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

“Revealing the lie at the heart of the American idea, however, occasions an opportunity to tell a different and a better story. It affords us a chance to excavate the past and to examine the ruins to find, or at least glimpse, what made us who we are. Baldwin insisted, until he died, that we reach for a different story. We should tell the truth about ourselves, he maintained, and that would release us into a new possibility.”

Truth and hope are key themes in Glaude’s book. Like Baldwin, Glaude maintains that ending racism is possible, but only by honestly confronting the past. This includes acknowledging the historic impact of the lie on Black people, as well as interrogating its current effects. Change is possible, but not without truthfully confronting racism.

“[W]hite America chose itself over a truly just and multiracial society.” 

The civil rights movement failed because rather than striving to achieve a truly multiracial democracy, White America reinforced the lie, resulting in many of the problems facing Black communities today, such as poverty, police brutality, and mass incarceration. Baldwin charted the nature of this betrayal in his late writings, calling out White people for their cowardice. He also abandoned King’s peaceful approach to racial equality, turning instead to Black militancy. 

“[T]hirty years after Baldwin’s death we are still wrestling with the fact that so many Americans continue to hold the view that ours is a white nation.” 

Viewing the US as a White country promotes the idea that White people deserve to stay and occupy the land, and that others must either be exterminated (Native Americans), exiled (Black people); or barred from immigrating in the first place (Mexicans, citizens of Central and South America, citizens of predominantly Muslim countries, and others). Racist policies favoring White people for citizenship trace to the country’s origins. In 1790, for example, Congress limited eligibility for naturalization to the free and the White. For Baldwin, the path to a different America entailed accepting the reality of the country’s racist past and present. Trump’s rallying cry to build a wall along the US-Mexico border and his Muslim ban reveal that the notion of a White America is alive and well.

“Baldwin saw clearly what he was up against; he fully understood the power of the American lie. It is the engine that moves this place. It transforms facts and events that do not quite fit our self-understanding into the details of American greatness or features of our never-ending journey to perfection. The lie is the story that warps reality in this country, which means that resisting it involves telling in each moment a truer story, one that casts the lie into relief, showing it for what it is.” 

This passage addresses the pernicious effects of the lie. It prevents White America from seeing the past for what it was. In addition, it forces White people to twist and omit facts that do not fit into their version of history. Baldwin witnessed firsthand the commitment White America had to maintaining the lie. Resistance entailed being truthful about the country’s racist past and present. Glaude adopts a similar stance, praising institutions that bear witness to racism in the US, notably, the Legacy Museum and the Lynching Memorial.

“What is most terrible is that American white men are not prepared to believe my version of the story, to believe that it happened […] In order to avoid believing that, they have set up in themselves a fantastic system of evasions, denials, and justifications, [a system that] is about to destroy their grasp of reality, which is another way of saying their moral sense.” 

Baldwin’s 1964 essay, “The White Problem,” asserts that the lies White people tell about themselves and others profoundly distort their ethical sense and obscure robust ideas of public good. Baldwin demanded an unflinching encounter with the ugliness of American history and the lies underlying the American idea. This requires rejecting the comforting illusions hiding the lie and putting an end to willful ignorance.

“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.” 

Trips to the South not only prompted Baldwin to write about the impact of the lie on Black people, who were terrorized by racists, but also about the lie’s deleterious effects on White people: White southerners were suffocated by the lies they had to tell to maintain the value gap.

“How, what, and who we celebrate reflects what and who we value, and how we celebrate our past reflects ultimately who we take ourselves to be today.” 

In 2015, students staged sit-ins at Princeton University to pressure the administration into acknowledging Woodrow Wilson’s racism and Princeton’s racist legacy by removing his name from two campus buildings. The University at first chose not to rename the buildings, instead adding signage around campus that told a more complete story about Wilson’s segregationist past and Princeton’s complex racial history. In 2020, however, Princeton rethought its response and renamed the two buildings completely. In short, the protesters forced Princeton to reassess its past in relation to its current values.

