Begin again : James Baldwin's America and its urgent lessons for today

Title:

Author:

Glaude, Eddie S., Jr., 1968- author

ISBN:

9781784744441

Personal Author:

Glaude, Eddie S., Jr., 1968- author

Publication Information:

London, England : Chatto & Windus, 2021.

Physical Description:

xxxi, 239 pages ; 22 cm

General Note:

Originally published: U.S. : Crown, 2020.

Personal Subject:

Baldwin, James, 1924-1987.

Subject Term:

Civil rights movements -- United States -- History.

Race discrimination -- United States -- History.

Geographic Term:

United States -- Race relations -- History.

Language:

English

Abstract:

The struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the presidency of Donald Trump, a president whose time in the White House represents the latest failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. For James Baldwin, a similar attempt to force a confrontation with the truth of America's racism came in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, and was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. In the years from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin - the great creative artist, often referred to as 'the poet of the revolution' - became a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair. Today, America is at a crossroads. Drawing insight and inspiration from Baldwin's writings, Glaude suggests we can find hope and guidance through our own era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Seamlessly combining biography with history, memoir and trenchant analysis of our moment, Begin Again bears witness to the difficult truth of race in America. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a more just future.

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Summary

A searing indictment of racial injustice in America - inspired by the life and work of James Baldwin - to help us understand the present moment, and imagine a new future into being

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

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

A searing indictment of racial injustice in America - inspired by the life and work of James Baldwin - to help us understand the present moment, and imagine a new future into being

The struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the presidency of Donald Trump, a president whose time in the White House represents the latest failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race.

For James Baldwin, a similar attempt to force a confrontation with the truth of America's racism came in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, and was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. In the years from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin - the great creative artist, often referred to as 'the poet of the revolution' - became a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair.

America is at a crossroads. Drawing insight and inspiration from Baldwin's writings, Glaude suggests we can find hope and guidance through our own era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Seamlessly combining biography with history, memoir and trenchant analysis of our moment, Begin Again bears witness to the difficult truth of race in America. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a more just future.

'Begin Again is that rare thing- an instant classic' Pankaj Mishra

'Incredibly moving and stirring' Diana Evans

Winner of the Stowe Prize 2021
A TIME 100 Must-Read Book of 2020
A Washington Post N otable Work of Non-Fiction 2020

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

This erudite take frames the election of Donald Trump to replace America's first black president as a "betrayal" analogous to the rise of Richard Nixon's "so-called silent majority" following the collapse of the civil rights movement and looks to James Baldwin's post-1968 writings for lessons in navigating the current political moment. Princeton University professor Glaude (Democracy in Black) explores how Baldwin's focus shifted from "the gaze of white America" to the "well-being and future of black people" in his later work, including No Name in the Street (1972) and the documentary film I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982), and contends that living in Istanbul gave Baldwin the privacy necessary to "reimagine hope" in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Glaude also details Baldwin's complex relationship with the Black Power movement and his "prescient view" of the impact of mass incarceration on African-Americans. Applying these insights to the Black Lives Matter movement, debates over the removal of Confederate monuments, and modern-day identity politics, Glaude at times seems to be trying to fit three books into one. Nevertheless, he makes an effective and impassioned case for those dismayed by Trumpism to remain committed to building "a genuine democratic community where we all can flourish." Progressives and fans of Baldwin's work will savor this perceptive reappraisal. (Apr.)

