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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

In our after times, in the full light of the country’s latest betrayal, we have to find the courage to confront honestly the lies that rest in us, if we are to confront and change the lies that confound the nation.

We have to work on ourselves, if we are to live up to the kind of world we want to create. The props and crutches that have supported our individual identities in this country have been knocked from under our arms and feet. We have to make of ourselves a new creation without them.

as historian Vincent Harding wrote, “the soul of America had not been redeemed. As a matter of fact, its deepest character had only been fully revealed and all the long-held suspicions of black people concerning the nature of racism North and South were confirmed.” The nation had brazenly refused to give up the lie, and in the growing energy of reactionary conservatism, actually seemed to be working harder than ever to secure it.

Lord, History is weary of her unspeakable liaison with Time, for Time and History have never seen eye to eye: Time laughs at History and time and time and time again Time traps History in a lie.

This is what the late poet Amiri Baraka called, in his classic work Blues People, “the changing same”—that sense of alienation rooted in terror and trauma, which remains no matter the shifts and permutations in our lives, and is exacerbated by the country’s forgetfulness. For many, Reagan’s presidential campaign was that trigger.

For Baldwin, Atlanta represented the illusion of the New South and, by extension, the lie: The changes that promised revitalization were only on the surface and not at the heart of the city, the region, or the nation. In this sense, the contradictions around Atlanta and how Dr. King was represented by those in the city become the essential frame for what follows in the film.

Dr. King had gained enough steam to reach a vote in the House, though it did not yet succeed. But Baldwin worried that tributes to King served to obscure a deeper truth. People could ignore what was happening in black communities across the country and instead celebrate the so-called legacy of Dr. King. They could pin King’s wings to the page. In this sense and for that purpose, Baldwin lamented, the memorials and the named streets perfumed the carnage. They hid in plain sight what actually happened to many of the movement’s survivors and their children. All one had to do was look down from the street signs for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and see the poor neighborhoods along it to get the point. As Baldwin said to David, his words slurring slightly from a bit too much drink: The monument [Dr. King’s memorial] in Atlanta is absolutely as irrelevant as the Lincoln memorial. It is one of the ways the Western world has learned or thinks it has learned to outwit history, to outwit time—to make a life and a death irrelevant, to make that passion irrelevant, to make it unusable for you and for our children. There is nothing you can do with that monument, someone said to the widow. The film makes plain the lessons about the domestication

all. Panic ensues when crises reveal the truth, because we are snatched from our fantasies and forced to confront who we really are.

We have been accused of being in spaces where we are obviously not wanted. In the end, Americans will have to decide whether or not this country will remain racist. To make that decision, we will have to avoid the trap of placing the burden of our national sins on the shoulders of Donald Trump. We need to look inward. Trump is us. Or better, Trump is you.

We have a constitution that talks about equality, liberty, and justice for all and for decades, for centuries we tolerated enslavement of other human beings. We tolerated abuse and violence against people. We tolerated bigotry and discrimination….I think there is a kind of smog in the air that’s created by the history of slavery and lynching and segregation, and I don’t think we’re going to get healthy, I don’t think we can be free…until we address this problem. But to get there we’re going to have to be willing to tell the truth.

for those who desperately sought to imagine a way forward: “Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.”

we look back to those beginnings not to reaffirm our greatness or to double down on myths that secure our innocence, but to see where we went wrong and how we might reimagine or re-create ourselves in light of who we initially set out to be.

But to view Trump in the light of the lynching memorial in Alabama is to understand him in the grand sweep of American history: He and his ideas are not exceptional. He and the people who support him are just the latest examples of the country’s ongoing betrayal, our version of “the apostles of forgetfulness.” When we make Trump exceptional, we let ourselves off the hook, for he is us just as surely as the slave-owning Founding Fathers were us; as surely as Lincoln, with his talk of sending black people to Liberia, was us; as surely as Reagan was us, with his welfare queens. When we are surprised to see the reemergence of Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and other white nationalists, we reveal our willful ignorance about how our own choices make them possible. The memorial confronts both Trumpism and those who would never imagine themselves in sympathy with it, with the truth and trauma of American history. It exposes the lie for what it is and makes plain our collective complicity in reinforcing it.

“People who have opted to be white congratulate themselves on their generous ability to return to the slave that freedom which they never had any right to endanger, much less take away. For this dubious effort…they congratulate themselves and expect to be congratulated.” The

Baldwin called the nation, in his after times, to confront the lie of its own self-understanding and to get about the work of building a country truly based on democratic principles.

To do your first works over means to reexamine everything. Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.

For the sake of one’s sanity, one simply ceases trying to make them hear. If they think that things are more important than people—and they do—well, let them think so. Let them be destroyed by their things. If they think I was happy being a slave and am now redeemed by having become—and on their terms, as they think—the equal of my overseers, well, let them think so. If they think I am flattered by their generosity in allowing me to become a sharecropper in a system which I know to be criminal—and which is placed squarely on the backs of nonwhite people all over the world—well, let them think so. Let the dead bury their dead.

“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.”

What is happening today isn’t unprecedented; it’s just uniquely of our times. We have to understand our own anger and disappointments and figure out for ourselves how to pick up the pieces, to hold off the temptations of hate and despair, and to fight the battle once again.

Trumpism presents us with a choice. We can either double down on the lie and reelect him or find comfort in reaching back to an idea of normalcy and elect someone “safe,” or we can decide to untether our politics from the insidious assumptions of race that have guided our choices for generations. If we now choose Trump or choose to be safe, we should prepare ourselves for even darker days ahead. But if we decide to be otherwise, as difficult as that may be, we will finally make possible the birth of a new America.