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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

“The Uses of the Blues”: I’m talking about what happens to you if, having barely escaped suicide, or death, or madness, or yourself, you watch your children growing up and no matter what you do, no matter what you do, you are powerless, you are really powerless, against the force of the world that is out to tell your child that he has no right to be alive. And no amount of liberal jargon, and no amount of talk about how well and how far we have progressed, does anything to soften or to point out any solution to this dilemma. In every generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving this particular world, some way to make the child who will be despised not despise himself. I don’t know what “the Negro Problem” means to white people, but this is what it means to Negroes. 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