Guardian Review

In 2018, two years after the "disastrous" 2016 US presidential election, Eddie Glaude Jr, professor of African American Studies at Princeton, made a pilgrimage to the house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in the south of France, where James Baldwin had lived for almost two decades, and which was now being knocked down to make way for luxury flats. Glaude, who has taught Baldwin for many years, had come in search of any surviving traces of the writer's refuge, and found most of it crumbling to dust. Only the writing room remained, "exposed for the sun to beat down on its side". Against the backdrop of bulldozers and the noise of sledgehammers, it "looked like the excavation of an ancient ruin", and called to mind "what Baldwin saw in the latter part of his life in the United States ¿ decay and wreckage alongside greed and selfishness". It became the impetus for Glaude to undertake an excavation of his own. He resolved to engage deeply with Baldwin's work, to try to think "with" him, in order to interrogate "how an insidious view of race, in the form of Trumpism, continues to frustrate any effort to 'achieve our country'", and then to write about it. The result is Begin Again, a book that is perfect for Baldwin aficionados or anyone experiencing staggering disbelief at America's state of disarray and trying to make sense of it. What sets this account apart is that Glaude understands how Baldwin's writing becomes a pathway for one's own thoughts; he's able to synthesise the novelist's work in a way that transcends summation or homage and becomes instead an act of breathtaking literary assimilation that acquires its own generative power. Early on, he quotes Baldwin's 1963 speech at Howard University: "It is the responsibility of the Negro writer to excavate the real history of this country ¿ We must tell the truth till we can no longer bear it." Baldwin took his own exhortation seriously, producing, according to Glaude, nearly 7,000 pages of writing distinguished by its astute, unflinching elegance, including Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963) - which established him as the literary consciousness of the African American resistance at a critical moment in the country's history. Glaude tracks an argument that originates in Baldwin's 1964 essay "The White Problem": "The idea of America is an outright lie" that has fostered a state of wilful blindness, involving not only a refusal to acknowledge that the US was founded on notions of white supremacy, but an interrelated insistence on the innocence of white Americans. Merging his own thoughts with Baldwin's, Glaude posits that the reason for America's troubles since the arrival of the first group of enslaved Africans has been its unwillingness to confront this lie: "any attempt" to do so "would be sabotaged by the fear that we may not be who we say we are". Instead of facing the truth about the genocidal horrors of its past, Americans pine for "national rituals of expiation". Thus, in the wake of any attempt to expose it, the lie always moves "quickly to reassert itself", prolonging a long practice of historical gaslighting. For Glaude, two previous turning points in American history - first, the civil war and reconstruction, and second, the black freedom struggle of the mid 20th century, both attempted to grapple with the lie, and were the occasions of "betrayal". Barack Obama's election to the presidency represented another turning point, but hopes were "betrayed", just as the civil rights movement was betrayed by the turn towards Reaganism. Now, the US faces another "moment of moral reckoning", the chance to "choose whether it will become a genuinely multiracial democracy", and Glaude suggests it should look to Baldwin's "navigation of his own disappointments" for guidance. He traces how the brutal response to the freedom struggle - in particular the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr - led to a shift in Baldwin's thinking, a recognition of the need to eschew "the burden of having to save white people first". Glaude concludes that the answer now is the same as it was then: the urgent need to "rid ourselves of the idea of white America", which is the only way to get off the "goddam racial hamster wheel". And he suggests that the first step involves what he called in his previous book Democracy in Black a "revolution of value": "This involves telling ourselves the truth about what we have done ¿ It requires centering a set of values that holds every human being sacred." In form, Begin Again is an essayistic marvel, circling and folding back on itself as Baldwin's musings in the past and Glaude's analysis of the present give meaning to each other. For example, Baldwin's understanding that we had to get "beyond" colour (misread by some as "boot-licking" self-hatred) leads to a discourse on modern identity politics through his contention that "categories can cut us off from the complexity of the world, and the complexity of ourselves", before coming back to the idea that we must tell the truth about who we are. Glaude's style works the same way Baldwin's did, achieving the kind of mimetic evocation of a mind at work that Montaigne described as "la peinture de la pensée" (the painting of thought), except that here we get two great minds for the price of one. In the US, the book was published in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. In the UK, it was released just after armed pro-Trump rioters staged the attack on the US Capitol, in the wake of which "the lie" was still everywhere in evidence, particularly the loud condemnatory chorus crying out: "This is not who we are! This is not America!" It's a persistent, predictable refrain, but as always it only raises the question: if it isn't America, why does it keep happening there? Glaude's attempt to answer this, via Baldwin, points to a way for his country to "imagine ourselves anew". It is a scholarly, deeply personal, and yet immensely readable meditation, a masterful reckoning with the "latest betrayal" of the American ideal.

