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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

and distorts any substantive idea of who we are as individuals. This is the real American dilemma: acknowledging the moral effects of a way of life emptied of genuine meaning because of a lie that denies the things we have done.

Narrating trauma fragments how we remember. We recall what we can and what we desperately need to keep ourselves together. Wounds, historical and painfully present, threaten to rend the soul, and if that happens, nothing else matters. Telling the story of trauma in fits and starts isn’t history in any formal sense. It is the way traumatic memory works: recollections caught in “the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting.” Facts bungled on behalf of much-needed truths. We try to keep our heads above water and tell ourselves a story that keeps our legs and arms moving below the surface.

attention to the trauma and terror that threatened everything. “What one does not remember,” he reminds the reader, “is the serpent in the garden of one’s dreams.”

Wherever the Negro face appears a tension is created, the tension is a silence filled with things unutterable. It is a sentimental error, therefore, to believe that the past is dead; it means nothing to say that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it. It is not a question of memory. Oedipus did not remember the thongs that bound his feet; nevertheless the marks they left testified to that doom toward which his feet were leading him. The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him as a child; nevertheless the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight. Some thirty years later,

It has something to do with the fact that no one wishes to be plunged, head down, into the torrent of what he does not remember and does not wish to remember. It has something to do with the fact that we all came here as candidates for the slaughter of the innocents. It has something to do with the fact that all survivors, however they accommodate or fail to remember it, bear the inexorable guilt of the survivor.

“My memory stammers,” he wrote. “But my soul is a witness.” In the end, we cannot escape our beginnings: The scars on our backs and the white-knuckled grip of the lash that put them there remain in dim outline across generations and in the way we cautiously or not so cautiously move around one another. This legacy of trauma is an inheritance of sorts, an inheritance of sin that undergirds much of what we do in this country.

It has never been America’s way to confront the trauma directly, largely because the lie does not allow for it. At nearly every turn, the country minimizes the trauma, either by shifting blame for it onto fringe actors of the present (“These acts don’t represent who we are”), relative values of the times (“Everyone back then believed in slavery”), or, worst, back onto the traumatized (“They are responsible for themselves”). There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day or pointing to the election of Barack Obama, and in the process doing further damage to the traumatized through a kind of historical gaslighting.

We lie and cover up our sins and mute the traumas they cause. We dissociate the trauma from our national self-understanding and locate it, if at all, in the ungrateful cries of grievance and victimization among those who experienced the pain and loss. “The biggest bigots are the people that call other people bigots,” George Wallace declared in 1968. By this logic, we identify scapegoats to bear the burden of our sins. Undocumented workers and Muslims become the “niggers” to fortify our sense of whiteness. We find security and safety in fantasies of how we are always, no matter what we do and what carnage we leave behind, on the road to a more perfect union.

When Baldwin returned to the United States in 1957, he knew he couldn’t readjust to the country’s racism. The whole system. The whole set-up. I knew I had to be in opposition to it. I couldn’t adjust to it….That was why I went south. I thought—the thing to do, you know, if you’re sitting around in a hotel room for a month or two months, wondering what you’re going to do next and drinking too much and really terribly occupied with yourself, that the thing to do is to, at any price whatever, is get in touch with something which is more than you. Throw yourself into a situation where you won’t have time to weep. So I went south. Because I was afraid to go South.

Instead, what shook Baldwin at his core was a “realization of the nature of the heathen.” The white southerner had to lie continuously to himself in order to justify his world. Lie that the black people around him were inferior. Lie about what he was doing under the cover of night. Lie that he was Christian. For Baldwin, the accumulation of lies suffocated the white southerner. So much so that Baldwin reached for Dante’s Inferno to express his feelings about it all: “I would not have believed that death had undone so many.”

The powerful white man, who with a phone call “could prevent or provoke a lynching,” lived a desperate lie, not only about race, but about his desire, and the result of it was that he could not genuinely love because he was blind to the actual human being right in front of him.

“I watched his eyes, thinking, with great sorrow, The unexamined life is not worth living,” Baldwin wrote. “The despair among the loveless is that they must narcoticize themselves before they can touch any human being at all. They, then, fatally, touch the wrong person, not merely because they have gone blind, or have lost the sense of touch, but because they no longer have any way of knowing that any loveless touch is a violation, whether one is touching a woman or a man.”

