James Baldwin's Fire

James Baldwin believed that America has been lying to itself since its founding. A sharp, funny, and insightful commentator on Black identity and American democracy, he never hesitated to bear witness, regardless of what it cost him. We speak with writer and professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. about how James Baldwin's words can help us navigate our current moment. This episode originally ran in 2020. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from iXL, a learning platform for helping kids build confidence and get up to speed fast. One subscription covers math, science, and reading for all children in a household. Receive 20% off at ixl.com/NPR.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  A quick heads up before we get started. This episode contains some strong language, including a racial slur and mention of suicide.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  Until the moment comes when we, the Americans, we, the American people, are able to accept the fact that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and black, that on that continent, we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other. Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream. Because the people who are denied participation in it by their very presence will wreck it. And if that happens, it's a very grave moment for the West. Thank you.

• 1:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hey, I'm Randa Nafata.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei. You may have noticed a quote making the rounds on social media. It goes, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." Those words are written by James Baldwin, whose voice you heard at the top, in an essay for The New York Times, published in 1962. For many people, it rings as true today as it did then. The words have a power and clarity that seem to cut through time and space.

• 2:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  It also shows how ideas reemerge in times when they seem most needed. And actually, that's something we talk about a lot when we develop episodes. Historical figures and their ideas. They inspire us, challenge our assumptions, and sometimes push us to ask questions we might not otherwise have asked. And what better way than to look at the philosophy of James Baldwin, a writer who used the power of his words to confront in order to connect, something we can relate to today?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Baldwin was an insightful commentator on Black identity, American democracy, and racism. He saw something deep and ugly and stubborn in American culture, and he never hesitated to call it by its name, to bear witness regardless of what it cost him.

• 2:53Rund Abdelfatah?

  Baldwin was a Black man, he was gay, and he was active from the 1940s to his death in 1987. He's still considered one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. His story is amazing, but that isn't what we're going to focus on in this episode. We're going to meet someone who spent his career diving into the meaning and purpose of James Baldwin's work, of his ideas. Someone who can help us see the world through his eyes so that maybe, just maybe, we can gather a little more strength to face the things that must be changed in ourselves and our culture.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  Hello, my name is Lola Mangual Valentin, calling from Charlotte, North Carolina. And you're listening to Throughline from NPR with Randa Telsa Tsa and Ramtin Arablouei. Keep up the great work, guys.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from iXL. The first few weeks back at school set the tone for the rest of the year. iXL is designed to help kids build confidence and get up to speed fast. Covering pre-K through 12th grade, iXL offers personalized, interactive practice in math, language arts, and science. One subscription covers everything for all the kids in your home. Receive an exclusive 20% discount on an iXL membership at ixl.com/npr. This message comes from Scholastic with Licorice, the highly anticipated, chilling-yet-heartfelt story from award-winning author Carol LaRoe. Told in powerful prose and illuminating illustrations,

• 4:54Speaker 00

  this charming tale following Kitty's eerie journey to find the perfect home is catnip for fans of Catherine Applegate and Kate de Camillo. Licorice from Carol LaRoe is available now wherever books are sold. This message comes from Sony Pictures Classics, proudly presenting the acclaimed new crime thriller, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. The Daily Beast raves, "A perfect crime film." John Turturro gives a career-best performance. Also starring Giancarlo Esposito, Tatiana Maslany, Will Price, and Steve Buscemi. See the film that the LA Times calls "instantly classic." Opens only in theaters October 23 in New York and Los Angeles. Nationwide, October 30.

• 5:35Speaker 05

  Part One: Confronting the Lie.

• 5:39Speaker 06

  I started reading Baldwin seriously in graduate school. I fell in love with the sound of his voice, the power of his pen, his courage, the way he queered politics, how he inhabited his own misfittedness, the way in which he balanced his rage and love.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  This is Eddie Glod, professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University.

• 6:06Speaker 06

  I'm the author of Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.

• 6:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 2018, Eddie was starting to write that book about Baldwin, but he was struggling. So he went to Heidelberg, Germany on a fellowship to try and figure it out.

• 6:23Speaker 06

  You know, I had been thinking I was going to write this intellectual biography of Baldwin. And I was having all of this trouble. The archives weren't yielding what I hoped they would yield. I'm in Heidelberg and I experienced this horrible scene.

• 6:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  He'd just arrived at the train station when he saw something disturbingly familiar. Here's how he describes it in his book.

