In 1965, a reporter for Cumhuriyet, a Turkish daily newspaper, asked the novelist, playwright, and essayist James Baldwin—then living in Istanbul—about his dreams for the future of the United States. Baldwin, in his reply, chose instead to talk about the history of the United States. He explained that the future he imagined already existed in the past of the country, namely in the Reconstruction era. “Black and white people were side by side even in trade unions in the South,” Baldwin said, and continued: “We had Black members in Parliament. … Unfortunately, northern capitalists and southern landlords [aghas] destroyed this unity and order.”1 In interpreting his country’s present and envisioning its future, Baldwin turned to the past.
Elaborating on the entanglements between the past and present of US politics, Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own effectively interweaves Baldwin’s time with our own. Recounting his own recent visit to the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, for instance, Glaude notes that visitors to these sites carry with them the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. “When we are surprised to see the reemergence of Klansmen, neo-Nazis, and other white nationalists,” Glaude continues, “we reveal our willful ignorance about how our own choices make them possible.”
Glaude’s forceful use of “we” in this passage is explicitly connected to Baldwin’s much-discussed employment of the pronoun in ambiguous and changing ways over the course of his writings. At the beginning of his career, Baldwin adopted a first-person plural that included his white readers, but gradually embraced elements of the language of Black nationalism. Glaude attributes the shift to Baldwin’s realization that “he could not save white Americans,” who had to “save themselves.” Still, as Glaude points out, Baldwin did not accept “Black identity politics” uncritically and saw it only as “a means to an end.” In other words, he “never gave up on the possibility that all of us could be better.”
The lessons for the contemporary United States are clear for Glaude, who identifies the current “ugly period” in US politics as one in which the “we” of the country is changing for the worse, and is confronting the “ugliness of who we are.” The task becomes “not to save Trump voters,” nor to “convince them to give up their views that white people ought to matter more than others.” Instead, Glaude—channeling Baldwin—makes clear that “our task is to build a world where such a view has no place or quarter to breathe,” while also not “retreat[ing] into the illusions of an easy identity politics.”