In No Name in the Street, this “poverty of spirit” constituted the backdrop of Baldwin’s recollection of the heroic effort of the civil rights revolution. In a beautiful passage, he wove together the memory of his own experience with the early stirrings of the movement, and then set them against the hatred of the airport men: What had begun in Montgomery was beginning to happen all over the South. The student sit-in movement has yet to begin. No one has yet heard of James Foreman or James Bevel. We have only begun to hear of Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm X has yet to be taken seriously. No one, except their parents, has ever heard of Huey Newton or Bobby Seale or Angela Davis. Emmett Till had been dead two years. Bobby Hutton and Jonathan Jackson have just mastered their first words, and with someone holding them by the hand, are discovering how much fun it is to climb up and down the stairs. Oh, pioneers!—I got into the car and we drove into town: the cradle of the Confederacy, the whitest town this side of Casablanca, and one of the most wretched on the face of the earth. And wretched because no one in authority in the town, the state, or the nation, had the force or the courage or the love to attempt to correct the manners or redeem the souls of those three desperate men, standing before that dismal airport, imagining that they were holding back a flood.

think I really understood and probably for the first time that what you are doing, as a writer, or any kind of artist, was not designed to, you know, to make you special or to even isolate you….What your role was, it seemed to me, was to bear witness. To what life is—does—and to speak for people who cannot speak. That you are simply a kind of conduit.”

We are told, for example, that Trumpism is exceptional, a unique threat to our democracy. This view that Trump, and Trump alone, stresses the fabric of the country lets us off the hook. It feeds into the lie that Baldwin spent the majority of his life trying to convince us to confront. It attempts to explain away as isolated events what today’s cellphone footage exposes as part of our everyday experience. Exceptionalizing Trump deforms our attention (it becomes difficult to see what is happening right in front of us) and secures our self-understanding from anything he might actually represent. If anything, Trump represents a reassertion of the belief that America is, and will always be, a white nation.

This latest betrayal by the country joins with the underlying trauma caused by all the previous betrayals. That trauma carried over, and it shapes implicitly how we imagine and respond to our current days. This is the undertow of black politics: traumatic memories that cling to our choices like ghosts who can’t find peace as white America refuses to change again.

Seen in this way, the civil rights movement could easily be conscripted into a story of how Americans perfected the Union, where all of their sacrifices would become, with vicious irony, proof of America’s inherent goodness. The history they were making, in real time, could be bent in the service of the lie. For Baldwin, the movement had to challenge that lie at its root or it would consume us all, which is why, perhaps, he had dedicated his own introduction of King to telling a true story of the movement.

I must honestly confess that I go through moments of disappointment when I have to recognize that there aren’t enough white persons in our country who are willing to cherish democratic principles over privilege. But I am grateful to God that some are left.

Perhaps even more than the death itself, the manner of his death has forced me into a judgment concerning human life and human beings which I have always been reluctant to make….Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become. Baldwin struggled to come

In July of 1968, just a few months after King’s assassination and against the backdrop of American cities burning, Baldwin gave an interview to Esquire magazine. He set the tone of the interview with his answers to the magazine editors’ first two questions. Q. How can we get the black people to cool it? A. It is not for us to cool it. Q. But aren’t you the ones who are getting hurt the most? A. No, we are only the ones who are dying fastest.

I’m not trying to accuse you, you know. That’s not the point. But you have a lot to face….All that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history…which is not your past, but your present. Nobody cares what happened in the past. One can’t afford to care what happened in the past. But your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself and save yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history. —

White historians had for a century crudely distorted the Negro’s role in the Reconstruction years. It was a conscious and deliberate manipulation of history, and the stakes were high. The Reconstruction was a period in which black men had a small measure of freedom of action. If, as white historians tell, Negroes wallowed in corruption, opportunism, displayed spectacular stupidity, were wanton and evil, and ignorant, their case was made. They would have proved that freedom was dangerous in the hands of inferior beings. One generation after another of Americans were assiduously taught these falsehoods, and the collective mind of America became poisoned with racism and stunted with myths.

In so many ways, the people who promulgated the lie, those Frederick Douglass called the “apostles of forgetfulness,” helped build monuments to their willful amnesia. They turned their backs on the promise of emancipation and rejected the idea that black people could be full-fledged citizens in the United States.

