Ramtin Arablui

The words have a power and clarity that seem to cut through time and space.

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.

This is Eddie Glaude, Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.

The intensity of that scene snapped things into focus for Eddie.

He wasn't gonna write an intellectual history of James Baldwin as he had originally planned.

He was gonna 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.

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 Baldwin's observations.

What is that lie?

And how does it apply today?

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 stuck with me.

I want to read it really quick for you, if that's okay.

Sure.

Sure.

America and its racist assumptions had indelibly shaped who Baldwin was.