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

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

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?

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.

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.

What many of his critics, then and today, fail to realize is that Baldwin never gave up on the possibility that all of us could be better. I found that insight in the rubble. Baldwin never relinquished the idea of the New or Heavenly Jerusalem found in the book of Ezekiel and the book of Revelation, where, for him, the idols of race and the shackles of obsolete categories that bound us to the ground were no more. We still needed to fight for that. But we would do so without the burden of having to save white people first.

Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.

The United States has always been shadowed by practices that contradict our most cherished principles. The genocide of native peoples, slavery, racial apartheid, Japanese internment camps, and the subordination of women reveal that our basic creed that “all men are created equal” was a lie, at least in practice.

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.

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.

In his 1964 essay “The White Problem,” published in Robert A. Goodwin’s edited volume 100 Years of Emancipation, Baldwin placed the lie at the heart of the country’s founding. 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.

When residents erupted in Baltimore, Maryland, after the murder of Freddie Gray, one activist was seen outside the Western District police station with a sign quoting Baldwin: “Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy of justice.”

As he wrote in his poignant 1953 essay, “Stranger in the Village,” 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.

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.

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.

Baldwin put it this way to Fern Marja Eckman: “You’re at the mercy of something, which has nothing to do with you, nothing to do with your career, nothing to do with your ambitions, nothing to do with your loneliness, nothing to do with your despair. It had to do simply with the division of labor in the world—and this was your job. This is what you were here to do. Y’know, to translate somehow, if you could, by whatever means you could find, the way I see it—in any case, you know, I found myself in the deep South, looking at the eyes of a black boy or girl of 10. Y’know? To make it real. To force it on the world’s attention.” In so many ways, these last two sentences best illustrate what Baldwin means by being a witness. Tell the story. Make it real for those who refuse to believe that such a thing can happen/has happened/is happening here. Bring the suffering to the attention of those who wallow in willful ignorance. In short, shatter the illusion of innocence at every turn and attack all the shibboleths the country holds sacred.

A brief search of the Internet could easily pull up footage of racist encounters in parks and grocery stores, incidents that unfold while black and brown people are simply walking down the street or trying to move into an apartment or attempting to check into a hotel. The footage reveals the insults and cuts—the danger and the death—that happen daily in this country that many white Americans don’t want to know about. We saw police in Arizona accost a family at gunpoint because a four-year-old allegedly stole a doll from the dollar store. We saw Eric Garner say, over and over again, “I can’t breathe.” We witnessed in real time on Facebook Live the shooting and death of Philando Castile. And we heard the babies in cages on the borders crying for their parents. The footage shatters the innocence, but just as in Dot Counts’s time, it does not guarantee anything like justice. In fact, we’re inundated with the horror and the risk, becoming numb to it all. Most people seem to just click to the next thing. But we cannot become numb.

Today, our task remains the same, no matter its difficulty or the magnitude of the challenge. Some of us must become poets, but we all must bear witness. Make the suffering real and force the world to pay attention to it, and not place that suffering all at the feet of Donald Trump, but understand it as the inevitable outcome in a country that continues to lie to itself.

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. The editors did not see how the moral burden of America’s racial nightmare rested not with the black people rioting in the streets but with those white people who insisted on holding so tightly to the belief that they were somehow, because of the color of their skin, better than others who were not white. These people, Baldwin argued, had to see themselves otherwise. Passing new laws or declarations of unending sympathy or acts of racial charity would never be enough to change the course of this country. Something more radical had to be done; a different history had to be told. Now Baldwin spoke directly to the editors—and, by extension, to white America. I imagine his brow furrowed, with a slight smile in the beginning, only later turning to an intense gaze: 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 ...

Again, who and what we celebrate reflects who and what we value. This is why in moments of revolution or profound cultural shifts one of the first things people remove are symbols of the old values. Lenin’s and Stalin’s statues, for example, had to fall, but it is telling that Robert E. Lee continues to stand tall in parks across the United States—even in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Heather Heyer died.

In that 1970 Ebony interview, the reporter asked him, “What then, about hope?” Baldwin’s response is instructive for us as we live through another shameful period in the life of the nation: “Hope is invented every day.”