Kirkus Review

A penetrating study of how the words of James Baldwin (1924-1987) continue to have (often painful) relevance today. Glaude, a frequent guest on political talk shows and chair of the African American Studies department at Princeton, has long read, admired, and taught Baldwin's work. In this follow-up to his 2016 book, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, the author mines that work to illustrate our ongoing inability to confront what both Baldwin and Glaude call the lie at the center of our American self-conception and how the nation refuses "to turn its back on racism and to reach for its better angels." Glaude employs a blend of genres: some biography of Baldwin (the text ends at Baldwin's gravesite), literary analysis of key works, memoir (first-person appears throughout), and pieces of American history, especially those events that many of us don't want to think about. Repeatedly, the author examines "the ugliness of who we are"--and of the men we have elected president (Reagan and Trump do not come off well). In prose that is eloquent and impassioned--sometimes hopeful, sometimes not--the author presses his fingers on our bruises, the ones many of us would prefer to ignore. Among his many topics: Martin Luther King Jr. and how his murder both elevated his status and began to create the myth that conceals much of the truth about him; the civil rights movement and how many of its gains have been lost; the mass incarceration epidemic and what the author believes are the legally sanctioned murders of young black men. Much of the focus, of course, is on Baldwin: his literary rise, his years abroad (France, Turkey), and how, later in life, he continued to sell well but had lost the approval of many key literary critics. Both Baldwin and Glaude argue that we must begin again. Baldwin's genius glimmers throughout as Glaude effectively demonstrates how truth does not die with the one who spoke it. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

The persisting problem of race lies at the core of malaise in the United States, argues Glaude (African American studies, Princeton Univ.; Democracy in Black). In this book spanning memoir, history, and cultural analysis, he asks the nation to confront the legacy of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. To clarify where the country has come from and failed to go, Glaude revisits what James Baldwin witnessed and remarked on in In the Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972) works exposing dark realities of the nation's racial ferment. Glaude excavates the rubble and ruin of the nation's contradictions and failures, alongside a personal journey of self-discovery. Most importantly, Glaude writes about our collective responsibility to navigate disappointments, harness rage, and live with faith that good works can result in the triumph of "the better angels of our nature." VERDICT This is not an easy read for those wanting easy answers about race. Instead, it is a book about moral reckoning, owning up to failed choices, and making an effort to choose better ones. For all interested in uncovering how we got here, and how much further we have to go.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

