Late Baldwin abandoned persuasion of white Americans, dismissing their self-serving slave narratives entirely

Evidence

For the sake of one’s sanity, one simply ceases trying to make them hear. If they think that things are more important than people—and they do—well, let them think so. Let them be destroyed by their things. If they think I was happy being a slave and am now redeemed by having become—and on their terms, as they think—the equal of my overseers, well, let them think so. If they think I am flattered by their generosity in allowing me to become a sharecropper in a system which I know to be criminal—and which is placed squarely on the backs of nonwhite people all over the world—well, let them think so. Let the dead bury their dead. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 569

Categorization

• XREF: The exact rupture the reader argues defines essential late Baldwin — the turn from ‘we are bound together forever’ to ‘let the dead bury their dead.’