He put it this way once, and I’m paraphrasing here: There’s a level of barbarity and psychological fracture when you’re selling your own child. In some ways, America had refused to face its fears, refused to look at its own self-conception.īaldwin said that Black people are the rejected sons and daughters of America. It refused to look itself squarely in the face. The easy answer is that he saw that America was constantly telling itself lies. ![]() I’ve never been asked that question before. What was Baldwin’s greatest insight into this country? What did he see more clearly than anyone else? Eddie Glaude Jr. There are no easy answers in any of this, but, in a strange way, the unanswerability of the questions is a reminder that we’re all figuring out how to navigate this moment together.Ī lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. It is also, I hope, a clarifying exchange on the moral dilemmas at the heart of this challenge. This is a long and honest discussion about the contradictions of the American project and why racial progress is both real and illusory at the same time. ![]() I reached out to Glaude to talk about Baldwin’s conception of America and how it can speak to this moment. It’s Glaude’s attempt to process what’s happening right now through Baldwin’s eyes. It’s called Being Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own and the book is part memoir, part biography, and part political essay. Obviously, no one is raising Baldwin from the dead, but we now have maybe the next best thing: a book about Baldwin from Princeton African American studies professor Eddie Glaude Jr. ![]() The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has invoked him as a model he was the subject of a widely praised 2017 documentary and his novel If Beale Street Could Talk was adapted into a feature film in 2018. He had a rare combination of raw literary talent and intellectual honesty that made him uniquely equipped to communicate an alien reality to someone like me, a white kid growing up in the South.Īs it happens, Baldwin, who would have turned 96 this Sunday, has been in the news these past few years. I don’t know what the Black experience is like in America, but I can say that no writer made it as visceral or vivid for me as Baldwin. If I could bring back from the dead any American writer and ask them to describe the country they see today, it would be James Baldwin, the great 20th-century essayist and novelist.
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