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"It is exhausting," says
Glaude, "to find oneself... navigating a world rife with
deadly assumptions about you and those who look like you...
for no other reason" than the color of your skin or your
sexuality.
Author James Baldwin
keenly felt both and in the midst of his career, he
demanded, through his writing, that America come to terms
with "this so-called democracy." Baldwin was tired of a "set
of practices" Glaude calls "the lie," or "more properly
several sets of lies" meant to keep racism alive in as many
American systems as possible.
Baldwin saw "the lie" and
it enraged him: once, early in the Civil Rights Movement, he
made a group of Black college students promise that they
would never take to heart "the lies" they heard about
themselves. It's been said that he saw "the lie" and wanted
to give "warning" to White readers of the battle to come,
but in truth, Glaude says, Baldwin wasn't sure "whether
white America was worthy of warning at all."
These are the things
Baldwin spoke out against, says Glaude, and that we still
grapple with – especially in the political climate in which
we live. He believes "the divisions in the country feel old
and worn," although we do have the tools to alter current
racial and political climates. Baldwin, for instance
"insisted that we reach for a better self..."
"With that in mind," says
Glaude, "we have to gather ourselves to fight and to begin
again."
In his introduction,
author Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. says that he was in Heidelberg
when he started this book, which gave him a unique
perspective of the "current state of our politics." He says
that he didn't write it as biography or literary criticism
or history, although it ended up being "some combination of
all three." This, plus a good measure of personal memoir
thrown in, adds a different twist and makes Begin Again
quite deep.
But not too deep:
there's enough room here for readers to be moved by the
parallels that Glaude draws between then and now, and how
Baldwin perceived American society before his death. Glaude
also presents Baldwin's constant fury and sadness over "the
after times" (post-Civil Rights Movement) with an urgency
that can still galvanize, though Baldwin has been gone for
more than three decades.
So what would Baldwin have
thought about our current administration? Glaude doesn't
hypothesize here, so we're left mostly to draw our own
conclusions, to imagine, think, and to use Baldwin's words
as a sort of guide out.
And for that, Begin
Again is a book you'll want to see.
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