• 6:50Speaker 06

  As we entered the station, I heard screaming. People in front of us stood still and stared at some kind of commotion. I followed their eyes. Four policemen were piled on a black man. One officer had his knee in the man's back. The others twisted his arms. His pants were halfway down his legs. His bare ass was exposed. The police pressed his head down into the concrete as if they were trying to leave the imprint of a leaf there. With each attempt to cuff him, the man let out a blood-curdling scream. All eyes were on him as the crowd stood by and watched intently, like spectators at a soccer game, without any real attachment to the team's play. I watched them as they watched the police and the black man.

• 7:35Speaker 06

  Their faces revealed nothing. They were inscrutable, at least to me. I had not been in Heidelberg for two hours, and police had a black man's face pressed down on the concrete with a knee in his back.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  The intensity of that scene snapped things into focus for Eddie. He wasn't going to write an intellectual history of James Baldwin as he had originally planned. He was going to try and write with Baldwin, to try to put him in a deeper, more philosophical context and understand what his work offers us in our world. He went back to his room, and the words just started pouring out. And to do it, he had to call back to when he started reading James Baldwin more than 30 years earlier.

• 8:23Speaker 06

  And I knew that when I started reading him in graduate school, that he was going to have me deal with my own traumas, my own wounds, my own pains. And I didn't have a philosophical language for that yet. He would, in effect, open me up, and then I would have to deal with the fact, and it is a disturbing fact in some ways, that I am and remain a vulnerable little boy. But in order for me to say anything substantive about the world, I would have to confront that vulnerable little boy, you know?

• 9:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  So just to establish, who was James Baldwin?

• 9:06Speaker 06

  He's this child of Harlem, not Sugar Hill Harlem, but, you know, the ghetto of Harlem. Born in August of 1924, who had stories dancing around in his head, who was misfitted and the like, but whose mind was unbounded by his circumstance and his environment. Yet, he had to fight and work desperately to hold off what the world said about him in all of its ugliness. And he willed himself into becoming one of America's most amazing and accomplished writers. I think he's this mixture of Henry James, Malcolm X, and Freud. You know, this, you know, this, um...

• 9:49Speaker 06

  His, his writing demands a kind of deep sea dive. You know, he believes in the Socratic dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living.

• 10:00Speaker 06

  Before we can say anything, you know, about the world we inhabit, we need to say something about ourselves because the messiness of the world is actually a reflection of the messiness of our interior lives. So there's a kind of demand for self-examination. That's part of the dilemma of being an American Negro. That one is a little bit colored, a little bit white. And not only in terms, in physical terms, but in the head and in the heart. And there are days, one of them,

• 10:35Speaker 06

  when you wonder.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  What your role is in this country and what your future is in it.

• 10:43Speaker 06

  To my mind, he is perhaps the most insightful critic of American democracy and race we've ever produced.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  I'm terrified at the moral abaté, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have rooted themselves for so long, they really don't think I'm human. And this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  In the book, you kind of refer to this notion that there's a kind of lie at the center of America's self-image. And it's something that comes out in your voice and also in the kind of Baldwin's observations. What is that lie and what, how does it apply today?

• 11:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the lie is what I call the value gap. And that is the belief that white people matter more than others. And that belief evidences itself in our dispositions, our habits, our practices, our social and political and economic arrangements. And they're protected by the lies we tell ourselves. You know, Baldwin in 1964 wrote an essay entitled "The White Problem", and he has this wonderful passage, it's so poignant, where he, and I'm paraphrasing here, where he says, you know, the founders of the country, you know, had a fatal flaw. They said that they were Christian, they said that they were founding the nation on these principles, but yet they had chattel, they had us.

• 12:22Speaker 06

  And in order to justify the role that these chattel played in their lives, they had to basically say that these men and women were not human beings. Because if they weren't human beings, then no crime had been committed. And then here's the line, that lie is the basis of our present trouble. And so we tell ourselves this story that we're the redeemer nation, that we're the shining city on the hill, as Ronald Reagan said, and, and we tell ourselves we're the example of democracy achieved, as if we didn't do what we did in Haiti, as if we didn't do what we did in Cuba, or what we did in Puerto Rico, or what we did in Hiroshima, what we did in Nagasaki, right? So we do all of that to protect our innocence.

