Begin Again

Begin Again Plot Summary

Introduction

America stands at a critical crossroads today, facing what James Baldwin would call a moral reckoning. This moral challenge requires confronting the fundamental contradiction at the heart of American democracy: a society founded on principles of freedom and equality that has consistently devalued the lives of Black people. Baldwin's unflinching examination of this contradiction offers essential insights for navigating our current political moment, as he understood that addressing racism in America was not merely about changing laws or individual attitudes, but about confronting a deeply embedded belief that white people matter more than others—what Eddie Glaude Jr. calls "the value gap." Baldwin's work provides a framework for understanding America's cyclical pattern of racial progress and betrayal. He witnessed how moments of potential transformation—from the Civil Rights Movement to the Black Power era—were followed by periods of backlash and retrenchment. His later writings, often dismissed by critics as too angry or pessimistic, actually contain his most profound insights about how America might truly begin again. By examining Baldwin's evolution as a witness to America's racial trauma, particularly after the assassinations of civil rights leaders and the rise of conservatism under Reagan, we gain valuable tools for understanding how to confront similar patterns today. His call to "do our first works over" challenges us to reexamine our foundational myths and imagine a new American identity.

Chapter 1: The Lie: America's Denial of Its Racist Foundation

At the heart of Baldwin's vision of America lies what he identified as "the lie"—a complex architecture of false assumptions that maintains what Glaude terms the "value gap." The lie consists of several interconnected falsehoods: narratives that debase Black people as inherently inferior, stories about American history that dismiss racism as minor mistakes in an otherwise triumphant march toward freedom, and tales that secure white innocence in the face of ongoing injustice. This powerful mechanism has allowed America to avoid confronting the truth about its treatment of Black people throughout history. Baldwin placed this lie at the foundation of American society. In his 1964 essay "The White Problem," he wrote that the original settlers had a fatal flaw—they could recognize the humanity of enslaved Africans but chose to deny it to justify their actions. "That lie," Baldwin asserted, "is the basis of our present trouble." The lie distorts American history, transforming resistance to slavery or Jim Crow into evidence of American greatness and ongoing perfection rather than confronting the systematic cruelty that defined these institutions. The persistence of the lie explains why racial progress is so often followed by backlash. When the civil rights movement threatened the lie, white America responded with calls for "law and order." When Black Lives Matter protesters demanded justice, they faced accusations of being un-American. The lie requires constant maintenance because it protects something precious—American identity itself, particularly for white Americans. To give up the lie would mean confronting the possibility that America might not be who we claim to be. Baldwin understood that telling the truth about America's racist foundation wasn't merely about assigning blame but about liberation. Only by confronting the lie could Americans free themselves from its poisonous effects. As he wrote in "The White Problem," "The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw... That lie is the basis of our present trouble." He challenged Americans to look honestly at what they had done and were continuing to do in the name of their history, arguing that this difficult reckoning was the only path toward creating a more just society. Baldwin's analysis helps us understand our current political moment as another iteration of this cycle—another attempt by the lie to reassert itself. When we characterize political figures like Trump as aberrations rather than manifestations of enduring American patterns, we participate in the lie. The path forward requires a different story about who we are—one that acknowledges our contradictions without turning away from them, that challenges our myths without abandoning hope for transformation.

