Baldwin saw hatred’s corrosion of the soul as the nation’s core moral problem.

Evidence

Baldwin never relinquished the belief that, at bottom, the problem we faced as individuals and as a nation was, and remains, fundamentally a moral one: It was and will always be a question about who we take ourselves to be. Hatred, in the end, corrodes the soul. And as Baldwin said, “I would rather die than see the black American become as hideously empty as the majority of white men have become.” The shibboleth of an essential blackness or mindless rage could lead us there. Only love can fortify us against hatred’s temptations. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 345

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the question is always ‘who we take ourselves to be,’ with love as the only fortification against hatred’s corrosion, is a genuinely paradigm-level idea — including for the late, ‘angry’ Baldwin the reader defends.