White man, hear me! History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us….And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this….In great pain and terror because…one enters into battle with that historical creation, Oneself, and attempts to recreate oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating.

An honest confrontation with the past had everything to do with the kinds of persons we understood ourselves to be and the kinds of people we aspired to become. Baldwin’s demand was a decidedly moral one: He wanted to free us from the shackles of a particular national story in order that we might create ourselves anew. For this to happen, white America needed to shatter the myths that secured its innocence.

Trump and his legions invoke a history to justify their belief in the value gap. In doing so, they stand in the long lineage of white people in the United States who have used a certain understanding of the past to reinforce the injustices of the present day.

Something has died. But the ghosts will not leave us alone. True freedom, for all Americans, requires that we confront them directly. Maybe tell a different, better story about how we arrived here. Tell the ghosts to go on and rest; we’ve got this now. All of which requires that we work even harder for a better world; that we put aside the old fears and the histories that justify them in order to finally bury that old Negro and the white people who so desperately needed him, and finally begin again.

Power was at the heart of the matter, the Panthers maintained, and power should be pursued, morality be damned. Who controlled government, who controlled the economy, who controlled and dictated the prospects of our futures—that was all that mattered. Moral appeals like Dr. King’s only distracted from that fact and from the need for the wretched of the earth, with the Black Panther Party as the vanguard, to overthrow it all.

Baldwin worried that their rejection of the moral underpinnings of the fight set them up for failure as well. “I would like us to do something unprecedented,” Baldwin wrote in 1967, “to create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy.” In

“Everybody’s Protest Novel”: “We find ourselves bound, first without, then within, by the nature of categorizations.”

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble,” Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time, “is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”

The question of color, especially in this country, operates to hide the graver questions of the self. That is precisely why what we like to call “the Negro problem” is so tenacious in American life, and so dangerous….The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours.

Black Power could never overrun this robust idea of our individuality. Categories, especially racial categories, remain the bait in the trap. Instead, Baldwin insisted that we reach for a better self, and that involved leaving the “swaddling clothes” and certain “habits” behind. Swaddling clothes call forth the image of a baby, of innocence wrapped tight and secure. But in Baldwin’s hands, the clothes refer to a refusal to grow up, and those habits indicate an unwillingness to leave behind childish things. The text of 1 Corinthians 13:11 comes to mind: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put aside childish things.” America had to finally grow up. —

“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

We have invented the nigger. I didn’t invent him; white people invented him. I’ve always known, I had to know by the time I was 17 years old, that what you were describing was not me and what you were afraid of was not me. It had to be something else, you had invented it so it had to be something you were afraid of and you invested me with….I’ve always known that I am not a nigger. But, if I am not the nigger, and if it’s true that your invention reveals you, then who is the nigger? I am not the victim here….So I give you your problem back. You’re the nigger, baby, it isn’t me.

When asked how he would talk to someone who was ready “to tear up the town,” Baldwin revealed what truly mattered to him: All I can tell him, is that I’m with you, whatever that means. I’ll tell you what I can’t tell him. I can’t tell him to submit and allow himself to be slaughtered. I can’t tell him that he should not arm, because the white people are armed….what I try to tell him, too, is if you’re ready to blow the cat’s head off—because it could come to that—try not to hate him; for the sake of your soul’s salvation and for no other reason. But let’s try to be better, let’s try—no matter what it costs us—to be better than they are. You haven’t got to hate them, though we have to be free. It’s a waste of time to hate them. Baldwin never relinquished the belief that, at bottom, the problem we faced as individuals and as a nation was, and remains, fundamentally a moral one: It was and will always be a question about who we take ourselves to be. Hatred, in the end, corrodes the soul. And as Baldwin said, “I would rather die than see the black American become as hideously empty as the majority of white men have become.” The shibboleth of an essential blackness or mindless rage could lead us there. Only love can fortify us against hatred’s temptations. —

“It is terrible to watch people cling to their captivity and insist on their own destruction. I think black people have always felt this about America, and Americans, and have always seen, spinning above the thoughtless American head, the shape of the wrath to come.”

