Long before Ta-Nehisi Coates penned his sorrowful yet powerfully angry letter to his son, "Between the World and Me," James Baldwin wrote a similar missive to his nephew in the introduction to "The Fire Next Time." What's so difficult for me to tell you is that, though sixty years separates the two books, the letters sound almost identical.
The fear is palpable, the fear that if the young Black boy refuses to accept what he's been taught, to despise himself, that he's less than his white counterparts, if he goes about with his head held high, he will be a target of white resentment. Baldwin exhorts his namesake, "If you know whence you came, there is no limit to where you can go."
Diane Rehm, who retired from her daily NPR radio program a few years ago, is still doing what she loves - talking about books. Next month? "1984." This month it was the Baldwin. She was joined by several academic scholars including Princeton's Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr. whose new book "Begin Again" delves into James Baldwin's work as it relates to America's history with race, poet and writer for the Atlantic Clint Smith, and author of "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks," Jeanne Theoharis. What an inspiring way to spend an afternoon!
Like Ms. Rehm I too was ashamed to admit that I had never read this particular book of Baldwin's. What an eye opener! It could have been written yesterday. Baldwin is especially eloquent when he talks about his youth, his abusive step-father who was ironically, a preacher, and Baldwin's own decision to best the man by following in his footsteps and being better, more powerful. He discovered the power of words early on, controlling the congregation with his sermons. He soon lost his faith, but he honed those words for years and, by the time he returned in 1963 from self-exile in Paris, he was, according to Glaude, at the height of his talents and ready to bear witness to the movement.
Theoharis posited that Baldwin demands that this nation grow up and reckon with its racial past by accepting that the myths we have always taught and told ourselves are not necessarily the truth, that no one in white America is completely innocent of setting up the structure that holds its Black citizens back to this very day.
Baldwin's own words on the end page of this brief, cogent work seem prescient. ""Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands....If we, conscious white and conscious blacks...do not falter in our duty now....we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world." We work together or lose it all.
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