• 13:03Speaker 06

  So Baldwin is insisting, you know, we have to confront the messiness of who we are, our ghastly failures, in order to release ourselves into being otherwise. And that, at the personal level, also must happen at the societal level. So we have to tell the truth about who we are and what we've done, but the lies get in the way.

• 13:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  You know, those lies that, as you say, we tell ourselves personally and socially, like as a society, we tell ourselves. On the one hand, it's that sort of self-preservation reflex that we have on both that sort of micro and macro level. And, and it just makes me think, you know, there's a certain vulnerability that it takes to own up to a lie and to look it straight in the eye and say, this is not the truth.

• 13:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  And so, in, in some ways, you know, that process of confrontation that you yourself, it seems, had to, had to go through just to, to tackle this subject, is also sort of a process of confrontation that Baldwin was saying the country needed to experience.

• 14:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, it's, it's confrontation is also a sign of maturity, you know, where we've grown into the resources requisite to do it honestly.

• 14:27Speaker 06

  He has this line, and I'm paraphrasing again, you know, is that, you know, the trouble we're in is deeper than we thought, because the trouble's in us.

• 14:37Speaker 06

  You know, you're so right to say that we have to confront it, it requires, you know, being willing to be vulnerable.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  There is this personal versus systemic tension in Baldwin's writings. In that he deeply reflects on the personal impacts that America as a country has had on individual people in terms of what it does to their self-confidence. And that actually brings me to one of the quotes from your book that really, really stuck with me. I want to really, I want to read it really quick for you, if that's okay.

• 15:15Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  "America and its racist assumptions had indelibly shaped who Baldwin was. But he insisted, 'We are not the mere product of social forces. Each of us has a say in who we take ourselves to be. No matter what America said about him as a black person,' Baldwin argued, 'he had the last word about who he was as a human being and as a black man. Just as we must examine our individual experiences and the terrors that shape how we come to see ourselves, together as a country, we must do the same. The two are bound together.'" What I love is while it's deeply personal, it's very much examining the systemic of

• 15:57Speaker 01

  the broader responsibility of the country, of its government, of its policies. Today, there seems to be a real tension between those things for many people. What do you think Baldwin would have made of that tension today?

• 16:14Speaker 06

  Well, you know, so one of the most powerful things about Baldwin is that he goes to the interior, not to stay there, but has the launching pad to go outward. So the interior is the basis for moving to a broader form of social criticism. Some people will move from social criticism to the interior and you end up with this kind of narcissistic kind of account, where it's just simply, you know, about the individual and their own pain and suffering, right? For Jimmy, that individual pain, as early as reading Notes of a Native Son, where you end with him at the funeral of his stepfather, with the birth of his youngest sister, and

• 16:55Speaker 06

  him leaving to get ready to go to Paris, and of course, the riots in New York. So there's a way in which the autobiographical is the kind of point of entry to the broader social context. I think that's really important in our own moment because we live in a moment that's so driven by our own individual brands, right? You know, our social media platforms or micro-reality shows. Right? It's very difficult for us to move outside of our own selves into a broader understanding of our relation, genuine relationship with others.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Jim, what do you see deep in the recesses of your own mind as the future of our nation?

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Well, I'm glad and sorry you asked me that question. But I'll do my best to answer it.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.

• 18:08Speaker 06

  When Jimmy says, "Choose life", don't wallow in the illusion, don't settle for safety. That's not about a how-to manual. That's not about a corporate strategy for dealing with difference in your midst. The point here is to choose life is a deeper existential question about who do you take yourself to be?

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Now, the artist, no matter how he sounds,

• 18:38Speaker 02

  is by definition a religious man,

• 18:43Speaker 02

  believing that we can create and transcend all our gods. That it is entirely up to us as the work of human beings to make the world more human.

• 19:01Speaker 06

  We travel and we move around the surfaces because we're afraid of what's in the dark cellar. We don't want to look the terror squarely in the face. But you know, America's like Never Neverland. You know, we all want to be lost boys and girls where we don't want to be responsible or accountable.

• 19:23Speaker 06

  We'd rather be safe and secure in our innocence.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  One of the things that most afflicts this country is that white people don't know who they are, where they come from. That's why you think I'm a problem. But I am not the problem, your history is.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  And as long as you pretend you don't know your history, you're gonna be the prisoner of it.

