 Hello, my name is Jonah Albert and I am one of the library's cultural events producers and I'd like to extend a very warm welcome to you for joining us for this special event. Rob Berkley will be speaking to Dr Eddie Claude about his new book, Begin Again, James Baldwin's America and his urgent lessons for today. But before we get going with the event proper, I do have a couple of points of housekeeping for you. Just above the video, you will see a tab that will enable you to buy Dr Claude's book. Also, there's a tab for you to provide us with feedback. Your feedback is really important to us. The British Library has been doing digital events throughout the lockdown and it will be really good for us to know what you think of it. You can also donate to the British Library. The British Library is a charity. Below the video is an opportunity for you to send questions to Dr Claude by filling out the question form. So just have a quick look down there and do send us your questions throughout the event. A few of them will be put to Dr Claude towards the end of the event. I'd like to extend a very, very special welcome to members of the LKN Network, the Living Knowledge Network and Network of Libraries across the UK. Welcome guys, thank you so much for joining us. Without further ado, I would like to introduce our moderator for the evening, Rob Berkley. He's a former director of the Race Equality Think Tank, the Runameed Trust and he's the director of the Gay Men's Community Journalist Platform and Multi-Aid Collective called Blackout UK. He's a former advisor to the BBC and Labour Party on Strategy and he's currently a trustee of Doc Society, Bering Foundation and Riverside Studios. Welcome, Rob Berkley. Thanks, Jonah, and it's a real pleasure to be here with this discussion. It's LGBT History Month, but we're not bound by months. This is an important discussion to have at any time and I'm really pleased to be able to introduce Professor Eddie Claude, who's a professor at Princeton University, the James S. McDonald Distinguished University Professor and Chair of African American Studies there. A writer that we're known to many of you, particularly for the democracy in black, how race still enslaves the American soul. But we're here this evening to talk about this fantastic new tone, Begin Again. James Baldwin's America has urgent lessons for today. As you can see, I've been filling it with notes, because James Baldwin is an important figure for my organisation, but also such a vital voice. So this new work is really important because finding ways to think about James Baldwin's writing and his lessons, I'm excited about what Professor Claude and you all will have to say about it. James, there'll be an opportunity for you to ask questions, as Jonah said, so do fill in the question form, because it's great to have as many of you as possible engaged in the conversation. Without further ado, Professor Claude, what time is it, where you are? Oh, it's 2.30, 2.30, yeah. It's in the middle of your day. In the middle of the day, indeed. Fair enough. So just a way of introduction really, just tell us a little bit about why this book and why now. Yeah, I've always been, at least for much of my academic career, smitten with Baldwin, he shapes how I read. So I'm a philosophical pragmatist. I work on John Dewey. I do the kind of philosophy of American religious history in some ways. And Baldwin has always offered me resources to kind of think differently within the pragmatist tradition. And so he's been in the background of all of my work, you know, in democracy in black he's everywhere in a shade of blue every chapter except for the last one begins with the quotation, you know the epigraph of Baldwin's work. So I wanted to write this intellectual biography on it, but the archives are aren't very robust at this point, because much of it is art, you know, embargoed for the next 30 years. So you can't write that definitive biography of him and my editor wasn't so much interested in a kind of intellectual engagement with the corpus, as it were. So, then the election happened. And I was sitting here. I remember just sitting, you know, thinking to myself, why folks have done it again. Right. I was like, my goodness, they have done it again. And so I was in some ways despairing and disillusion. And so I knew after teaching Baldwin for, you know, 30 years now that he went through this experience of having to grapple with his own disillusion, but he would say he never dispaired, but Baldwin's not telling the truth. Right. In that moment, but so, so I, so I decided to return to his corpus to move about through what he called the ruins. There I found begin again, which is my way of picking up the pieces in the face of all of this mess that America's unleashed. Quite early on in the chapter on the lie, you talk about whether this is a backlash or not, whether this moment could be described as a backlash. And it's a word that