The country lied, once again, and we were left with the consequences. “The horror is that America…,” Baldwin wrote, “changes all the time, without ever changing at all.”

I can imagine my conservative friends crying foul, saying that I am too harsh and bitter, that Trump’s election was not simply about race and that economics were more important, and they would be genuinely sincere. But sincerity can often be a mask for cruelty, especially the cruelty of conscious disavowal. To agree with me entails much more than condemning Trump. It necessitates an honest confrontation with and condemnation of one’s complicity with a way of life that insists that some people matter more than others and with a society organized to reflect that belief. Baldwin has it right when he says: Americans are always sincere, it is their most striking and appalling attribute….Nixon was perfectly sincere when lying about Watergate, the military were perfectly sincere when lying about Vietnam and Cambodia, Helms is perfectly sincere when he says that he is not a racist, and the late J. Edgar Hoover was sincere when he called the late Martin Luther King, Jr. the biggest liar in America. This sincerity covers, and pardons all, [and] is the very substance of the American panic.

“Memory is powerful, it is a powerful force in the way a society evolves,” Stevenson said in his documentary True Justice. 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.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, we have witnessed a 500 percent increase in the number of people in America’s prisons and jails. More than two million Americans are incarcerated, and 67 percent of that population are people of color.

In doing so, he offered, perhaps, one of the first accounts of what would become known as carceral studies, putting into stark relief the systemic racial bias in the American criminal justice system. As Baldwin put it, If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the law’s protection the most!—and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person—ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

The museum’s story isn’t necessarily a linear story, at least not in the organization of the space. One can wander about. Once you move away from the wall telling the story from slavery to mass incarceration, there is no attempt to suggest how you take in the details of the four eras of slavery, segregation, lynching, and mass incarceration that make up the museum. Sounds and sights bleed from one exhibit section into the next, and if you stand in the center of this small museum, as I did, you can hear the voices of King and Barnett, the sounds of freedom songs and the screams of people being overrun by the police in Selma. You can hear people taking in the violence of it all with deep sighs and hushed groans. It is the cacophonous song of America.

The memorial confronts the trauma directly and offers us, in its own way, a chance to begin again. Stevenson put it this way, I want there to be repair in this country not just for communities of color that have been victimized by bigotry and discrimination, I want it to be for all of us. I don’t think we can get free until we are willing to tell the truth about our history. I do believe in truth and reconciliation. I just think that truth and reconciliation are sequential: That you can’t have reconciliation without the truth.

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.

Later, Baldwin came to see the early history of America as the site of our Fall. In February 1969, Baldwin wrote in The New York Times, 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.

Of the choices that led to Reagan’s election and caused so much pain, he had little sympathy to offer. “I don’t care who says what,” he said. “I watched it happen. And all this, because they want to be white. And why do they want to be white? Because it’s the only way to justify the slaughter…—they’re trapped.” Until the end, Jimmy never stopped being a disturber of the peace.

Now we find ourselves facing a moral reckoning of the same magnitude. We should have learned the lesson by now that changing laws or putting our faith in politicians to do the right thing are not enough. We have to rid ourselves, once and for all, of this belief that white people matter more than others, or we’re doomed to repeat the cycles of our ugly history over and over again. 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.

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.

If we, and I mean all of us who are committed to a new America, organize and fight with every ounce of energy we have to found an America free from the categories that bind our feet, implement policies that remedy generations-old injustices, and demonstrate in our living and political arrangements the value that every human being is sacred, we can build a New Jerusalem where the value gap cannot breathe.

We cannot let the current political moment strangle our imaginations. We hear politicians and pundits recoiling from bold visions: “No big ideas about healthcare; no revolutionary ideas about education or about a living wage for workers.” They say: “Don’t press the issue of white supremacy. You’ll alienate white voters. Don’t overreach.” Safety, for them, is found in the comforts of the familiar, in an incremental approach to our problems. But our after times require big ideas and bold visions, or we will find ourselves stuck right where we are. Our history tells us as much because we have been stuck here before.