Ramtin Arablui

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.

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 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?

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.

And James Baldwin, who was a well-known figure by this point, kind of had a choice to make.