“A dying America clinging to life and a new America trying to be born,” is how historian Eddie Glaude describes the opposing cases made in last month’s impeachment trial.
His point hid in the weeds of Constitutional technicalities until House manager Stacey Plaskett, Democratic delegate from the Virgin Islands, noted that the faces in Team Trump’s 11-minute video–in which we heard the word “fight” 238 times with not a ten-count of context–were overwhelmingly Black, Hispanic, and Muslim. And most of those were women.
We need no history from Glaude or observation by Plaskett to tell us what the US Census has been pointing toward for years: That America’s white population will be a minority before the bell clangs in this oversized boxing ring we still call a nation. Yet another reason why the Trump Administration sought to undermine the Census.
Nevertheless, Glaude last year gave us a book that explains the two Americas he saw at odds during the impeachment, the insurrection, the election, the previous election, and all four years in between. For all that, the book could be titled “USA-Ja Vu All Over Again.”
Part history, part biography, and very much social critique, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own makes a convincing case that what Baldwin found in the “after times” and “ruins” of Reaganism is what we face today. Today it is more stark. In lieu of Reagan’s golly-gee nice guy veneer, anger and cruelty have been the point of the Republican Party since the rant of their current leader against “rapists and murderers” at the foot of an escalator in June, 2015.
No matter that Baldwin died in 1987. He lived long enough to see much of the Civil Rights movement undone, just as his ancestors saw Reconstruction undone. Bringing it up to date, Glaude points out that this is where African-Americans find themselves yet again.
In a year beginning with a “big lie” that fueled January 6 and triggered impeachment, it can be disorienting to see the same term used to describe America’s very foundation, let alone one election. Glaude reorients us with an interpretation of Baldwin that links our present to our founding.
The closer we come to Jefferson’s “created equal,” Lincoln’s “more perfect,” and FDR’s “New Deal,” the more we are fooled by Southern “heritage,” “morning in America,” and “great again.” For Blacks and other minorities who bear the brunt of an historically entrenched status-quo, it’s a door that keeps slamming shut. Rather than anything approaching “truth and reconciliation” such as happened in South Africa following Apartheid, America doubles down. Glaude describes what Baldwin saw in the mid-70s when “distrust of government and politicians spread like an aggressive cancer”:
Economically, the post-World War II boom had come to a startling halt as stagnation and deindustrialization shattered the American dream for many white Americans. Jobs at the local factory, which once provided a wage sufficient to take care of a family and send children to college, were disappearing at alarming rates. Once vibrant cities and towns in what would become America’s “rust belt” were transformed into monuments of national decline… A new service economy was taking hold as manufacturing moved abroad…
One of numerous passages which Glaude begins in the 1970s, or in the 1870s, it lands effortlessly in the 2020s:
Financialization started to shift the emphasis of the economy from stakeholders to shareholders, and immediate profits, a symptom of the narcissism of the times, mattered more than anything else–especially more than workers… And many white Americans who suffered, whether they lived in cities or in the suburbs, blamed the troubles of the nation on the tumult of the sixties revolution and the black people who were at the center of it all.
Baldwin, a voice of the Civil Rights Movement in the 50’s and 60’s with novels, plays, and essays, fell into despair following the assassination of Martin Luther King and exiled himself in Paris and Istanbul. Following two suicide attempts, he re-engaged in the never-ending effort to save America’s soul. With Begin Again, Glaude keeps us engaged with Baldwin.
In his own time, Baldwin was more than engaging. His book, The Fire Next Time (1963), galvanized the nation months before King shared his “Dream” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. King channeled the book’s warnings into a call for action–transforming the very title into what would eventually become Barack Obama’s mantra: “the fierce urgency of now.” Four years later, Baldwin’s Fire was required reading in progressive high schools where, as far as this sheltered 16-year-old was concerned, it could well have been titled, “Wake Up, White Boy!”
We liberals may be quick to nod in agreement when Baldwin, through Glaude, points out that the Confederate monuments so controversial today were built during the rise of Jim Crow, not to recall history, but to whitewash it and deny the truths of slavery. But we might squirm at their suggestion that monuments to the Civil Rights movement, including the Martin Luther King Holiday, often sanitize our history, as if to say that, yes, America made a mistake, but it’s all better now, and aren’t we honkies to be commended for taking such good care of it?
Worse yet is our tendency to say, look how well the system works each time it “self-corrects,” such as when Congress finished certifying the electoral votes in the wee hours following a day of attempted insurrection. Ostensibly, the controversy centered on the votes of five states, but how many white people noticed it was actually an attack on five cities? And how many of those are aware that there are now 150 bills pending in 33 states to restrict access to the polls, most all of them aimed at urban populations? All of which has unfolded in the wake of Glaude’s book.
To confront both past and present while anticipating our future, Glaude offers accounts of Baldwin’s give-and-take exchanges with King, as well as assessments that range from Baldwin’s of Malcom X to Toni Morrison’s of Baldwin. He uses the word “witness,” one of his chapter titles, as a way to reconcile the internal disagreements:
Like Baldwin, we have to bear witness to it all and tell the story of how we got here–and then, just maybe, we can muster the resolve and will to push this damn rock up the hill again.
Which brings us to the book’s title, a ray of hope taken from Baldwin’s last novel, Just Above My Head (1979), best remembered for one riveting passage:
Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.
To observe the 50th anniversary of King’s speech, I wrote a newspaper column connecting the Civil Rights preacher and leader to the Civil Rights poet and scribe. King was telling us to dream, I held, while Baldwin was telling us to wake up.*
Glaude is telling us to do both, which is why he feels as though he’s pushing a “damn rock” up a hill. For our own sake, we must push with him.
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*An account of my introduction to James Baldwin when I was just 16, you know what I mean, appears near the end of Keep Newburyport Weird under the headline, “A Time to Dream, a Time to Awake,” the column written for the 50th anniversary of King’s speech. Here’s a later column that more directly makes the connection from Baldwin’s Fire to King’s Dream:
Mouth of the River 
2 thoughts on “Before the Bell Clangs”