Chapter 2: Witness: Baldwin's Role as Truth-teller in American Society

Baldwin's concept of bearing witness emerged from his understanding that America needed someone to "tell the truth till we can no longer bear it." As a witness, he did not merely observe injustice but translated the daily experiences of Black Americans into art that made visible what many refused to see. When describing his responsibility to young Black students at Howard University in 1963, Baldwin declared: "It is the responsibility of the Negro writer to excavate the real history of this country...to tell us what really happened to get us where we are now." This role of witness was deeply personal for Baldwin. His own traumatic experiences—from his difficult relationship with his stepfather to his encounters with racism in America—shaped his artistic vision and allowed him to see what others missed. After leaving America for Paris in 1948, Baldwin gained the critical distance to understand himself and his country more clearly. "I didn't have to walk around with one half of my brain trying to please Mr. Charlie and the other half trying to kill him," he explained. This distance enabled him to become a poet in the tradition Ralph Waldo Emerson imagined—one who would "draw us with love and terror" and speak the unique genius of America while stripping away its comfortable illusions. Baldwin's witnessing often took the form of reframing familiar narratives. He inverted the traditional formulation of "the Negro problem," arguing that the problem wasn't Black people but white America's refusal to confront its own creation of the category "nigger." In his famous declaration, "I am not the victim here...You're the nigger, baby, it isn't me," Baldwin shifted the burden of racial reconciliation. The problem resided not in Black Americans' inability to assimilate but in white Americans' addiction to a false sense of superiority. Trauma shaped how Baldwin witnessed America. His memory of events like Dorothy Counts' harassment while attempting to integrate a Charlotte high school or the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't linear or detached. In No Name in the Street, Baldwin warned readers that "much, much, much has been blotted out, coming back only lately in bewildering and untrustworthy flashes." This fragmentation reflected how trauma affects memory, collapsing time so that past and present coexist in painful simultaneity. Baldwin's witnessing acknowledged this trauma without letting it overwhelm the truth. For contemporary Americans, Baldwin offers a model of witnessing that refuses the comfort of innocence. In an era when smartphone cameras capture daily indignities and violence against Black Americans, we face a similar challenge of making suffering real and forcing the world to pay attention. Yet as Baldwin understood, merely documenting injustice doesn't guarantee change. The footage can become another spectacle, consumed and forgotten. True witnessing requires connecting these moments to the deeper patterns of American life—to the lie that Baldwin spent his life exposing. Only by telling a different story about who we are can we create the possibility of becoming otherwise.

Chapter 3: The Dangerous Road: Confronting America's Historical Failures

America has faced critical moments throughout its history when the country might have emerged differently, when the idea of white supremacy could have been set aside. Yet each time—from the Revolutionary period to Reconstruction to the black freedom movement of the mid-twentieth century—the nation chose to remain exactly what it was: a racist society claiming to be democratic. These moments of national betrayal reveal how democracy consistently yields to a more fundamental commitment to white supremacy. Baldwin recognized this pattern early. In a 1961 article for Harper's Magazine entitled "The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King," he identified the challenges King would face as a leader during revolutionary times. Traditional black leaders had come to power not because they fought "to make the Negro a first class citizen but to keep him content as a second class one." Now a new generation was rejecting any compromise with white supremacy. Baldwin saw that King was caught in the crossfire between these younger militants and a white society unwilling to give up its privileges. By 1968, Baldwin and King shared a similar assessment of America's resistance to change. At a fundraiser in Anaheim, both men resisted any effort to draft the civil rights movement into a triumphalist American narrative. King expressed his disappointment "when I have to recognize that there aren't enough white persons in our country who are willing to cherish democratic principles over privilege." Three weeks later, King was assassinated, confirming Baldwin's fear that America would choose its racial hierarchy over its democratic principles. The contemporary debate over Confederate monuments illustrates the ongoing struggle over American history that Baldwin identified. When white nationalists violently defended Confederate statues in Charlottesville in 2017, they were fighting to preserve a particular story about America—one that glorifies white supremacy while denying its brutality. This battle over public symbols reflects Baldwin's insight that "history, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read...the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us." Our relationship to the past shapes who we believe ourselves to be and what futures we can imagine. Baldwin understood that honest confrontation with history was necessary for liberation. "People who imagine that history flatters them," he wrote, "are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world." This insight applies to institutions like Princeton University, which struggled to reconcile its celebration of Woodrow Wilson with his racist legacy, and to individuals who must confront how national myths shape personal identity. For white Americans especially, challenging historical narratives that secure innocence means risking the foundation of self-understanding. The path toward a different America requires telling a different story about our past—one that acknowledges the horrors and betrayals without turning away from them. This isn't merely about assigning blame but about creating the conditions for genuine transformation. As Baldwin told Esquire in 1968, "All that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history...which is not your past, but your present." Until Americans confront how the lie has shaped both their society and their souls, they will remain trapped in cycles of progress and betrayal, unable to create the multiracial democracy they claim to desire.

