anguish and pain are faced, where everything seems to have gone wrong, and yet a kind of resilience is found in the painful phrasing of new possibility. In the after times, hope is not yet lost, even if the call to reimagine the country has been answered with violence. So the after times also represent an opportunity for a new America—a chance to grasp a new way of being in the world—amid the darkness of the hour. But as Jimmy understood, that opportunity rests on what we do in the moment.

With a gesture to Whitman, Baldwin cried out in No Name in the Street, “There are no clear vistas: the road that seems to pull one forward into the future is also pulling one backward into the past.” The

“Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy of justice.” Activists throughout the Obama years appealed to Baldwin’s

Trump is the dominant manifestation of our after times. His presidency is the response to the political and social possibilities of Barack Obama’s election and the radical demands of the Black Lives Matter movement. Both Obama and Black Lives Matter indicated a significant shift in the political climate of the country. And millions of white Americans did not like what they saw. 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.

In each instance the country chose to remain exactly what it was: a racist nation that claimed to be democratic. These were and are moments of national betrayal, in which the commitments of democracy are shunted off to the side to make way for, and to safely secure, a more fundamental commitment to race.

Only addressing the deeper fears can accomplish that. “Backlash” mistakenly views demands for fundamental dignity as demands for privileges, and, worse, suggests that creeping incrementalism is a legitimate pace of change when it comes to remedying the devastation of black lives.

“Backlash” fails to capture the response to the collapse of old hierarchies as people who were once relegated to the bottom rungs of society seek to move out of their designated spots. In critical moments of transition, when it seems as if old ways of living and established norms are fading, deep-seated fears emerge over loss of standing and privilege. Baldwin put it this way in the essay on Carmichael: “When a black man, whose destiny and identity have always been controlled by others, decides and states that he will control his own destiny and rejects the identity given to him by others, he is talking revolution.” That threat to the social order releases fears that further contaminate our politics.

They do not really know what it is they are afraid of, but they know they are afraid of something, and they are so frightened that they are nearly out of their minds. And this same fear obtains on one level or another, to varying degrees, throughout the entire country. We would never, never allow Negroes to starve, to grow bitter, and to die in ghettos all over the country if we were not driven by some nameless fear that has nothing to do with Negroes….It is only too clear that even with the most malevolent will in the world, Negroes can never manage to achieve one-tenth of the harm which we fear. No, it has everything to do with ourselves and this is one of the reasons that for all these generations we have disguised this problem in the most incredible jargon.

Talk of backlash is just one of the many disguises. In these moments, the country reaches the edge of fundamental transformation and pulls back out of a fear that genuine democracy will mean white people will have to lose something—that they will have to give up their particular material and symbolic standing in the country. That fear, Baldwin understood, is at the heart of the moral psychology of the nation and of the white people who have it by the throat. That fear, not the demand for freedom, arrests significant change and organizes American life. We see it in the eyes of Trump supporters. One hears it in the reticence of the Democratic Party to challenge them directly. It is not enough to merely acknowledge

To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. How can the American Negro’s past be used? The unprecedented price demanded—and at this embattled hour of the world’s history—is the transcendence of the realities of color, of nations, and of altars.

As the black glories in his newfound color, which is his at last, and asserts, not always with the very greatest politeness, the unanswerable validity and power of his being—even in the shadow of death—the white is very often affronted and very often made afraid….And one may indeed be wary, but the point is that it was inevitable that black and white should arrive at this dizzying height of tension. Only when we have passed this moment will we know what our history has made of us. —

How did he see his task as a writer in that moment, and what lessons can we draw from it about what we must do in our own? We have to tell a different story about who we are (by way of an honest encounter with our past) that challenges the repetition of myths and legends in the guise of nostalgia for simpler times.

Baldwin saw clearly what he was up against; he fully understood the power of the American lie. It is the engine that moves this place. It transforms facts and events that do not quite fit our self-understanding into the details of American greatness or features of our never-ending journey to perfection. The lie is the story that warps reality in this country, which means that resisting it involves telling in each moment a truer story, one that casts the lie into relief, showing it for what it is. And so Baldwin saw his role as that of bearing witness; that witness becomes a resource for what’s possible.

Painful moments were triggered by random encounters. Grief and loss often overwhelmed everything. In No Name, he tries to capture, at the level of form, the effect of this trauma: The book reads like the reflections of someone who has been traumatized, folding back on itself and twisting time as past and present collide and collapse into each other. Memories flood and recede.

In Paris, he embarked on a high-stakes quest for individuality, heightened by the pressing need to stay alive in a foreign country with little to no money.

David Baldwin, the only father Baldwin ever knew, was consumed by his hatred of white people and his inability to provide for his ever-growing family. That hatred often spilled over into violence. He

The mindless jobs he took and the scripted future he was expected to fulfill—a wife, kids, and a job at the post office—ate at his spirit.

No matter how much David Baldwin frightened his stepson, he was the victim of America’s lie. He died believing, tragically, what white America said about him. Jimmy understood that.

he wrote of his stepfather in “Notes of a Native Son.” “But this was not true. It was only that I had hated him, and I wanted to hold on to this hatred. I did not want to look on him as a ruin: It was not a ruin I had hated. I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”

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.

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.

“I am not talking about the crime: I am talking about denying what one does. This is a much more sinister matter,” he wrote in “The White Problem.”

At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to live with himself. And the history of this problem can be reduced to the means used by Americans—lynch law and law, segregation and legal acceptance, terrorization and concession—either to come to terms with this necessity, or to find a way around it, or (most usually) to find a way of doing both these things at once. The resulting spectacle, at once foolish and dreadful, led someone to make the quite accurate observation that “the Negro-in-America” is a form of insanity which overtakes white men. In this long battle…the white man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity.