Telling truth in the after times costs status and earns dismissal

Evidence

This may necessitate risking one’s status and forgoing the awards and recognition of the powers that be. Or, as the late cultural critic Edward Said put it, it entails moving “away from the centralizing authorities toward the margins, where you see things that are usually lost on minds that have never travelled beyond the conventional and the comfortable.” Jimmy understood the risks when he decided that he had to change his “we”; he fully grasped the implication of what it meant for him to tell the truth in the after times. People would turn on him. Critics would dismiss him. He wrote No Name in the Street anyway. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 439

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s core argument that recanonizing No Name in the Street requires embracing that Baldwin wrote it knowing it would cost him his reputation.