The Choice: Begin Again

I find myself returning to James Baldwin’s writings repeatedly these days. The madness of the country makes it necessary, I think. He remains, after all, one of the most insightful expositors of 20^th century America. But as I was processing this week and the politics of our moment, I kept thinking about what I wrote at the end of Begin Again—of how my reading of Baldwin, in the end, foregrounds the choice we have to make. And it is choice that repeatedly confronts us.

Here is the excerpt.

Americans must walk through the ruins, toward the terror and fear, and lay bare the trauma that we all carry with us. So much of American culture and politics today is bound up with the banal fact of racism in our daily lives and our willful refusal to acknowledge who benefits and suffers from it. Underneath it all is the lie that corrupts American life. It corrupts how we imagine governance; how we think about our private lives (constraining even who we can love); and how we imagine community and the broader public good. It even tells us which voters matter. The lie is the lifeblood of Trumpism. Anyone that doesn’t fit the view of America as a white nation or refuses to submit to it is cast as traitor or as someone who hates America.

As we confront this latest iteration of the lie, we cannot hide in the comfort of an easy identity politics or revel in the self-righteousness of a moralism that announces our inherent goodness and the obvious evil of our opponents. This is too simplistic a moral picture. We should all remember that we are at once miracles and disasters. Demonizing others isn’t the point. Failing to realize this springs the trap again. Baldwin wants us to imagine ourselves without the need for enemies. He wants us to be a new creation, a reflection of a New America.

This place, as I imagine it, would be a country where black children are not born in exile, where they don’t have to endure a thousand cuts and slashes that wound their spirits and require their parents to engage in daily triage to protect their souls. A new America, no longer tethered to the value gap, would make it possible for millions of black people like myself to finally feel at home without the concern that the nation’s contradictions might very well drive us mad. That unsettling feeling of being “in but not of” of this country would be no more. Everyone could rest for a while, because we would no longer need the lie to hide our sins. This is the America I imagine coming into being. This is the idea of America that Trumpism has by the throat. What we decide to do in our after times will shape another generation. The choice is that momentous. I pray that we don’t choose safety, again. (211-212)

Rereading this breaks my heart, because I know what choice the country made, and we are living in its terrifying consequences. But, even now, we can choose differently. The question, of course, is can we find the courage to do so. Or, better, can white America finally find the courage to deal with the idea of itself that threatens, as it always has, to destroy the Republic?

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