36 pages • 1-hour read
Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
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Themes
Truth in the Face of Lies
Glaude stresses the importance of the truth in combating the myriad lies White America tells about itself, its history, and Black people. These lies include White claims to morality and Christianity, even as much of White America supports an openly racist president. The lies also cast Black people as lazy, dishonest, overly sexual, prone to criminality, and dependent on government handouts, to justify racial inequality and maintain the value gap. Falsehoods about American history are also central to White identity. These promote the notion of an innocent country and dismiss historical atrocities, such as the genocide of Native people, slavery, Japanese internment, and the unequal treatment of women, as minor missteps on the road to a more perfect union. Invested in maintaining this identity, White people twist historical events to perpetuate the story of an innocent, fundamentally good America.
To counter this, Glaude prescribes telling unvarnished versions of the past in schools, books, films, and other media and highlights the central importance of Institutions devoted to truth telling. The Legacy Museum and Lynching Memorial in Montgomery are exemplary in this regard, providing a strong counter-narrative to false historical commemoration, such as Confederate monuments. The Legacy Museum and Lynching Memorial provide unique opportunities to interrogate the country’s history of racial injustice by immersing visitors in the sights and sounds of the slave trade, Jim Crow laws, and the world’s largest prison system. As such, they allow visitors to draw connections not only between eras, but also across generations of Black Americans impacted by racial inequality.
Baldwin’s Personal Trauma and Racial Trauma
Glaude draws parallels between Baldwin’s personal trauma and the collective trauma of Black people. This trauma includes slavery, racial apartheid during the Jim Crow era, lynchings, the killing of Black people by police, and the mass incarceration of Black men.
Baldwin’s life experiences, including incidents with sexual predators and run-ins with White police officers during his childhood in Harlem, weighed heavily on how he navigated the world. Baldwin’s writings and interviews, moreover, reveal the extent of his trauma at the failure of the civil rights movement:
He witnessed what was happening in ghettos, where the workings of the lie impoverished millions. He saw the beginnings of mass incarceration and its effects on black communities. He also felt the emotional trauma of dashed hopes and expectations, and the costs of the fight (17).
In addition to the betrayal of the civil rights movement, Baldwin grappled with the aftermath of King’s assassination, as well as the murders of other civil rights leaders. These experiences affected his memory, leading him to misremember the past and sparking long-forgotten memories. Baldwin’s pain is also apparent in his ability to narrate the past in a linear way. Glaude argues that No Name in the Street, for instance, reads like the reflections of a traumatized person, “folding back on itself and twisting time as past and present collide and collapse into each other” (33).
Hope for a Better Future
Hope for a better future is implicit in the quotation that is the book’s title: “begin again.” Indeed, starting anew means recommitting to the fight for racial equality, even in the face of failure. Baldwin emphasized the importance of beginning again throughout his career, despite being disillusioned by Jim Crow and the deaths of civil rights leaders, such as King. Even his late works, which voice his rage and promote militancy, maintain hope for the possibility of a New Jerusalem. The epilogue of No Name in the Street describes the struggle and responsibility that lies ahead: “An old world is dying, and a new one, kicking in the belly of its mother, time, announces that it is ready to be born. […] our responsibility is to the newborn: the acceptance of responsibility contains the key” (206).
Glaude is also hopeful for a better future—for a third American founding. He challenges Americans to embrace equality fully, calling for “a world and a society that reflect the value that all human life, no matter the color of your skin, your zip code, your gender, or who you love, is sacred” (206). He is confident that confronting the lie at the heart of the American idea can eradicate Trumpism, thereby bringing the country closer to achieving its founding promises. Like Baldwin, Glaude cites the importance of responsibility in achieving this new America:
We have to do this for all those young people who risked everything to change the country—for those who have gone mad, who gave us their last breath, and for those who now face the temptation of accepting the world as it is as opposed to what it can be. It is, after all, a declaration of responsibility and love (27).
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