Where to Buy Begin Again Near Me
Gird yourselves, white America: Eddie Southward. Glaude Jr. is putting y'all on notice, and he brought the receipts. The James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton prefaces his eighth book with praise quotes from several platinum authors who laud his brilliance and the genius of his discipline on brandish in Begin Over again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.
To begin again on the subject area of racism, Glaude proposes passing H.R. 40, a bill that would constitute the Commission to Report and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans. Information technology's a suggestion that comes at the cease of what the author himself describes in his introduction as "a foreign book. It isn't biography...it is not literary criticism...it is not straightforward history. Instead, Begin Once more is some combination of all iii in an effort to say something meaningful about our current times."
Glaude starts gently but then lowers the boom. His volume is a damning indictment of Donald Trump and white America, particularly white male America — or at least that office of it which believes in its superiority simply because it's white.
Additionally, this book, provocative and lyrical in so many places, is Glaude's personal journeying through a tunnel of rage commencement explored by James Baldwin (1925-1987), whose writing — "close to seven thousand pages of work" — the professor has captivated and studied and taught.
In Begin Again, Glaude challenges "the lie" that America is fundamentally good, that all men are created equal, and that the country is a beacon of light and a moral force in the world. "The stories we often tell ourselves of the civil rights movement and racial progress…[are] all too often lies," he writes.
Instead, says the writer, America is a racist nation that continues to tell the lie that it is a democracy while refusing to face the indelible legacy of slavery and ongoing systemic bigotry against African Americans.
With Baldwin as his guide, Glaude moves from the nonviolence practiced past Martin Luther King Jr. to the militancy of Huey P. Newton, Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panther Political party, the latter a "justifiable, even inevitable, response to white America'southward betrayal of the civil rights movement." Along the way, he lashes Richard Nixon's "silent majority," Reagan Democrats, and Trump voters for propagating "the lie." Finally, Glaude concludes "that America is an identity that white people volition protect at any cost."
Past 2016, he had become so disgusted by the Democratic Party for refusing to remedy Black suffering that he urged Blackness voters, many whose ancestors had paid with their lives for the right to vote, to abstain from voting for Hillary Clinton for president. His reasons seemed petty in the extreme:
"Much more than was required than the Clinton proper name, or the endorsement of her bid for the presidency by President Obama, or by some celebrity, or the brandishing of hot sauce in [her] handbag."
High-strung by rage, he used his considerable influence to urge Black voters to exit the presidential ballot blank. So the Republicans nominated Donald Trump. However, Glaude refused to believe white America would elect "the carnival barker" to the highest office in the land.
Trimming his sails a fleck, he co-authored an anemic essay in Time magazine with Fredrick Harris, a political scientist at Columbia, proverb that if you were a Democrat in a battleground land like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, you should vote for Hillary. But if you lived in a incomparably scarlet country or an overwhelmingly blueish ane, you could blank out or vote your conscience.
Startlingly, the professor, who has studied Baldwin for thirty years, seems not to accept learned from his mentor, peculiarly on the value of presidential voting. In "Notes on the Business firm of Bondage," Baldwin ponders the 1980 presidential race between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan:
"My vote will probably not get me a task or a dwelling or help me through schoolhouse or preclude another Vietnam or a third globe state of war, only it may keep me here long plenty for me to see, and apply, the turning of the tide — for the tide has got to plough. And…if Carter is reelected, it will exist by means of the blackness vote, and information technology will non be a vote for Carter. Information technology volition be a coldly calculated gamble, a means of buying time."
Surely, President Hillary Clinton would've bought Glaude more time than President Trump.
To his credit, Glaude admits his fault. "I was incorrect," he writes, "and given my lifelong reading of Baldwin, it was an egregious mistake."
Far less egregious, but still a mistake, was to publish this book without providing whatsoever photographs, especially since Glaude frequently refers to instances that need illustration. For example, he writes about Sedat Pakay, a Turkish photographer who "offers a beautiful black-and-white portrait of Baldwin in the most intimate of settings." No flick.
In another case, Glaude refers to the opening of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," a documentary of Baldwin's time in the Due south during the Civil Rights move, in which he sits "at a desk in his brother David'south apartment at 209 W Xc-7th Street, looking pensively at a book of photographs." No picture show. (Glaude writes pages about his ain bout of the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, yet provides no pictures.)
He ends his volume, appropriately, with a visit to Baldwin's gravesite at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Was it a simple marble rock, a granite slab, a large headstone marked with a quote? Or a family mausoleum to enfold Baldwin and his seven siblings? Sadly, at that place is over again no picture. Glaude writes merely that he knelt down, touched the earth, and quietly said, "Thanks."
Kitty Kelley is the author of seven number-one New York Times bestseller biographies, including Jackie Oh!, Nancy Reagan, and The Family: The Real Story Backside the Bush Dynasty. She is on the boards of Reading Is Fundamental and the Independent.
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Source: http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/bookreview/begin-again-james-baldwins-america-and-its-urgent-lessons-for-our-own
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