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There are times when I think myself to be a decent writer, having strung together thoughts in a manner almost artistic, if still far from poetic. And then I make the mistake — a happy one but a mistake nonetheless — of pulling James Baldwin off my bookshelf and re-reading something he wrote many decades before.
It is then that I am reminded I could live five lives and never become the kind of writer Baldwin was, and that anything most of us could say about race in America has already been said, and better, by him.
I know it is trendy to quote Baldwin now. Thanks to the brilliance of Raoul Peck’s documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, millions of people have only recently discovered him. Others are re-discovering him, having once read The Fire Next Time, or perhaps one of his novels, like If Beale Street Could Talk, itself turned into a major motion picture — and a cinematically beautiful one at that. But however fashionable it may be to reference him today, insight is insight and deserves repetition.
And 33 years after his death, one discovers that there is almost always something Baldwin wrote, which critics could not understand at the time, but which has proved prescient. As regards the current moment — perhaps the largest…
