As Glaude bears witness to the difficult truth of racism’s continued grip on the national soul, Begin Again is a searing exploration of the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America. Our task is to build a world where such a view has no place or quarter to breathe. In these brilliant and stirring pages, Glaude finds hope and guidance in Baldwin as he mixes biography-drawn partially from newly uncovered Baldwin interviews-with history, memoir, and poignant analysis of our current moment to reveal the painful cycle of Black resistance and white retrenchment. In Begin Again, Glaude changed my outlook with the following words: In our after times, our task, then, is not to save Trump voters it isn’t to convince them to give up their views that white people ought to matter more than others. Glaude Jr., when white Americans met the civil rights movement’s call for truth and justice with blind rage and the murders of movement leaders, so in our moment were the Obama presidency and the birth of Black Lives Matter answered with the ascendance of Trump and the violent resurgence of white nationalism. Just as in Baldwin’s “after times,” argues Eddie S. Begin Again is one of the great books on James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America’s ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race.
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