Late Baldwin’s rage still carried hope for all Americans’ redemption.

Evidence

But I am not comfortable ending here, and it is not the lesson for our after times. Baldwin’s shift in concern is real. In the face of white America’s repeated refusal and betrayal, he insisted that we tend to ourselves (we have to raise our babies, he was fond of saying) and leave behind the old idea that it is our task to save white Americans. But this conclusion does not change the substance of his analysis of our moral malaise. Even in No Name, he understood that the embrace of color was only a means to a broader end; relinquishing the stigma of blackness was just as difficult as “surmounting the delusions of whiteness.” For him, the country had to go through this phase around color in order, finally, to get beyond it. Baldwin still hoped, even in his angriest of moments, that we, and I am convinced he meant all of us, could be better. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 348

Categorization

• DEFINE: Refines the after-times lesson: even amid the failure, Baldwin’s analysis retained the hope that all of us could be better.
• XREF: Buttresses the reader’s recanonization argument — the moral-analysis continuity between early and late Baldwin despite the tonal shift.