• 19:43Speaker 06

  And you know, it's that moment in Baldwin's The Fire Next Time where he says, "People either don't know or they don't want to admit, in effect, what's happened to thousands and thousands of their countrymen." And he says, "You can't be innocent in the face of that. Innocence is the crime."

• 19:59Speaker 02

  When "white people" talk about progress in relation to black people, all they are saying and all they can possibly mean by the word "progress" is how quickly and how thoroughly I become white. I don't want to become white. I want to grow up, and so should you.

• 20:17Speaker 06

  So, America's not unique in its sins. Right? We may be unique in the efficient way in which we deny them.

• 20:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  When we come back, James Baldwin refuses to take the bribe and pays a heavy price.

• 21:11Speaker 04

  This is Charlene Reeves from Mesquite, Texas, and you're listening to Throughlines from NPR.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  This message comes from iXL, a learning platform for helping kids build confidence and get up to speed fast. One subscription covers math, science, and reading for all children in a household. Receive 20% off at ixl.com/NPR. This message comes from Scholastic with Licorice, the highly anticipated, chilling-yet-heartfelt story from award-winning author Carol LaRoe. Told in powerful prose and illuminating illustrations, this charming tale following Kitty's eerie journey to find the perfect home is catnip for fans of Catherine Applegate and Kate de Camillo. Licorice from Carol LaRoe is available now wherever books are sold. This message comes from Sony Pictures Classics, proudly presenting the acclaimed new crime

• 22:08Speaker 00

  thriller, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. The Daily Beast raves, "A perfect crime film." John Turturro gives a career-best performance. Also starring Giancarlo Esposito, Tatiana Maslany, Will Price, and Steve Buscemi. See the film that the LA Times calls "Instantly Classic." Opens only in theaters October 23 in New York and Los Angeles. Nationwide October 30.

• 22:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part Two: The Bribe.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  During the 1960s, different groups emerged in the movement for Black liberation and civil rights. There was the nonviolent, direct-action wing of the movement, headed by groups like SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and people like Martin Luther King and John Lewis.

• 22:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  And then there was the more radical wing, often called the Black Power Movement, with groups like the Black Panthers, who vowed to defend themselves and their communities with arms if necessary. They were painted as extremist and dangerous by much of the mainstream media.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  And James Baldwin, who was a well-known figure by this point, kind of had a choice to make: clearly pick a side or potentially lose support from the mainstream.

• 23:26Speaker 06

  Sometimes you gotta sing off-key to be heard, you know?

• 23:31Speaker 06

  When everyone was turning their backs on Black Power,

• 23:35Speaker 06

  Baldwin didn't.

• 23:37Speaker 06

  And he knew the cost. He should have won a Nobel a long time ago. He knew the cost.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  If we were Irish, if we were Jewish, if we were Poles,

• 23:48Speaker 02

  if we had, in fact, in your mind, a frame of reference, our heroes would be your heroes too. Nat Turner would be a hero for you instead of a threat. Malcolm X might still be alive.

• 23:59Speaker 06

  He turned his back on the New York intellectuals, all of those white writers, the chattering classes of New York that gave him the platform, that projected him out. He turned his back on them.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  But you know, when the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world says, "Give me liberty or give me death", the entire white world applauds. When a black man says exactly the same thing,

• 24:26Speaker 02

  word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so there won't be any more like him.

• 24:42Speaker 06

  When he told those young college students at Howard University in 1963, "If you promise your elder brother that you will never believe what the world's saying about, says about you, I promise you that I will never betray you", and even when they questioned his manhood, his sexuality, right, his dedication to black folk, he never betrayed them.

• 25:04Speaker 06

  That doesn't mean he wasn't critical. He understood from whence these young folk came. And he was trying to tell a story about how they, how their eyes darkened, how these once holy fools who risked all, everything to transform the country in the bowels of the South as they organized nonviolently, these same children were now screaming "Black Power", and burning cities down. He said, "No, no, these children are ours. We produced them."

• 25:33Speaker 06

  So what does it mean to do that in this moment? It's so, I'm sorry, I'm getting so emo-, you know, I guess passionate about it. Because we're constantly faced with taking the bribe.

• 25:48Speaker 06

  Jimmy, he could have taken the bribe. And what is the bribe? The bribe is your silence. The bribe is, you know, just pursue your craft and make your money. The bribe is to adjust yourself to injustice.

