Eddie Glaude revisits James Baldwin’s America

It is hard to imagine a harsher assault on American self-satisfaction than the one in Begin Again. The true American exceptionalism, according to Eddie Glaude, is a lie that hollows out the nation’s soul and leaves its democracy flawed and threatened. That lie concerns race, and Glaude, who teaches at Princeton and is a familiar television commentator, addresses the lie with blistering candor. His book is nothing less than a call to national repentance.

Most Americans—and I do not exempt myself—will be to one degree or another ill at ease with this. It is hard to repent; denial is easier. But if Karl Barth is right, repentance is the primary ethical act. Before all else in the moral life, he said in his commentary on Romans, comes the toppling of self-satisfaction wrought by divine grace: “Grace is the axe laid at the root of the good conscience.” So repentance, even if unpleasant, is essential to the Christian way of being. Authentic Christian life is ready always for the renewing of heart and mind, ready always to consider the sort of challenge Glaude puts before us.

In calling for repentance, or what amounts to it, Begin Again is substantially Christian. This is so in other ways as well. James Baldwin, perhaps the best-known Black writer from the period of the civil rights movement, was himself a child of the church. If his life, as Glaude notes, was a “journey with and through religion,” the language of scripture, and arguably its hope, burnished his prose and outlook to the end. His work, Baldwin said, was to “bear witness.” Like an Old Testament prophet, he made his own “psychic anguish” a lens for revolutionary social vision. He defined salvation as “accepting and reciprocating the love of God.” Even when he was discouraged by setbacks to the civil rights movement, he dreamed of a “New Jerusalem.” He took one book title from Job and another from Hebrews. He quoted, crucially, from the book of Revelation.