Chapter 4: The Reckoning: Black Power and White America's Responsibility

The rise of Black Power in the late 1960s represented a radical response to America's betrayal of the civil rights movement. When the Black Panthers entered the California state capitol bearing arms in May 1967, they embodied a shift in strategy and philosophy. No longer willing to appeal to the moral conscience of white America, organizations like the Panthers concluded that power, not morality, was at the heart of America's racial problem. As cities burned in the "long, hot summer" of 1967, it became clear that Dr. King's nonviolent philosophy was being challenged by a more militant approach. Baldwin understood this turn toward militancy as a logical response to white America's refusal to change. In his essay defending Stokely Carmichael, who faced accusations of treason after criticizing American foreign policy, Baldwin wrote: "If those suffering, gallant, betrayed boys and girls who were then using their bodies in an attempt to save a heedless nation have since concluded that the nation is not worth saving, no American alive has the right to be surprised." While some critics saw Baldwin's sympathy for Black Power as evidence of his artistic decline, it actually reflected his evolving understanding of America's racial crisis. The complexity of Baldwin's view distinguished him from both traditional civil rights leaders and Black Power advocates. He recognized the necessity of Black Power while rejecting some of its premises. Though he defended the movement's rage, he warned against embracing a fixed idea of blackness that could become another trap. "I would like us to do something unprecedented," Baldwin wrote in 1967, "to create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy." For Baldwin, Black identity politics were valuable only as a means to an end—the creation of a society where racial categories no longer determined human worth. Baldwin's shifting stance reflected a change in his moral analysis. In his early work, he suggested that Black Americans had a responsibility to help white Americans see themselves differently. By 1968, he had largely abandoned this view. "We have tried to speak to them endlessly, and, if anything, we have been encouraged to be more explicit," he told a New York audience. "But what white people mean by 'explicit' is a certain kind of servile acquiescence in their fantasies." Baldwin concluded that Black people should focus on securing their own freedom rather than trying to save white Americans from their racism. This shift in Baldwin's thinking offers important lessons for our current moment. Today's racial justice advocates often face pressure to "reach out" to disaffected white voters who feel threatened by demographic change. Baldwin would question whether this strategy merely reinforces the value gap by treating white comfort as more important than Black liberation. Instead, he might suggest building a world where being white no longer confers special privileges—not to punish white Americans but to create conditions where all people can live with dignity. Baldwin never abandoned his faith in love as a revolutionary force, even at his most disillusioned. When asked how he would counsel someone ready "to tear up the town," Baldwin replied: "If you're ready to blow the cat's head off—because it could come to that—try not to hate him; for the sake of your soul's salvation and for no other reason." This commitment to love without sentimentality remains Baldwin's most challenging and necessary insight. It reminds us that the work of justice isn't merely about changing policies but about creating new ways of being human together.