“But, in the end, we have to allow this ‘innocent’ idea of white America to die. It is irredeemable, but that does not mean we are too.”

Glaude argues that the lies White Americans tell about their history must be put to rest. These lies gloss over or ignore the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Black people, Japanese internment, and other atrocities, casting them as minor missteps on the path to a more perfect union. Despite the country’s brutal history, however, Glaude maintains hope for a better future, if White America commits to change. 

“Power mattered. But in the end, for Jimmy, what kind of human beings we aspired to be mattered more. And I am convinced he was absolutely right, especially for our after times.” 

Following Baldwin, whose views contradicted those of the Black Panthers, Glaude argues that policy and power alone will not end racism in the US. Rather, White America must confront its racist past directly in order to reimagine itself differently. Self-examination is key to this process, as is rejecting fixed identities and strict categories that hinder progress.

“In the years after The Fire Next Time, Baldwin openly questioned capitalism—even commending, with Bobby Seale, a ‘Yankee Doodle’—type socialism. He relentlessly criticized white supremacy, railed against U.S. imperialism, and prophesied the end of the West.” 

Many Baldwin readers criticize his engagement with Black Power, arguing that his views go too far politically. Indeed, Baldwin questioned capitalism, imperialism, and White supremacy, three fundamental systems in the US. However, focusing on Baldwin’s radical views disregards the complexity of his stance. Glaude attributes the shift in Baldwin’s politics to the trauma and disappointment of the failure of the civil rights movement.

“White liberals weren’t loud racists. They were simply racial philanthropists who, after a good deed, return to their suburban homes with their white picket fences or to their apartments in segregated cities with their consciences content. Baldwin was not shy about calling this out.” 

This passage addresses a key problem in achieving racial justice in the US: the lack of commitment on the part of White people. Baldwin viewed White liberals who paid lip service to racial equality but did not act to move the cause forward as co-conspirators in maintaining the value gap. This lack of commitment is a prime reason the civil rights movement failed.

“To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one’s interior agreement and collaboration with the authors of one’s degradation.” 

The Black Panthers appealed to Baldwin because they took pride in being Black, rejecting the racist views of Blackness promoted by White America. The movement marked a dramatic shift in the US. Defiance became widespread as Black people ceased to concede to what the country said about them.  

“It is up to white people to release themselves from their own captivity.” 

Baldwin’s position on the problem of racism changed over his lifetime. In his early writings, he argued that it was up to Black people to help White people set aside biases. He stressed the redemptive power of suffering and love embodied by King and other civil rights leaders. His late works, however, placed the burden for ending racism squarely on the shoulders of White America. If change was going to happen, it had to come directly from White people.

“Baldwin penned a powerful open letter to Angela Davis, later published in The New York Review of Books. He famously wrote: ‘We must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.’” 

In 1970, the FBI placed American activist and author Angela Davis on their Most Wanted List for arming a 17-year-old who stormed the Marin County Courthouse. In his open letter, Baldwin alluded to the gas chambers used to exterminate Jews during the Second World War to spur readers into helping her. His letter sparked an international movement that eventually led to Davis’s freedom.

“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.” 

A critical aspect of Trumpism is its ubiquity. Trump distracts from real issues, intruding on time that could be better spent. His antics on FOX and Twitter are so extreme they are difficult to ignore. Moreover, they normalize racist views and cruel policies. Trump occupies so much mental space he leaves Glaude feeling trapped and exhausted.

“Hope is invented every day.” 

In an interview Baldwin gave in 1970 for Ebony magazine, he stressed two key themes in his works: hope and new beginnings. These themes are the basis of Glaude’s book.

“Just twelve years after the last major legislation of the Great Society—the Fair Housing Act of 1968—aimed, however clumsily, at addressing inequalities produced by generations of racist policies, the country elected a president whose charge was to dismantle it all.” 

