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

Glaude’s multi-pronged approach to America’s race problem is one of the most striking aspects of his book. He seamlessly interweaves history, literary criticism, and Baldwin’s biography to shed light on the contradiction at the heart of American democracy—that racial inequality persists despite the founding principles of liberty and equality spelled out in the Declaration of Independence.

Though rigorously researched, as evidenced by Glaude’s direct citations of Baldwin’s expansive oeuvre, the book remains accessibly written and unencumbered by a scholarly apparatus of footnotes. Glaude’s liberal use of personal anecdotes also contributes to the book’s readability. These anecdotes are not only engaging, but also make distant history and abstract concepts more tangible. The Introduction, for example, opens with a description of Glaude’s visit to Heidelberg, drawing a direct parallel between his trip to Germany and Baldwin’s time in France, in addition to forging a connection between the past and present.

Indeed, analyzing the present in light of past events is a running theme in Glaude’s book. This approach supports his two overarching claims. The first—that Baldwin was a prescient observer of American society—justifies Glaude’s use of Baldwin’s writings as a point of departure for analyzing contemporary racism in the US. The second—that the country’s past failures to confront racism bear directly on the current political climate—contextualizes Trumpism by presenting it as part of a historical continuum.

The idea of the value gap, a key part of the lie, is a throughline in Glaude’s book. He unpacks the term in Chapter 1, arguing that the belief that White people matter more than others characterizes all periods of US history, from its foundation to the present day. The belief helps explain the history of Black oppression, from slavery, to the segregationist laws of the Jim Crow era, to contemporary police killings of Black people. The value gap manifests in daily habits, beliefs, and practices. Moreover, Americans tell a host of lies to safeguard the belief, which is pervasive:

a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions […] These are the narrative assumptions that support the everyday order of American life, which means we breathe them like air. We count them as truths. We absorb them into our character (7).

As Glaude observes, Baldwin was keenly aware of the value gap and its impact on the past and present. His 1964 essay, “The White Problem,” describes the concept in relation to justifications for slavery:

The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one […]; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn’t, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble (9).

For Baldwin, the lie is what made America truly exceptional, not its ostensible commitment to liberty and equality.

The current manifestation of the lie is steeped in nostalgia. Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” taps into a longing for a bygone era. Glaude reads this nostalgia as a fearful and angry reaction to the election of the first Black president, and as evidence that a large portion of the electorate still holds the view that the US is a White nation. The popularity of Baldwin’s writings grew in the Obama years, encouraging Americans to rethink race and confront the lie. Yet for many White Americans, Black people taking control of their destiny and rejecting the identity others have bestowed is a revolutionary threat to the social order that contaminates American politics. These fears cannot be legislated away—they must be addressed directly.