• 26:06Speaker 06

  And then, in the context of the world in which we inhabit, that bribe involves the deformation of attention. Right? So we don't, so we start producing work that doesn't capture folks' attention. It actually becomes a part of this white noise that that leaves folks' eyes blank, right? It's not, doesn't force them to do much. I'm sorry.

• 26:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  No, no, don't apologize. I mean, there's something in that emotion that you're expressing, just the literal feelings that are bubbling up that like come through in so many of Baldwin's writings, right? Like, he had so much emotion packed into what he was saying because of the things he was seeing, right? And he was angry. And I wonder what you make of the, what you make of that anger and how it related to the country's anger? I mean, was he channeling it?

• 27:11Speaker 06

  You know, in an interview in 1968 in Esquire, the reporter is asking him, "How do we get black people to cool it?" He says, "It's not for them to get, it's not for us to cool." He said, "But aren't you dying? You know, but aren't you the ones dying?" And he responds, "No, we're just the ones dying the fastest."

• 27:31Speaker 06

  And the reporter didn't quite get what he was saying.

• 27:35Speaker 06

  We tend to think of the Black Power movement and the civil rights movement as if they were wholly separate, as if the people who inhabited Black Power, who advocated for Black Power, weren't at some point risking their lives just a few years earlier engaged in nonviolent protests in Selma. Stokely Carmichael was one of the most brilliant nonviolent organizers in the movement. What happened to him? Right? John Lewis wasn't just simply this man who risked everything on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He was the chairperson of SNCC from 1963 to 1966. But these movements are continuous, they're linked.

• 28:18Speaker 06

  The rage, the anger, if you weren't angry, what the hell was wrong with you? So I think, for me, he gives me license to be rageful. And then he says, if you're not rageful, then what is wrong? What is wrong? This, we have to go through this brook of fire to get to the other side. There's no going around it.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Throughout the book, just to follow up on that, there is this feeling that while he holds that rage, as you just said, he's also capable of simultaneously understanding that the white citizens of the United States who are responsible for the state of, play a major role in responsible for the state of racism and the system in America, he also holds a deep love and a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood for those people. And do you think part of the reason he was able to do that so well, beyond just his ability to write and think?

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Was that he was a witness and not necessarily a participant in the sense that he wasn't an activist. He intentionally chose to be a witness, to bear witness, to document in a lot of ways what he was seeing. What does that tell us about kind of where, you know, many of us sit? And do you think that was what really enabled him to kind of really be able to balance those heavy emotions?

• 29:56Speaker 06

  You know, I don't know, to be honest with you. There is a sense in which, you know, Baldwin is the poet in the Emersonian sense. Baldwin never gave up on the fundamental sacredity of human being. We're all sacred. And then that line where he says, you know, "I want us to do something unprecedented, and that is to create a self without the need for enemies." Oh, my Lord. Every time, I mean, that's just, I just love that line. So part of what he's saying, I know I'm going around in circles, he's saying that what

• 30:40Speaker 06

  white supremacy does, it not only causes all of this hell for me and how I have to raise my children and live my life, it is literally deforming and disfiguring the character of the people who embrace it. Your character is fundamentally affected by all of this. Can't you see?

• 30:59Speaker 02

  I think that you and I might learn a great deal from each other. If you can overcome the curtain of my color, this country is mine too. I paid as much for it as you. White means that you are European still, and black means that I'm African. And we both know, we've both been here too long. You can't go back to Ireland or Poland or England, and I can't go back to Africa. And we will live here together, or we will die here together. And it's not I am telling you, time is telling you. You will listen, or you will perish.

• 31:39Speaker 06

  And what he's warning us is not to fall into the trap. Because if it disfigures them, if we buy into his logic, it will disfigure us. We can't release the trap, man. But we can't, we also can't fall into this stuff of sentimentality either. But anyway.

• 32:01Speaker 06

  Jimmy.

• 32:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  What James Baldwin can teach us about dealing with our loneliness. When we come back.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  Hey, what's up? This is J.C. Williams calling from Zurich, Switzerland, and you're listening to Throughline on NPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  This message comes from iXL, a learning platform for helping kids build confidence and get up to speed fast. One subscription covers math, science, and reading for all children in a household. Receive 20% off at ixl.com/NPR. This message comes from Scholastic with Licorice, the highly anticipated, chilling, yet heartfelt story from award-winning author Carol LaRoe. Told in powerful prose and illuminating illustrations, this charming tale following Kitty's eerie journey to find the perfect home is catnip for fans of Catherine Applegate and Kate Camillo. Licorice from Carol LaRoe is available now wherever books are sold. This message comes from Sony Pictures Classics, presenting the acclaimed new crime thriller,

• 33:18Speaker 00

  The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, starring John Turturro. Only in theaters October 23rd in New York and LA. Nationwide, October 30th.