gets used regularly, but you suggest it's not a good word to use. A backlash is, is, you know, it shifts the blame, it's too, it's too sanitized. Right. It's not a what else is a backlash white people are being racist against. What is it. I mean, a backlash is for zooms that someone else actually bears responsibility to what's going on, right, that we've done something wrong that would warrant a return, a reassertion of racism. I don't use that language. I actually use the language of betrayal, that there's this ongoing betrayal of American ideals, ongoing betrayal of Christian ideals, ongoing betrayal of who we take ourselves to be. And, and, and we have to deal with the consequences of it every generation, you know. So, so yeah, I tried to resist the sanitized language of backlash. It lets folk off the hook and I don't try to let anyone off the hook in the book. No, definitely not. And I did. Of naming the lie straight away. Can just really, really struck me as a. Well, dreamy into a book, so it's certainly straight away. I was like, okay, he means. Um, it's a lie and the comparison you're making is about being in say, what, what Whitman talked about the after time. Is it still an after time or, or is it has it always been an after time. Well, you know, after, you know, it's almost after times is Whitman's language but it's also my way of riffing on. You know the old blues metaphor of the crossroads. You know that that moment where you're in between worlds. Right that something is dying, but something isn't quite come into view yet. And so we're still in that moment, you know, where we have to, you know, Donald Trump closed the door on something and open and ushered in something in some ways and so part of what what what we're doing is an old world is dying and a new world is trying to come into existence and and the choices that have to be made in this moment. Right. Are you going to take, you know, to echo to extend the metaphor. Are you going to take the broad. Are you going to take the deal that Robert Johnson did with the devil or you're going to do something else. Right. And so in this instance we are I mean the late Stuart Hall would call it a conjunctural moment, a moment of crisis and a moment of possibility. That's that's where we are. And so I just, I think the aftertimes is this moment where, you know, for Whitman, a moment where the nation has fought this war. 600,000 plus are dead. Carnage has death has defined the emergence of the of the modern US nation state. And now the country seems empty the value the only thing that seems to motivate people is greed. Whitman writes Democratic vistas as a way of accounting for the vapidness of the of the moment and what what is on the horizon and what is behind us and so I think we are in one at this point. And during the kind of after time, I mean, which, which I would like from, from this vantage point, you go America goes from, from Obama to Trump and it feels like the country that we thought we knew from here. Suddenly looks much more foreign. Much, much more different. I wonder about the what the what the progressive does at that moment. The person who is interested in just what what happens because do we hunker down to people disappearing to university departments and they and they try and find a bolt hole to the storm passes. You didn't choose to do that. You're still, you think you're still engaging yourself. You're still there in the room. Right, right, you know, in some ways I'm taking my lead from the activists. So in one level when I when I decided to write the book is not only about my despair and my disillusion brother up it's also. It was also at a time when many of the activists in Ferguson were dying. And so I was I was worried about them. And then, you know, the murder of George Floyd happened eight minutes and 46 seconds people in the United States and around the globe saw this public lynching and what emerged was fascinating to them. It wasn't just amazing about the kind of cross section of people protesting. But what I realized is that they had been they had been organizing all along. That even though the country had elected Trump. Obama's years were behind them. They were still in the trenches doing work. So defund the police isn't just some random phrase that just popped out of nowhere. It's actually the language of organizing. Is on the ground who have been trying to pressure municipalities in the United States to budget their values in some ways right. And so what I what I realized as I was writing the book. And as I was witnessing what I was witnessing is that no it's not a moment of retreat. It's actually a moment of doing, you know, politics. Of setting the stage for for the battle as it were as it were the battle to come. And do you think that there is learning between generations between. Because. The board wins in the last time. And we're we're in the last time as well. Oh, do we destined to just repeat the same