Late Baldwin’s writings guide the response to a failed reckoning.

Evidence

Baldwin’s words spoke to us powerfully in Obama’s moment, as Black Lives Matter gained energy and the country opened up space to rethink race and confront the lie. But he also speaks to us just as powerfully, if not more so, in this moment of disillusionment, of promise deferred—especially to those young people of Black Lives Matter who risked so much to change this nation. I like to think of Jimmy as a moral compass. His writings and witness during his own after times offer direction and particular insight into how we might imagine beginning again in the face of yet another failure of America to give up the value gap. What might an honest reckoning with the country look like now? How do we muster the courage to keep fighting in the face of abject moral failure? To not abdicate our responsibility to fight for our children and for democracy itself? Baldwin’s later writings are saturated with these questions. He sought to answer them while grappling with his own trauma, grief, and profound disillusionment with the moral state of the country and in the people who repeatedly choose the safety of being white over a more just society. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 121

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes what ‘after times’ means functionally: a period when a reckoning has failed and a country tells itself it has changed when it has not.