Baldwin saw Black Power as justified but still rejected fixed categories

Evidence

Even though Baldwin understood Black Power, its condemnation of white America, and its insistence on black self-determination as a reasonable and, in some ways, wholly justifiable response to the country’s betrayal of the civil rights movement, he never rejected the idea, found in this formulation, that we are much more than the categories that bind our feet. We, too, must never forget this insight. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 320

Categorization

• SEED: Useful for the reader’s defense: late Baldwin, often read as Black-Power-adjacent anger, actually kept his anti-categorical insistence even amid that justified rage.