Begin Again by Eddie S. Glaude (Jr.)

James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race. In our own moment, when that confrontation feels more urgently needed than ever, what can we learn from his struggle?

“In the midst of an ugly Trump regime and a beautiful Baldwin revival, Eddie Glaude has plunged to the profound depths and sublime heights of Baldwin’s prophetic challenge to our present-day crisis.”—Cornel West

We live, according to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in a moment when the struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the election of Donald Trump, a president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. From Charlottesville to the policies of child separation at the border, his administration turned its back on the promise of Obama’s presidency and refused to embrace a vision of the country shorn of the insidious belief that white people matter more than others.

We have been here before: For James Baldwin, these after times came in the wake of the civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In these years, spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin transformed into 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.

In the story of Baldwin’s crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews—with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude’s endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. 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 new America.

“Revealing the lie at the heart of the American idea, however, occasions an opportunity to tell a different and a better story. It affords us a chance to excavate the past and to examine the ruins to find, or at least glimpse, what made us who we are. Baldwin insisted, until he died, that we reach for a different story. We should tell the truth about ourselves, he maintained, and that would release us into a new possibility.”

“And, in the end, we must resist Ibsen's ghosts, the ‘old ideas and beliefs' that cage us in categories and assumptions about who we are and what we are capable of and blind us to the beauty of others, never forgetting that categorization refers only to the different conditions under which we live; it doesn't capture the essence of who we are.”

“We have to muster the moral strength to reimagine America....The moral stamina to fight this fight requires that we cultivate our own elsewhere, because the one ‘who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle....' We have to find and rest in a community of love....In our time, with so much hatred and venom in our politics and our culture, we must actively cultivate communities of love that allow us to imagine different ways of being together.”

This is a gorgeous, somber book about the disconnect between how we talk about America and how America functions. Glaude weaves together the past and present seamlessly, incisively describing the consequences of exceptionalism and whitewashing history.

Begin Again feels startlingly fitting after the events of January 6th, and mere days after the Senate neglected to convict. Glaude talks about Baldwin's efforts to bear witness and tell the truth about what he witnessed, even and especially when it was painful. Likewise, if America is ever to live up to its ideals and its rhetoric, we must stop telling ourselves comforting lies and start telling ourselves harsh and whole truths about who we are and how we got here.

Glaude depicts Baldwin with so much care and depth. He explores how critiques of America can feel like personal attacks because the narratives we use to characterize ourselves are so wrapped up in believing ourselves to be examples to the rest of the world, to be superlatively hardworking and powerful and successful, of being proud and rightly so, of being right, of being white.
He also pushes back against reductive understandings of “backlash” as a pendulum inevitably swinging back and forth. He talks about the continuum connecting George Wallace to Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. He talks about the potential we have.

I have hundreds of Kindle highlights, but it really is one of those books I think you need to read in full to grasp its scope and purpose. In one sense I think everyone should read Begin Again, but I don't think it's the best starting point for folks new to nonfiction about racism. Baldwin's words are poetic and intentional, but (at least for me) it takes time for them to sink in, and even then I feel like I'm just beginning to understand his full meaning. His perspective is potent and searing.
Take your time with this one, but read it if you can.