Begin Again by Eddie S. Glaude Jr

Author:Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2020-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

This is Baldwin’s revolutionary act: to shift or invert the “white man’s burden.” The problem is not us. Instead Americans must understand as best we can, because our lives depend on it, the consequences of this deadly projection. Through this lens, the “black man’s burden” is the brutal behavior of white people in thrall to a lie. By way of the horrors of slavery, black people became the depository for many of the dangers and terrors white America refused to face. We are made the sexualized beasts, the violent criminals, the reckless and shiftless primitives ruled by passions with no regard for Christian restraint. We are made niggers continuously (an act that is transferable to others who aren’t white). All of this, Baldwin maintained, revealed more about white Americans than black people.

In Baldwin’s early formulation of the problem, the solution rested partially on the shoulders of black America. If black people were ever to break loose from the image projected onto us, we had to help white Americans put aside the false image of themselves. They had to see how they were, in fact, the niggers. In politics this would involve the redemptive power of suffering and love evidenced in Dr. King’s philosophy and the civil rights movement. In our daily lives it would entail the difficult task of love: for black people to break free from the assumptions about who they were and, in doing so, lovingly open up space for white people to see themselves otherwise. It was the only way, Baldwin believed in those early days, we could all be free.

Baldwin’s understanding of Black Power came, in part, with a rejection of this view. He rejected not so much the analysis that turned the so-called Negro problem on its head as he did the faith that we could convince those who were so deeply invested in being white that they should see themselves otherwise. He lamented that we cannot do what Thoreau called us to do: “awaken the sleeper.” The costs of America’s lies had become too much to bear. The dead kept piling up. By 1968, Baldwin admitted that he was not the man he used to be and, in a fit of rage, shouted that he could care less about what happened to the country. White people deserved whatever happened to them, he said. The problem is that we don’t deserve any of it.

In Baldwin’s Esquire interview in July 1968, one can see the rage dripping from the page. Barely a month removed from the murder of Dr. King, he spares no one in his criticism of the country. Baldwin offered an account of why black people were rioting in the streets and shifted the burden of responsibility for “cooling” down the tensions onto white America. “White people cooling it means a very simple thing,” he told the interviewer.

Black power frightens them. White power doesn’t frighten them. Stokely [Carmichael] is not, you know, bombing a country out of existence. Nor menacing your children.

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