For him, the country had to go through this phase around color in order, finally, to get beyond it. Baldwin still hoped, even in his angriest of moments, that we, and I am convinced he meant all of us, could be better. Here is that staunch commitment in No Name, the book dripping with so much grief and rage: To be an Afro-American, or an American Black, is to be in the situation, intolerably exaggerated, of all those who have ever found themselves part of a civilization which they could in no wise honorably defend—which they were compelled, indeed, endlessly to attack and condemn—and who yet spoke out of the most passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life. But it is not our task to save white people: That old idea has provided comfort for far too many across generations who continued to hate and harm.

In our after times, our task, then, is not to save Trump voters—it isn’t to convince them to give up their views that white people ought to matter more than others. Our task is to build a world where such a view has no place or quarter to breathe.

If one accepts my basic assumption, which is that all men are brothers—simply because all men share the same condition, however different the details of their lives may be—then it is perfectly possible, it seems to me, that in re-creating ourselves, in saving ourselves, we can re-create and save many others: whosoever will. I certainly think that this possibility ought to be kept very vividly in the forefront of our consciousness. The value of a human being is never indicated by the color of his skin; the value of a human being is all that I hold sacred; and I know that I do not become better by making another worse. One need not read the New Testament to discover that. One need only read history and look at the world—one need only, in fact, look into one’s own mirror.

“revolution of value.” This involves telling ourselves the truth about what we have done. It entails implementing policies that remedy generations of inequities based on the lie. It requires centering a set of values that holds every human being sacred.

The book had not succumbed to the ideological pressures of the times, but rather sought to explain how we had arrived there. At the heart of No Name is the reality of loss: The country’s betrayal of the civil rights movement had left in its wake a trail of the dead, and we needed to come to terms with the bodies.

Istanbul became Baldwin’s elsewhere: It allowed him the critical distance from the deadly dynamics of American life. The silence enabled him to hear his own language and, I suspect, feel his own grief more deeply. That distance gave him a different angle of vision not only on the United States but on himself apart from the lie that suffocated him and much of American life.

Without recourse to an elsewhere, we can be, as some of us surely are, “broken on the wheel of life.”

My desire to be seduced, charmed, was a hope poisoned by despair: for better or for worse, it simply was not in me to make a separate peace. It was a symptom of how bitterly weary I was of wandering, how I hoped to find a resting place, reconciliation, in the land where I was born. But everything that might have charmed me merely reminded me of how many were excluded, how many were suffering and groaning and dying, not far from paradise which was itself but another circle of hell. Everything that charmed me reminded me of someplace else, someplace where I could walk and talk, someplace where I was freer than I was at home, someplace where I could live without the stifling mask—made me homesick for a liberty I had never tasted here, and without which I could never live or work. In America, I was free only in battle, never free to rest—and he who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle.

“the price of being American,” what he would later refer to as “The price of the ticket,” is the brutal process of becoming white.

We had to struggle against the terms the country imposed on us. And in that struggle for individuality, Baldwin saw the need to distance himself from the categories and fantasies that trapped all Americans: “If one is trying to become an individual in that most individual of countries, America, one’s really up against something,” he said. To try to think for oneself, and act for oneself, and have as little regard as I was forced to have for the architecture of my prison…to go into battle with all of that is to be very lonely. It’s a sort of exile, and if you’re lonely enough, you can perish from being lonely.

America. This supposition is a prison, containing the assumptions held by both black and white Americans. In this light, the very act of self-creation within this prison involves rejecting those suppositions, and that act, in turn, creates the distance that allows us to think of ourselves differently.

Like so many people I have talked to—writers, scholars, activists, and many others—I often find myself struggling to locate a space to breathe and to think, but it is hard to find that space apart from the distractions and anxieties produced by today’s politics. One of the more insidious features of Trumpism is that it deliberately seeks to occupy every ounce of our attention. In doing so, it aims to force our resignation to the banality of evil and the mundaneness of cruelty. To invoke T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, Trump aims to “distract us from distraction by distraction.” He greedily intrudes on our time, seeking our adoration or our scorn. It becomes, at least for me, next to impossible to turn him off, but I know I am not alone in feeling trapped.

We have to find and rest in a community of love. That community doesn’t have to take any particular shape or form; it simply has to be genuine. It can be made up of family or people who hold similar commitments or those who make us laugh with full-belly laughs and those without whom we could not imagine living. Here genuine mutuality serves as the basis for a broader, more collective expression of mutuality necessary for a vibrant democracy.