Excerpts

Chapter One The Lie James Baldwin and Stokely Carmichael first met during the heady days of the movement to desegregate the South. Carmichael was a young activist and a member of a student group at Howard University called the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), which sought to combat racism and segregation in Washington, D.C., and in the surrounding areas of Virginia and Maryland. NAG offered a snapshot of the civil rights movement's future: Carmichael's fellow students in the group included Courtland Cox, Michael Thelwell, Muriel Tillinghast, and Ruth Brown, all of whom would go on to be influential leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). On Howard's campus, NAG sponsored a series of programs called Project Awareness, which was designed to explore the full complexity and richness of black life and to engage the controversies surrounding the black freedom movement. It was through these programs that James Baldwin was invited to campus. During the spring semester of 1963, after the violent response directed at the movement in Birmingham, the group organized a symposium about the role and responsibility of the black writer in the civil rights struggle. They invited Baldwin, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, novelists John O. Killens and Ralph Ellison, and actor and playwright Ossie Davis. Ellison sent his regrets, and Hansberry was too ill to attend, but students packed the auditorium. Baldwin had just finished a speaking tour on behalf of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE), and this audience was hungry to hear him speak. Malcolm X, in town by happenstance, dropped in to hear Jimmy hold forth. "Whenever I hear that this little brother is going to speak in any town where I am," he said, "I always make a point of going to listen, because I learn something." Baldwin didn't disappoint. He was a captivating speaker, with a powerful, almost hypnotic cadence; if the desire to be a preacher had long ago left him, his ability to hold a crowd in his hand had not. "It is the responsibility of the Negro writer to excavate the real history of this country . . . to tell us what really happened to get us where we are now," he boldly declared from the stage at Howard. "We must tell the truth till we can no longer bear it." After the symposium ended, Baldwin, Killens, and Davis joined a group of students in the small, cramped apartment of a few NAG members. The hour was late. Jimmy needed a glass of Johnnie Walker Black, but the liquor stores were closed. Someone knew a bootlegger. The impromptu rap session went on until sunrise. "Our older brothers reasoned with us like family," Carmichael, who would become known as Kwame Ture, later recalled, even though he confused the date of the panel and the subsequent events. "We had three years of struggle behind us," he said. "So was the March on Washington and Dr. King's Dream. John F. Kennedy had recently been gunned down. The national mood was sore, tense, and uncertain, as was our mood." Everyone understood the burden the students carried on their shoulders. Despite their relative youth, they had already confronted the brutality of the South in an effort to desegregate lunch counters and to register black people to vote. Many had been beaten and chased down dusty roads in Mississippi and Alabama by the Klan and by white sheriffs. These students were the shock troops of the civil rights movement, and many suffered from the trauma induced by a region and a country reluctant to change. Pessimism and rage threatened to overwhelm them. Baldwin worried about the young men and women like an older brother who did not know exactly how to protect them from the dangers he already glimpsed ahead. For him, the brutality of sheriff "Bull" Connor's dogs and firehouses in Birmingham had already foreshadowed what was to come, revealing a depth to the country's depravity that no single piece of legislation could cure. As the meeting wound down, Baldwin was left to say the final words, and he brought the conversation full circle to the reason why the students had invited him to campus. "Well, here we are, my young brothers and sisters. Here's how matters stand. I, Jimmy Baldwin, as a black writer, must in some way represent you. Now, you didn't elect me and I didn't ask for it, but here we are." All eyes were fixed on him. "Everything I write will in some way reflect on you. So . . . what do we do? I'll make you a pledge. If you will promise your elder brother that you will never, ever accept any of the many derogatory, degrading, and reductive definitions that this society has ready for you, then I, Jimmy Baldwin, promise you I shall never betray you." It was an avowal of love, and a declaration of his responsibility as a writer dedicated to speaking the truth. "It is, alas, the truth that to be an American writer today means mounting an unending attack on all that Americans believe themselves to hold sacred," Baldwin wrote in 1962. "It means fighting an astute and agile guerrilla warfare with that American complacency which so inadequately masks the American panic." In this sense, Baldwin's view of the writer was a decidedly moral one. The writer puts aside America's myths and legends and forces a kind of confrontation with the society as it is, becoming a disturber of the peace in doing so. By the time Baldwin sat down with the Howard students in 1963, he was at the height of his powers, if not yet the full-on disturber of the peace he would soon become. In a relatively short period of time since the publication of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain , in 1953, his play Amen Corner in 1954, and his first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son , in 1955, he had become one of the most prominent African American writers and critics in the United States. With his view of the moral role of the writer; his faith in the redemptive possibilities of human beings, no matter their color; and his initial faith in the possibility that the country could change, Baldwin was catapulted to literary fame and emerged as one of the most incisive and honest critics of America and its race problem. His admirers stretched across racial and political spectrums. Malcolm X referred to him as "the poet of the revolution." Edmund Wilson described him as one of the great creative artists of the country. Since the publication of Notes of a Native Son , Baldwin had insisted that the country grapple with the contradiction at the heart of its self-understanding: the fact that in this so-called democracy, people believed that the color of one's skin determined the relative value of an individual's life and justified the way American society was organized. That belief and justification had dehumanized entire groups of people. White Americans were not excluded from its effects. "In this debasement and definition of black people," Baldwin argued, white people "debased and defined themselves." Baldwin's understanding of the American condition cohered around a set of practices that, taken together, constitute something I will refer to throughout this book as the lie. The idea of facing the lie was always at the heart of Jimmy's witness, because he thought that it, as opposed to our claim to the shining city on a hill, was what made America truly exceptional. The lie is more properly several sets of lies with a single purpose. If what I have called the "value gap" is the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by which the value gap is maintained. These are the narrative assumptions that support the everyday order of American life, which means we breathe them like air. We count them as truths. We absorb them into our character. One set of lies debases black people; examples stretch from the writings of the Founding Fathers to The Bell Curve . According to these lies, black people are essentially inferior, less human than white people, and therefore deserving of their particular station in American life. We see these lies every day in the stereotypes that black people are lazy, dishonest, sexually promiscuous, prone to criminal behavior, and only seeking a handout from big government. Baldwin made the Howard students promise him that they would never believe the lies the country told about them, because he knew that the lie would do irreparable harm to their souls, as it had done to the country. Another constituent part of the lie involves lies about American history and about the trauma that America has visited throughout that history on people of color both at home and abroad. According to these lies, America is fundamentally good and innocent, its bad deeds dismissed as mistakes corrected on the way to "a more perfect union." 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. These weren't minor events in the grand history of the "redeemer nation," nor were they simply the outcomes of a time when such views were widely held. Each moment represented a profound revelation about who we were as a country--just as the moments of resistance against them said something about who we aspired to be. Excerpted from Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.