Chapter 5: Elsewhere: Finding Critical Distance to Reimagine America

In 1972, after a period of profound depression following Martin Luther King's assassination, Baldwin announced in The New York Times: "I'm beginning again." This renewal emerged from his recently published book No Name in the Street, which reckoned with the collapse of the civil rights movement and the trauma it inflicted on Baldwin and Black America. Yet writing this "Mighty Mother Fucker," as he called it, had nearly destroyed him. He struggled with severe illness, attempted suicide in 1969, and found it almost impossible to write amid his grief. Baldwin's recovery depended on finding what can be called an "elsewhere"—a physical or metaphorical space that afforded him critical distance from the demands of American society. For much of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Baldwin found this elsewhere in Istanbul, Turkey, where he lived intermittently for almost a decade. Unlike Paris, where his fame had preceded him, Istanbul initially offered Baldwin anonymity and silence. The city became a refuge where he could gather himself and reimagine his work as a witness in the after times of the civil rights movement. Istanbul was not an escape from America but a vantage point from which to see it more clearly. As Baldwin explained in Sedat Pakay's 1970 film From Another Place, "Being out, even temporarily, and with a perfect awareness that one is not really very far out of the United States...one sees it better from a distance...from another place, from another country." This critical distance allowed Baldwin to hear his own language more precisely and to assess his commitments more honestly. Despite never learning Turkish, Baldwin found in the silence of being a foreigner the space to process his trauma and renew his creative vision. Baldwin distinguished this elsewhere from exile. Though he sometimes used the language of exile, he understood that Black Americans were already "natally exiled"—born into a country that did not fully accept them as citizens. "Being an American is a very special condition," he explained in a 1971 interview, "really by definition. Born already in a kind of exile." For Baldwin, seeking an elsewhere did not mean abandoning America but finding the distance necessary to reimagine it. Even in his darkest moments, he continued to criticize America "out of a passionate love, hoping to make the kingdom new, to make it honorable and worthy of life." This concept of elsewhere offers crucial insights for our current political moment. The constant barrage of cruelty and injustice under Trumpism can overwhelm our capacity to think clearly and act effectively. Baldwin's example suggests we must cultivate spaces—physical, intellectual, and emotional—that allow us to breathe and imagine alternatives. These spaces might include communities of love where genuine mutuality flourishes, critical examination of our own complicity with unjust systems, and solidarity with those fighting from the margins of society. Baldwin's time in Istanbul teaches us that finding an elsewhere is not an escape from responsibility but a precondition for sustained resistance. The person "who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle," he wrote in No Name in the Street. In our after times, when white supremacy has reasserted itself with renewed vigor, we need Baldwin's insistence that healing and resistance are interconnected. By cultivating our own elsewhere, we can find the strength to continue fighting for a new America while refusing to be defined by the terms of the struggle.

Chapter 6: Ruins: Reagan's America and the Betrayal of Civil Rights

By the late 1970s, America had undergone profound changes since Baldwin's first journey south in 1957. Legal segregation had ended, Black mayors governed major cities, and Jimmy Carter, a Southern Democrat, occupied the White House. Yet beneath these surface transformations, Baldwin recognized a disturbing continuity: "The horror is that America...changes all the time, without ever changing at all." The country had betrayed the promise of the civil rights movement, replacing legal segregation with new systems of control and exclusion. In 1979, Baldwin collaborated with filmmaker Dick Fontaine on I Heard It Through the Grapevine, which documented his return to the South. The film exposed the gap between civil rights memorials and the ongoing reality of Black suffering. Visiting Atlanta, Baldwin observed how monuments to Martin Luther King Jr. served to neutralize his radical message: "The monument in Atlanta is absolutely as irrelevant as the Lincoln memorial. It is one of the ways the Western world has learned or thinks it has learned to outwit history, to outwit time—to make a life and a death irrelevant." These memorials perfumed the carnage while obscuring how little had fundamentally changed. The film's most powerful scene featured Baldwin's conversation with Dave Dennis, a former CORE activist who had witnessed the discovery of the bodies of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi. Dennis recounted how searches for the three activists repeatedly uncovered other Black bodies—victims whose deaths had never been investigated or mourned publicly. He described how James Chaney's younger brother Ben, traumatized by his brother's murder and the country's failure to deliver justice, eventually ended up in prison himself. "What they did," Dennis concluded, "was to create permanent enemies of this country." This betrayal took institutional form in Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign. Reagan launched his campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, just miles from where Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had been murdered, declaring his commitment to "states' rights"—a coded appeal to white resentment. His subsequent presidency would eviscerate civil rights enforcement, attack affirmative action, and promote a "color-blind" ideology that denied the persistence of racism while implementing policies that disproportionately harmed Black communities. For Baldwin, Reagan's election represented a definitive closing of the window of opportunity opened by the civil rights movement. In "Notes on the House of Bondage," he wrote: "I lived in California when Ronald Reagan was governor and that was a very ugly time—the time of the Black Panther harassment, the beginning (and the end) of the Soledad Brothers, the persecution and trial of Angela Davis. I saw all that, and much more, but what I found unspeakable about the man was his contempt, his brutal contempt, for the poor." Reagan embodied white America's refusal to confront its history of racial injustice. The parallel between Reagan and Trump is unmistakable. Both exploited white racial resentment while maintaining plausible deniability through coded language. Both represented a backlash against movements for racial justice—Reagan against the civil rights movement, Trump against Black Lives Matter and the Obama presidency. Both promised to "make America great again" by restoring a mythical past when white supremacy went unchallenged. Understanding this continuity requires rejecting the tendency to treat Trump as an aberration rather than a manifestation of enduring patterns in American life. As Glaude writes: "To not see yourself in Trump is to continue to lie."