After Johnson, the US elected as president Reagan, whose policies and actions harmed people of color by attacking affirmative action, eviscerating the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the US Commission of Civil Rights, promoting tough on crime laws, and calling for cuts to social programs. Reagan’s election stymied the efforts of Johnson’s Great Society programs to end poverty and racial injustice in the US. History repeated itself with the back-to-back elections of Obama and Trump, two presidents with diametrically opposed policies and rhetoric. 

“Trump cannot be cordoned off into a corner with evil, racist demagogues. We make him wholly bad in order to protect our innocence. He is made to bear the burdens of all our sins, when he is in fact a clear reflection of who we actually are.”

Glaude argues that viewing Trump as exceptional promotes the lie. Categorizing him as an evil racist shifts the blame for Trumpism entirely onto one man, rather than addressing the widespread racism that made his presidency possible. 

“We stand in the ruins. Modern conservatism has collapsed. Its claims about the value of small government, the importance of tax cuts for the rich, and the benefits of deregulation and privatization have resulted in most Americans drowning in profound uncertainty about their future and their children’s future and have left the planet mortally wounded. All that is left of this once-vaunted ideology are appeals to our lesser angels in order to divide Americans along the fault lines that have been a part of this democratic experiment since the very beginning.” 

Modern conservatism has failed in a variety of ways: Poverty is on the rise, the rich are getting richer, the American middle class is besieged by sky-rocketing healthcare, education, and housing costs. Trumpism capitalizes on this uncertainty, stoking long-standing racial resentments and scapegoating Black people and other minorities, as burdens on the system. For Glaude, the path forward demands that conservatives confront their biases, cease being complicit in maintaining the lie, and work to create a society that reflects the belief in equality. 

“We evade historical wounds, the individual pain, and the lasting effects of it all. The lynched relative; the buried son or daughter killed at the hands of the police; the millions locked away to rot in prisons; the children languishing in failed schools; the smothering, concentrated poverty passed down from generation to generation; and the indifference to lives lived in the shadows of the American dream are generally understood as exceptions to the American story, not the rule. Blasphemous facts must be banished from view by a host of public rituals and incantations. Our gaze averted, we then congratulate ourselves on how far we have come and ruthlessly blame those in the shadows for their plight in life.” 

Generational trauma links past and present racism. White people routinely turn their gaze away from the millions of Black people killed by police, imprisoned, or languishing in failing schools and neighborhoods. They expect gratitude for the progress that has been made, while refusing to recognize the challenges that remain. White America defends its right to educate its children in the best schools. It demands that individuals be judged on merit alone. Moreover, it enjoys its successes free of guilt, convinced that these successes were earned, while blaming Black people for their poverty. 

“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.” 

Blaming Trump for the current political climate minimizes the problem of widespread racism in the US. White America must confront its racist past and present through honest self-examination, a critical step in achieving equality.

“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.” 

Baldwin’s No Name in the Street addresses systemic racial bias in the American criminal justice system. Baldwin worked to exonerate Tony Maynard, an aspiring actor falsely accused of murdering a White marine named Michael Kroll. Maynard was tried three times. The first trial resulted in a hung jury, the second in a mistrial, and the third sent Maynard to prison for 10 to 20 years. Baldwin’s experiences trying to free Maynard increased his awareness of inequality in the legal system. He saw the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 for what it was—a law that enshrined the value gap. Introduced less than two months after the Black Panthers occupied California’s state capitol, the law provided police departments around the country with weapons and surveillance equipment, as well as funding research about criminality. These well-equipped police departments then targeted Black communities.

“With an extraordinary clarity about the moral role of the press, the editorial board of the Advertiser did exactly what the Legacy museum called for: They admitted the paper’s complicity in the wrongs and stated a commitment that ‘we must never be as wrong as this again.’” 

Confronting racism at a personal and institutional level is critical to achieving racial equality. The editorial board of the Montgomery Advertiser took an important first step taken by publishing an op-ed in conjunction with the opening of the Legacy Museum and Lynching Memorial. The board apologized for the newspaper’s role in promoting or condoning racism and pushed back against readers who argued that the past was better left alone, all the while stressing the moral role of the press. In short, the board recognized that being truthful about the past was the only way not to repeat it.