Narrator: In 2018, the scholar Eddie S. Glaude Jr. arrived in Heidelberg, Germany, to accept an academic award. He hoped for a brief refuge from the racial turmoil of an America under Donald Trump. But on his very first day, as he walked through the local train station, he heard screams. He saw four German police officers piled on top of a Black man, one kneeling on his back, pressing his face into the concrete. The crowd watched in silence. In that moment, the illusion of escape shattered. The problem wasn't just America's; it was a global wound. This jarring experience raises a profound question: When faith in one's country is shaken to its core, and the promise of progress seems like a lie, what is to be done?

In his searing book, Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, Glaude argues that the writer and activist James Baldwin provides the essential roadmap for navigating these dark times. The book posits that America is trapped in a cycle of progress and backlash, and only by confronting the nation's foundational lies, as Baldwin did, can we find a way to truly begin again.

Narrator: At the heart of America's racial crisis is what Glaude, channeling Baldwin, calls "the lie." This is the deliberate, comforting myth that America is an innocent nation, a beacon of democracy that has largely overcome its racist past. The lie allows the country to ignore the "value gap"—the unspoken belief that white people are more valuable than others. This lie is not just a historical artifact; it is an active force that distorts the present, justifying police brutality, systemic inequality, and political cowardice.

Baldwin saw his life's work as a direct assault on this lie. In the spring of 1963, he met with a group of young, battle-weary student activists from the Nonviolent Action Group at Howard University. These students, including a young Stokely Carmichael, were on the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement, facing down dogs and firehoses in the South. In a late-night session, Baldwin made them a solemn promise. He told them that if they would promise to never accept the derogatory definitions society had for them, then he, in turn, would never betray them. For Baldwin, this was a sacred pact. His role as a writer was to bear witness and tell the truth, no matter how unbearable, to ensure that the sacrifices of that generation would not be swallowed by the nation's convenient and self-serving lie.

Narrator: To fight the lie, one must first become a witness. For Baldwin, this meant confronting the raw, unvarnished trauma of American racism. Glaude highlights how trauma shapes and fragments memory, pointing to Baldwin's own recollection of what drove him back to the U.S. from Paris in 1957. Baldwin claimed it was a photograph of fifteen-year-old Dorothy Counts being spat on and jeered by a white mob as she integrated a high school in Charlotte, North Carolina. The timeline doesn't quite match his return, but Glaude argues that this detail is less important than the truth it reveals: the image became a symbol of the unbearable reality he felt compelled to confront.

Baldwin’s journey to the American South was a descent into the nation’s heart of darkness. He witnessed firsthand the "poverty of spirit" among white southerners, a moral decay born from their commitment to white supremacy. This experience solidified his understanding that the role of the artist is to bear witness—to see what others refuse to see and to speak for those who cannot speak. He understood that America's racial problem was not a "Negro problem" but a white one, rooted in the necessity of white Americans to confront their own history in order to live with themselves.

Narrator: Glaude argues that American history moves in a painful cycle: a moment of racial progress is inevitably followed by a period of intense backlash and betrayal, which he calls the "after times." The period after the Civil War and Reconstruction was one such era. The period after the Civil Rights Movement was another. Glaude contends that we are living in an "after time" today, where the hope symbolized by Barack Obama's presidency was met with the racist backlash that led to Donald Trump.

This sense of betrayal was palpable in the final years of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life. In March 1968, just weeks before King’s assassination, Baldwin was asked to introduce him at a fundraiser in California. King was struggling to fund his Poor People's Campaign, an initiative that moved beyond civil rights to demand economic justice. Many white liberals who had supported desegregation were now balking at this more radical vision. In his introduction, Baldwin didn't offer easy praise. Instead, he recounted the history of disappointment, reminding the audience that the country had never truly wanted to hear what Black people were saying. Both Baldwin and King resisted the easy narrative of American triumphalism, understanding that the nation was on the verge of betraying its promises once again.

Narrator: When the promise of nonviolent change is met with violence and betrayal, a reckoning is inevitable. The rise of the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party was a direct response to this failure. The Panthers, founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, rejected the moral appeals of the Civil Rights establishment. They argued that power, not love, was the only language the American state understood, and they advocated for armed self-defense against police brutality.

Baldwin found himself in a complex and difficult position. He understood the rage and disillusionment of the younger generation. Yet, he was wary of the Black Power movement's separatist rhetoric and what he saw as a dangerous mirroring of the very racial essentialism they were fighting. This tension came to a head in his interactions with Eldridge Cleaver, a prominent Black Panther who viciously attacked Baldwin in his writing, accusing him of self-hatred. Baldwin believed that creating a new enemy, or imprisoning oneself in a rigid racial identity, was another kind of trap. He insisted that the ultimate goal was to transcend race altogether, a position that put him at odds with many of the more militant voices of the era.

Narrator: In the face of overwhelming political and personal despair, Baldwin discovered the necessity of "elsewhere"—a physical and psychological space of distance from which to see America clearly. After the assassinations of his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., Baldwin was plunged into a deep depression. He found his refuge in Istanbul, Turkey. Far from the racial pressures of the United States, he found the quiet and community he needed to process his grief and rage.

This "elsewhere" was not an escape but a vantage point. It was in Istanbul that he wrote his powerful book-length essay, No Name in the Street, a fragmented and searing account of the "after times." The distance allowed him to refuse to adjust to America's madness and to assess his commitments. Glaude argues that in our own turbulent times, we must all find our own "elsewhere." This doesn't necessarily mean leaving the country, but rather carving out an "elsewhere-in-place"—a community of love and trust where we can fortify our imaginations and find the strength to rejoin the battle.

Narrator: Ultimately, "beginning again" requires a direct and unflinching confrontation with the ruins of American history. Glaude argues that the election of Donald Trump was not an aberration but a reflection of the country's unresolved sins. To protect our own sense of innocence, we want to see him as uniquely evil, but he is a product of the very lie America has always told itself.

The path forward is modeled by the work of Bryan Stevenson and the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Glaude describes his own pilgrimage to this site, which traces the direct line from slavery to lynching to mass incarceration. Standing before the hanging steel monuments, each representing a county where lynchings occurred, is to stand in the middle of the wreckage of American history. It is a painful but necessary act of witness. This is what it means to confront the truth. The task is not to save the people who cling to the lie, but to build a new world where that lie has no power. It is about taking responsibility for the past, not to be trapped by it, but to ensure we do not have to live it again.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Begin Again is that America cannot be saved by comforting illusions. The path to a more just future does not go around the nation's ugly history of white supremacy; it goes directly through it. The cycle of progress and backlash will continue until the country stops telling lies about its past and confronts the "value gap" that has defined it from its inception.

James Baldwin left behind a crucial insight for our time: "Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again." The ultimate challenge Glaude presents is not simply to tear down the monuments to a false history, but to find the courage to build a new America in their place—a "third founding" based on a radical commitment to the sacredness of every human life.