Chapter 7: Begin Again: The Path Toward a New American Identity

In 2018, the Equal Justice Initiative opened the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. These institutions confront America's history of racial violence without offering the comforting narrative of progress that characterizes most civil rights memorials. Instead, they make visitors face the brutal reality of lynching and its connection to contemporary forms of racial control. As Bryan Stevenson, EJI's founder, explains: "I don't think we're going to get healthy, I don't think we can be free...until we address this problem. But to get there we're going to have to be willing to tell the truth." This truth-telling embodies what Baldwin called "doing your first works over." Throughout his later writing, Baldwin urged Americans to "reexamine everything. Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it." This wasn't merely about cataloging past injustices but about creating the conditions for a radically different future—one where the belief that white people matter more than others no longer structures American society. Baldwin's call to begin again emerged from his experience of the after times—the period following the collapse of the civil rights movement and the reassertion of white supremacy. In Just Above My Head, his last novel, Baldwin wrote: "Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again." This refusal to abdicate responsibility, even amid profound disillusionment, distinguishes Baldwin's later work. He never relinquished hope for what he called the New Jerusalem, a society freed from the prison of racial categories. Beginning again requires a third American founding, one that builds on previous attempts to create a multiracial democracy. The first such attempt came during Reconstruction, when Congress passed constitutional amendments establishing equal citizenship regardless of race. The second came during the civil rights movement, which sought to fulfill the promise of those amendments. Both moments were betrayed by white America's refusal to surrender its privileged position. Now we face another moral reckoning, another opportunity to choose a different path. This third founding demands new stories, symbols, and policies. We must narrate our national beginnings in light of our contradictions and aspirations, placing at the center those who have fought to make real the promise of democracy. We must transform our symbolic landscape by removing monuments to white supremacy and creating physical environments that reflect the country's diversity. Most fundamentally, we must implement policies that repair the damage caused by generations of racial injustice, beginning with a serious national conversation about reparations. These changes must emerge from a transformed politics. The protests that erupted after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others revealed the potential for a multiracial movement demanding fundamental change. Yet history teaches us that such moments of possibility often give way to backlash and retrenchment. Baldwin's example suggests that sustaining the struggle requires both unflinching honesty about the depth of America's racial sickness and a faith in the possibility of healing. As he said in his final interview: "I am an optimist because I'm alive."

Summary

Baldwin's vision for America demands a profound moral reckoning with what he identified as "the lie"—the complex architecture of false assumptions that maintains the belief that white people matter more than others. Through his evolution as a witness to America's racial trauma, particularly after the collapse of the civil rights movement, Baldwin developed a framework for understanding how the country repeatedly betrays its democratic promise while clinging to myths of innocence and progress. His call to "begin again" challenges us to reexamine our foundational values and create a new American identity freed from the prison of racial categories. The ultimate power of Baldwin's witness lies in his refusal to separate America's racial problems from deeper questions about what it means to be human. Even in his most disillusioned moments, Baldwin maintained that confronting our history honestly could release us into new possibilities for living together. His understanding of love as a revolutionary force—not sentimental affection but the difficult work of seeing others in their full humanity—offers a path beyond the identity politics that often trap us in static categories. Baldwin's legacy isn't merely a critique of American racism but a vision of what democracy might become if we were brave enough to face our trauma and imagine ourselves anew. As we navigate our own after times, his example reminds us that true freedom requires not just political change but spiritual transformation.

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Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

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