• 33:29Speaker 05

  Part Three, The Elsewheres.

• 33:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  Throughout his life, James Baldwin felt the solitude of being an outsider. He was a nomad, spending many years living abroad in France and other parts of Europe. And whether it was because of the color of his skin, his sexuality, or his fiercely independent thinking, he could never escape being alone. And the more successful he became as a writer, the more the loneliness followed him.

• 33:59Speaker 06

  You know, the first thing I would say is that fame is a motherfucker.

• 34:04Speaker 06

  You know. But I chose the photo, um, the image uh for the, for the cover precisely for this reason. It is, uh, it comes from Sadat Bekay's haunting and beautiful uh short film uh from another place. And he's sitting in uh an old tea house uh in Bebek in Istanbul. And in the film, he's surrounded by people, but his eyes betray the company. He's looking elsewhere. Uh, he's in a fragile place in that moment in his life, even though he's in, in the company of others. Loneliness is his companion because he has to get his work done.

• 34:47Speaker 06

  But I also say that, you know, we have to find our elsewheres. Um, that doesn't mean we have to retreat to some other country, but we certainly have to uh find communities of love. People, you know, who allow us to laugh, full belly laughs, uh to rage, to be quirky, uh to be ourselves without cost, that people who hold us to account. We have to find the way to create the distance from the status quo so that we can develop resources to say no to the bribe as it comes to us over and over again.

• 35:33Speaker 06

  So we avoid not necessarily the existential condition of loneliness uh per se, because it is, how can I say this? What I've chosen to do with my life is by definition, by definition requires solitude. It requires a kind of loneliness, especially when people want you to sing in the chorus and you think what they're singing is wrong. I experienced that over, from two thousand eight to two thousand sixteen with the Obama administration. Uh, but that's another story.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Well, tell us more, but, but, but.

• 36:11Speaker 06

  No, in Democracy in Black, I was, I was really critical of the Obama administration. I wanted him to do more. And, you know, people were, many people were delighted to get invitations to the White House and they were delighted by the symbolism of a black president and I was more distraught by what was happening to black communities. And so I wrote a book and called him a confidence man in the line of Melville. I'm still, I'm still not living that one down, along with some other things I wrote. But, okay, if you're gonna speak the truth, if you're gonna bear witness and make the suffering real, you're gonna risk loneliness. But in the

• 36:52Speaker 06

  midst of it all, you have to find a community of love that will love you to death, no matter your faults, who will give you the space to replenish, so that you can join the fight again.

• 37:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  You know what I love about the way that you're, that you're talking about James Baldwin is, or Jimmy, you refer to him as Jimmy a few times, is this sense of intimacy, I feel, listening to you talk about him, that, that you almost know him. I mean, do you feel that? Do you, I mean, he, his, his words resonate so much today, as you, as you're, as you're repeating them back to us. I mean, do you feel that he is, his message and his ideas, you know, apply just as much today as they did then?

• 37:47Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. He got to the heart of the matter. You know, I call him Jimmy, cause his closest friends called him Jimmy. And even though I never got to know him, I, I feel like, you know, he walks with me. He has been constantly present. I mean, I could talk about images flitting by from the side of my eye when I'm writing, or... Uh, when someone would show up in the middle of, of a lull and give me an interview that would suddenly take me in a different direction, or, you know, a mistake being caught. It's like he was editing the book as I was writing. It was, it was, it was wild.

• 38:28Speaker 06

  Um, not all that to say is that that's my personal journey, but, um, because he's the most, it's like reading DeTocqueville on American democracy, you go, wow, this man really got us. When you read Jimmy on American democracy and race, it's like that, cuts even deeper. He got us. He unders- he understands the contradiction at the heart of the country.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  What is it you wanted me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost sixty years ago. I'm not gonna live another sixty years. You always told me it takes time. It's taking my father's time, my mother's time, my uncle's time, my brothers and my sisters' time, my nieces and my nephews' time. How much time do you want for your progress?

