Baldwin’s queer identity made him a radical alternative to masculinist black politics.

Evidence

No wonder, then, that in the last years of Obama’s presidency we saw a resurgence of interest in Baldwin’s life and work. Before Election Day 2016, Baldwin was everywhere in the Black Lives Matter movement. When residents erupted in Baltimore, Maryland, after the murder of Freddie Gray, one activist was seen outside the Western District police station with a sign quoting Baldwin: “Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy of justice.” Activists throughout the Obama years appealed to Baldwin’s critical insights on social media and reveled in his sexuality as a way of disrupting older forms of black politics (this black queer man represented a different kind of radicalism than the masculinist politics of black male preachers, they maintained). — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 115

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete detail of the Baldwin revival the reader must ground in biography; feeds the recanonization argument.