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

I first encountered James Baldwin in his short story “Sonny’s Blues,” published in 1957, when he was 33 years old. I read it in my freshman composition class in 1981, when I was 17. It remains a timeless piece about suffering and acceptance that, coming from a devout, gay Black man in mid-20th-century America, is all the more moving.

I roamed the pages of his novels for so long that it took some time for me to discover his nonfiction. Here was the wellspring of force fueling his narrative skill as one of the most influential and controversial voices of the Civil Rights Movement.

It is a career well recounted by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. More than a biography, Glaude uses Baldwin’s life and writings to examine the racial injustices that continue to plague us.

“Begin Again” argues that America has yet to confront many of the fundamental problems Baldwin identified more than 50 years ago, beginning with his insistence that we must reject comforting myths about our past. He wrote that the nation’s unwillingness to acknowledge the enduring effects of slavery, segregation, and systemic racism prevented progress.

Glaude goes further, writing that “White America chose itself over a truly just and multiracial society.”

The gains of the Civil Rights era were undermined because the nation refused to embrace equality, Glaude says. He argues that Baldwin’s writing on racial fear, resentment, and the abuse of power lives on today in police violence, voter suppression, political polarization, and the resurgence of white nationalism. Americans must examine the social attitudes and structures that made such politics possible if we are to undo them, instead of pointing fingers at political opponents.

“In the end, Americans will have to decide whether or not this country will remain racist,” Glaude writes. “We need to look inward. Trump is us. Or better, Trump is you.”

He explains it this way: “Much is made today of the necessity to reach out to the disaffected Trump voter … working-class white people who feel left out of an increasingly diverse America. These are the voters left behind by a Democratic Party catering to so-called identity politics — as if talking about a living wage and healthcare as a right, or affordable education, or equal pay for women, or equal rights for the LGBTQ community, or a fair criminal justice system, somehow excludes working-class white people.”

Baldwin did not underestimate the danger of such divisions — three of his friends were assassinated in the 1960s (the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, Malcolm X). But he believed that we could transform ourselves and our society through truth and compassion, themes he returned to repeatedly in his fiction.

“Revealing the lie at the heart of the American idea, however, occasions an opportunity to tell a different and a better story,” Glaude writes, arguing that confronting the myths of American innocence and the current whitewashing of history is not an act of despair but a necessary step toward creating a more honest and democratic nation.

One of these is the notion of a post-racial America that dogged Baldwin, who was criticized for speaking out despite his success, similar to what followed the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Among other things, it is a good example of the fallacy of division or hasty generalization: the assumption that what is true for one (a Black man becoming president) must then be true for the whole (the treatment of all nonwhites in America).

“Our task is not to retreat into the illusion of an easy identity politics either,” Glaude writes. “Talk of identity politics often runs aground because we find comfort and safety in the appeal to unique experiences that are essentially ‘our own’ and bind us to others like us. … What Baldwin called ‘mystical Black bullshit,’ I sometimes saw and heard, in various forms, in the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Baldwin’s hope for the future emerged from the courage to confront such painful realities while refusing to surrender to despair, Glaude writes.

“We should tell the truth about ourselves, (Baldwin) maintained, and that would release us into a new possibility.”

He therefore rejects the notion that criticizing America is unpatriotic. Glaude argues that love for one’s country requires confronting its failures honestly, as it does our own. Baldwin did so “out of a passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life.”

Glaude recalls Baldwin’s struggles doing the same for himself: his spiritual and sexual doubts, his many disappointments, and his self-exile to Europe. Finally, his experience with discrimination and alienation deepened his understanding of human suffering while strengthening his commitment to justice, forging a man whose vulnerabilities strengthened rather than diminished his authority as a public intellectual, and democracy requires continual renewal, honest self-examination, and the courage to begin again.

“Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost; it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.” as an artist.

Rather than providing easy answers, the book asks difficult questions. Its achievement lies in showing that Baldwin’s voice remains indispensable. Through his example, Glaude reminds readers that the title “Begin Again” is a challenge not so distant from “Sonny’s Blues.” They are both portraits of suffering and the grace that acceptance can deliver.

Baldwin died in 1987. He was 63 years old.