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.
