The Critic's Choice

The Critic's Choice Book Review Begin Again. James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own By Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. Crown Publishers New York 2020 Christine Nava, MS Former President, Escondido Chamber of Citizens Civic Leader for Social Justice & Human Rights San Diego, CA Tel: (760) 715-9053 Email: [email protected] Author Note The release of Begin Again in June 2020 was met with acclamation from critics throughout the country, including scholars, historians, political leaders, and giants in the Black struggle. This reviewer is not among this distinguished group of critics. I am a lay person--an ordinary woman on the street--whose life of activism began as a member of a religious community when, in 1965, I joined a group of Catholic sisters from St. Louis and travelled to Selma to protest at the Selma Voting Rights March. The event had a profound effect on my life that remains to this day. In my “after life” since I left religious community, I raised a family, taught, joined civic organizations, lobbied members of congress and local elected officials on social justice issues, never forgetting the importance of bearing witness--the lessons of Selma. Introduction My work on this book began with James Baldwin’s words, “You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect other people’s pain, and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.” — Begin Again, p. 219 Eddie Glaude Given the structure of the book where Glaude explores the life and works of James Baldwin, and in which Glaude himself becomes an integral figure in the narrative, it seems to this reviewer appropriate to establish who Glaude is, his academic credentials, and his own works. 120 Volume VII, No. 1 Journal of Health and Human Experience The Critic's Choice Eddie Glaude is an American academic, an expert on religion and race, and a prolific writer in both fields, a lecturer, and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University where he also chairs the Department of African American Studies. His well-known books on racism include: Democracy in Black, How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul; and In A Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America. His well-recognized works in the fields of religion and philosophy include: An Uncommon Faith: A Pragmatic Approach to the Study of African American Religion, African American Religion: A Very Short Introduction, and Exodus! Religion, and Race in Early Nineteenth Century Black America. Glaude’s expertise has earned him a voice in social media and in academic journals. He is a familiar face on MSNBC where he is a frequent contributor on Morning Joe and Deadline: White House with Nicole Wallace. He is also a frequent guest on Meet the Press on Sundays. Summary In writing this book, I (Eddie Glaude) wanted to understand more fully how Baldwin navigated his disappointments, how he lived his refusal to chase windmills any longer, and how he maintained his faith that all of us, even those who saw themselves as white, could still be better. I needed to understand how he harnessed his rage and lived his faith. — Begin Again, pp. xxiii-xxiv Eddie Glaude And so began Glaude’s long and arduous work to understand James Baldwin’s tumultuous journey. The book, scholarly and extensively resourced, draws from biographical materials that include other important figures of the Civil Rights movement: Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael, and many others who were important to Glaude in establishing the context and understanding of the narrative. Glaude says, “I also read everything I could get my hands on about trauma... to help me understand how to read trauma in Baldwin’s writing.” He later notes that, “I used newspaper accounts and interviews throughout the book to add color to the historical moment.” (p. 224). Context was all important to him. He left no stone unturned in his search for authenticity in helping to understand how Baldwin’s tortured life and works speak to our time. Memory provides lessons and is still relevant and he reminds the reader that not everything is lost; it can only be abdicated. The book, passionate and beautiful in its writing, is a study of Baldwin’s life during the early 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement era when Baldwin was at the height of his popularity as a speaker, writer, and literary critic. It was a traumatic period for Baldwin: the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the death of four little girls in the bombing of the Birmingham Sunday School, the gruesome killings of civil rights workers, the murder of Malcom X, etc. These and other tragedies left a painful and traumatic memory that followed Baldwin the rest of his life. It dominated his writing and thinking as a sociopolitical critic. Glaude’s understanding of Baldwin’s experience of pain, suffering, and sense of betrayal during the era of the Civil Rights Movement was heightened during a visit to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The Museum, which represented a “traumatic history” of Black America, deeply affected his understanding of the pain and rage that dominated Baldwin’s life. Journal of Health and Human Experience Volume VII, No. 1 121 The Critic's Choice Of that experience he writes, “Our bodies carry trauma forward. The history of racial trauma lives and moves us in ways we often don’t realize. It grounds our fears, and whether we know or not, it affects our dream and how we look at the world.” (p.192). Baldwin believed that the core of the race problem in America is the belief and perpetuation of what he called the “lie.” He held that comprehending the “lie” is important to a full understanding of the “White problem,” and consequently that of the Black problem. According to Baldwin, the “lie” is comprised of two parts. One debases Black people; the other, and integral to the lie, is the myth about America as the “shining beacon of light,” a moral force in the world where all are created equal. Baldwin agonized about the contradictions inherent in that interpretation of history that sought to absolve America from the sins of the past. He saw this as White America’s way to avoid the truth about America’s past history of unjust treatment of Blacks. He held that the “lie” is part of the American psyche, one that perpetuates the myth of America’s greatness and national innocence. “The face of the ugliness and evil we have done” is conveniently erased from those who want to forget. Here, the importance of the writer as a moral leader comes into focus for both Glaude and Baldwin. Glaude elaborates on what that means, “[it] means fighting an astute and guerrilla warfare with the American complacency…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 so doing so.” (p. 6). Both view the moral imperative is to bear witness and speak Truth. The “lie” has to be confronted. Not doing so allows the lie to overshadow democracy. A tour of Baldwin’s writings, books, interviews, and essays brings to light how Baldwin’s views evolved during time. There were changes, but constants evident throughout all his works were a search for authenticity and a desire to find new ways of finding a better world. Baldwin never gave up on hope for a better world. Baldwin’s book No Name, which in Glaude’s view, is perhaps his best and most important work of social criticism, reveals a shift in Baldwin’s thinking. He has “given up on a space apart from politics, to write as an artist.” (p. 121). He is now writing as an artist whose responsibility is to bear witness. In No Name, Baldwin lived up to his role as a moral leader. “He sought to bear witness to what happened, to offer language to describe the betrayal, and, in doing so, offer us a chance to outlive it”. Borrowing from his idol Ralph Waldo Emerson, he would urge “Let me begin anew!” (p. 120). Glaude believes that Baldwin speaks to our time. The election of the one whom he refers to as “the carnival barker” presents new challenges for America, challenges far more serious than the nation has faced in prior times. The current era is now in what Baldwin would call the “after times.” The damage to human rights, civil rights, and abhorrent immigration policies have demoralized the nation and impacted America’s leadership in the world. Current hatreds and “isms” have emboldened the “lie.” It has never been clearer that institutional racism is a fact of life in America. It corrupts every aspect of our American life. As Glaude comments in his conclusion: “It corrupts how we imagine governance; how we think about our private lives (constraining even whom we can love), and how we imagine community and the broader public good. Indeed, this even tells us which voters matter.” (p. 211). We are now living in the shadow of disaster. The recent attempted siege of the Capitol is as serious of an attack on our democracy as we have ever experienced. It is war, a civil war between hater-mobs and democracy.

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