Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own is a non-fiction book by Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a Princeton University professor specializing in race and religion in the US. The title gestures to a passage in James Baldwin’s last novel, Just Above My Head (1979), which stresses the importance of new beginnings in the quest to rebuild the US as a truly multiracial democracy. A New York Times bestseller, Begin Again combines elements of history, biography, literary criticism, and memoir, presenting Baldwin’s observations on race as salient to American society today. Glaude’s direct prose makes the nation’s race problem accessible without glossing over its complexity. This guide refers to the first edition published in 2020 by Penguin Random House.

The Introduction describes the book’s origins and lays out its main thesis: Insidious views of race in America continue to frustrate efforts to achieve equality.

Chapter 1 is about two concepts: “the lie” and the “after times.” The lie is the idea that White people matter more than racial minorities, while the after times are transitional periods in US history that present opportunities for change, such as the post-civil rights years and the current era.