• 39:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  Did he come, come out of the civil rights movement feeling hopeful? Because I, I, I look at the moment that we're in now and

• 39:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  the, and there's a lot of potential for change. There's a lot of potential for a real kind of awareness, a reckoning with our history.

• 39:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  But there's also a potential for things to continue.

• 39:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 39:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  As they've been. And I guess I wonder, is, is, is the ultimate kind of

• 40:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  takeaway from Baldwin, a, a sense of hope, um, in, in where the, the country's headed?

• 40:07Speaker 06

  You know, that's a great question. And in some ways, it's, it's a question that, that, that is in part the motivation for writing the book, because I focus on the later Jimmy Baldwins. I will focus on his later work for a reason, because he witnessed the country turn its back on the civil rights movement. You know, something, they murdered the Apostle of Love. They assassinated Dr. King. He collapsed. You know, tried to commit suicide in sixty-nine. So, he was despairing, disillusioned. But he had to pick up the pieces. He had to bear witness. Because he also saw the country elect Ronald Reagan. And he, you know, Reagan for black activists during this period was as bad, if not worse, than George Wallace.

• 40:53Speaker 06

  And they were calling him the Redeemer in Chief. This was the man who, who, who led the hunt, you know, that destroyed the Black Panther Party. This was the man who put Angela Davis in effect on the FBI Most Wanted list. This was the man who despised the poor in California, as Baldwin put it. He was the, he would, he became the avatar of all of those who rejected and resisted the Great Society and the Civil Rights Movement. And the country elected him, this B-list Hollywood actor. He was their latest fantasy. Hmm, sounds like an echo. We live in a moment, similarly. And so Baldwin, in that moment, said the country had turned its back on it, on, on the possibility of being otherwise.

• 41:37Speaker 06

  And so he had to figure out how to pick up the pieces so that we could push this damn bolt up the hill again.

• 41:47Speaker 06

  In nineteen seventy, an Ebony interviewer came to Istanbul while Baldwin was trying to pick up the pieces and working on No Name in the Street. And he asked him about hope. And Jimmy, who is barely keeping it together, although he's in a community of love, offers the advice that I found in the ruins and in the rubble, that I offer us today. Hope is invented every day. Hope is invented every day. And so, I'll say this really quickly. There's no, there's reason to, to think that we are on the precipice of change.

• 42:25Speaker 06

  But there's no guarantee. But wherever human beings are, we at least have a chance. Because we're not only disasters, we're also miracles.

• 42:40Speaker 06

  We have to dare everything right now. We have to try to be otherwise. We have to risk everything to be otherwise. We have to figure out how to be together differently. I don't want to see another generation of Americans having to bear the burden of this lie. To use an image that Baldwin used, you know, we're all midwives, trying to give birth to a new America. In the past, every time we came to the moment in which the new America could be born, white supremacy was the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby's neck.

• 43:23Speaker 06

  And we let it snuff the life out of him. Let's be better midwives as we try to be better people.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  This is the man that the artist makes of his society, which society inevitably, unbearably, and always resists. Resists because it knows that it could do it, but prefers to believe that what it can see and touch is more real than what it knows and feels at that moment, for example, when the baby is born. The role of the artist or responsibility of the artist is to make you respect that moment above all other moments, to recognize that there is nothing under heaven, no creed and

• 44:11Speaker 02

  no flag, and no cause, more important than the single human life.

• 44:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  Eddie Glod is a professor at Princeton University and author of Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the suicide and crisis lifeline.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 45:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm Randaam Nafatah, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by me.

• 45:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  And me and. Jamie York. Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson.

• 45:12Speaker 05

  Julie Kane. Kia Miyaka-Natise. Victoria Whitley-Berry.

• 45:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  Fact checking for this episode was done by Julia Wool and Greta Pitenger from the NPR Rad team.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Thanks also to Camille Smiley and Anya Grunman.

• 45:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes. Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Anya Mizani. And before we let you go, we wanted to highlight a comment on Apple Podcasts from a listener named Brooke, who said, quote, "I so appreciate the episode about the history of the conflict in Sudan. Because this massive conflict gets so little media attention in the Western media, I've struggled to understand the basics. But your show was an excellent education. Thanks for sharing this, Brooke. And if you have a minute, please leave us a review and rating on Spotify or Apple, just like Brooke did. And who knows, maybe we'll read your comment on a future episode.

• 46:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thanks for listening.

• 46:21Speaker 00

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