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

"This title is written by a man who has been reading James Baldwin—both as a professor and as a African American who wants to understand the world he’s in—for most of his adult life. He has taken not the fiction of Baldwin, but the nonfiction, starting with The Fire Next Time ( published in 1963) and going on through the seventies and right up until his death in 1987. It’s at once a tribute and a recuperation of Baldwin as a political thinker who lived through years of oppression and then many more of failure and powerlessness after the Reconstruction demanded by the Civil Rights Movement was resisted and defeated, with the help of murders, assassinations and mistrials. He finds one of the most depressing consequences of this defeat in the fact that, since the sixties, the African American population has been disproportionally funneled into the penal system. If you look at the racial composition of America’s prison population: well, the facts are glaring , and the situation has been likened to a continuation of slavery by other means. Glaude may not repeat that claim exactly, but he does find what Baldwin was living through after the defeat of the Civil Rights Movement directly comparable to what America was experiencing under Trump. The promised Reconstruction wasn’t going to happen on Reagan’s watch, and now the resistance to change was once again personified by the man in the White House. So what you have here is a lucidly argued book of witness, testimony and political critique. Glaude allows Baldwin to fail, to get things wrong, and to change his mind. The Baldwin he describes is struggling with defeat and the personal consequences of his own history—he drinks too much, he is angry, he is capable of saying intemperate things. He gets into rows that almost certainly help no one. It’s not easy to be the surviving spokesman of a movement that has been destroyed. “We’re looking for books that help us understand where we are now” Glaude seems to me exemplary in his engagement with Baldwin, here treated as a great American writer who should be counted alongside Emerson, Whitman and others, and whose arguments still have a close and illuminating bearing on the present. One of the things Glaude learns from Baldwin is that you sometimes have to be prepared to check your impatience. Baldwin talked about how you can sometimes only manage to buy time, and Glaude counts that insight against himself. In the approach to the election Trump won, he was advising people not to vote for Hilary Clinton, because her Democratic Party was so poor in terms of its engagement with the politics of race. Another point of understanding he raises from Baldwin’s example is that superficial identity politics really isn’t enough. The cry of ‘Me, me, me’ can actually be a problem, because there are no solutions without a wider vision capable of picking up more of the world than that. Glaude finds a contrary starting point in Baldwin, writing in 1963: “You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain.”"

"Beautifully written and very timely given the state of our country."