Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. By Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.
The American idea is indeed in trouble. It should be. We have told ourselves a story that secures our virtue and protects us from our vices. But today we confront the ugliness of who we are – our darker angels reign. That ugliness isn’t just Donald Trump or murderous police officers or loud racists screaming horrible things. It is the image of children in cages with mucus-smeared shirts and soiled pants glaring back at us. Fourteen-year-old girls forced to take care of two-year-old children they do not even know. It is sleep-deprived babies in rooms where the lights never go off, crying for loved ones who risked everything to come here only because they believed the idea. It is Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his twenty-three-month-old daughter facedown, washed on the banks of our border. Reality can be hard and heartless.
This is an unusual little volume – part biography, part appreciation, part literary criticism and part jeremiad. Glaude is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton and a long-time scholar of religion. Here, he puts forward a case for certain underappreciated Baldwin essays, putting them in the context of contemporary American politics. He is essentially arguing that Baldwin foresaw the rise of Trumpism and offers us a path towards a healthier country.
His thesis is simple: Baldwin’s career straddles the life and death of the Civil Rights movement. The popular view of his career is that the artistic power and promise of his early work is spoiled by his bitter involvement with the Black Power movement. Glaude suggests – actually, he does not suggest, he states outright – that this is a misreading. He argues that the collapse of the Civil Rights Movement hurt Baldwin deeply because Baldwin was not willing to sugarcoat that collapse. He saw that America had – again – passed up the chance to tell the truth about itself, which was (and remains) a necessary first step on the road to healing. Baldwin was not duped by Eldridge Cleaver, nor was Black Power an easy way to avoid the nuanced and challenging work of non-violence. After Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, Baldwin recognized that a more radical path was the only path left.
Glaude examines this thesis through a reading of one of Baldwin’s less famous books, No Name In The Street. Published in 1972, No Name is a loose collection of memory and analysis that looks back on key moments in Baldwin’s own involvement with the Movement, mourns its passing and argues that the memory of the movement is being coopted by white liberals to condemn the Black Panther Party and avoid facing the truth about the collapse of non-violence. For Baldwin, the non-violent movement collapsed because of the violence white people used against it and our nation’s fundamental inability to tell the truth about our history. We search for a way to rewrite history so that the facts of slavery and oppression are minimized or ignored. So we can tell a version of ourselves constantly in search of a more perfect union, one that makes slavery, genocide, various oppressions people of color face in the North and South, simple anomalies in a society fundamentally pursuing justice for all. For Baldwin, that is the lie of America and until we face that lie for what it is, we will not be able to move past racial hatred.
Glaude observes that this analysis of Baldwin’s represents his view of the time after the collapse of the Civil Rights movement, in much the same way that W.E.B. DuBois’s analysis of race in America captures the time after the collapse of Reconstruction. For Glaude, these “time after” periods present the need and the opportunity for America to regroup and find a new path towards the truth. He sees the election of Donald Trump as a third time after – coming as it does after the end of the Obama administration. Glaude was not a fan of Obama as president, pointing to the rise in deportations, the continued high rate of incarceration and Obama’s general unwillingness to lead a full-throated progressive agenda on race and economic issues. He likens the election of the first Black president to the Civil Rights Movement in that it did not solve the fundamental problems of white supremacy. Obama’s passing from history presents a time to regroup and find a new path forward. Instead, once again, America has chosen oppression. For Glaude (and, he presumes, for Baldwin) Trump’s election is neither a backlash nor a return to old paradigms – it is a sign that those paradigms never really got old.
He offers No Name in the Street, several uncollected essays and a later Baldwin documentary as a source of ideas and energy to rethink and redirect our energy towards the destruction of white supremacy. Glaude writes and argues effectively, and he has come up with an interesting hybrid. I don’t finish this with the sense of having read a biography, but I do feel I know Baldwin in a deeper and more interesting way than I did before. I got a lot out of his discussions because I read the book along with Baldwin’s Collected Essays and was able to read the essays he discussed at length while reading the book. It is hard to say what value his discussion of No Name would have if I were not reading Baldwin’s words as Glaude was analyzing them. And even at 225 pages, the book feels padded. In general, his reading of other essays is cursory and used to reinforce ideas established in his reading of No Name. The documentary (I Heard it Through the Grapevine) is not available to stream. Based solely on the clip available online, It is not clear what it would add to Glaude’s case other than demonstrating that Baldwin was as compelling a talker as he was a writer.
While I enjoyed the book, I am not sure I wouldn’t recommend spending the time reading more of Baldwin’s brilliant essays instead .
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