pattern. Or. You know Baldwin has this this wonderful phrase and I know I'm paraphrasing him and you said the whore of America is that it's always changing, but America never changes. Right. Yeah, so it's supposed to be dynamic, but it's really kind of constantly reproducing a set of standard assumptions about who's valued and who's not in the line. What I noticed is that young folk who have been organizing, even in the context of the Obama administration, they were reaching for Baldwin they were reaching for Jimmy was everywhere. You know, and no it's because in some ways, you know, each sentence in his corpus is like a universe unto itself. So he's so quotable so people are just pulling things out and you know as as as Baltimore was burning, and you had this kind of dual image of the CVS on fire and Obama calling them thugs. You suddenly an image of this poster, nothing, you know, every, nothing can be changed unless it's faced to the, you know, power, you know, an ignorance, you know, alive with ignorance. I mean, it's just this wonderful kind of. So he was everywhere. And so I think, you know, young people today have been trying to imagine a different kind of politics, as they confront the rear guard action. That is the invocation of Dr King and the civil civil rights movement in the US I don't know what it's like in the UK. But there's always a kind of invocation of what is considered legitimate forms of dissent. And Dr King is the avatar. So, even though these people don't give a damn about King aren't committed to non violence. They will invoke him as a way of containing the radical possibilities of black politics and they do it over and over again. So sometimes I could result in a kind of knee jerk reaction against past movements. But what we saw are these, what I saw now where these interesting attempts to to connect to establish continuity, even in the midst of rupture, if that makes sense. So, which I think is for me, I suppose I'm just getting used to my kind of great hair, right? So I'm getting used to not being in that in that wave of the young activists. But that what comes across really clearly is that there's a clear concern of yours. But it also was a concern of James Baldwin to think about the next generation to spending spending time up all night. We'd stick to Carmichael, as you mentioned. And it's using thinking about something really perfect, something I've noted down, that someone of us should have been there with her. Yeah, there's Dorothy Counts. This is Dorothy Counts. Yeah, absolutely. And I think I feel that now as an older activist, I want to be alongside. Is there something about the intergenerational kind of conversation that might be the key to making sure that the pattern doesn't just repeat itself in the same way? I think so, and I was deliberate in terms of how I began the book and how I ended it. So outside of an introduction, I begin chapter one with Baldwin in this apartment chopping it up with these veteran student activists, the SNCC. So it's Stokely Carmichael who will become Kwamiture, Michael Thelwell, and Myriel Tillingas, right? Those students who were members of the National Action Group who had organized in Cambridge, Maryland, went down into the south and experienced raw terror. Baldwin knew what they had experienced, but I also end the book, right, with me trying to find Jimmy's grave and I can't find it. And there are these group of young, you know, young men, right, brown and black and this smoking loud. I mean, the weed is louder than anything I've ever smelled in my life, right, and it's loud. And I remember and I write this in the book because we couldn't find this because it's a sprawling cemetery. And we couldn't find, and they were like, well, maybe he's over there with Malcolm, you know, and they're suited, they're high. And so, and I was with David Baldwin's partner, Jimmy's brothers, the mother of David Baldwin's son and Carol Weinstein and Carol said, no, he's not over there. So we drive and come back and Baldwin was right behind the young folk all the time. He was right there. And so part of that framing deliberately was to say what's at stake here. What has always been at stake here and as a reader of Baldwin, you know this is how do we raise our babies. How do we ensure that they won't be all right. And so, and I should say this really quickly, Rob, the elsewhere chapter almost wasn't written. Because I was supposed to go to Istanbul. And I was like, bro, you're a critic of Donald Trump, you're going to go to Erdogan's Istanbul, you've lost your damn mind. And so, and then the Secretary, then the State Department issued its warnings and the like. And my editor wanted me to go and interview activists. And I was like, we're always extracting always going to them. Can I write something to them for them. And that's how the elsewhere chapter emerged to so. That's good. And I want to talk a bit about travel, because I think that's, yeah, it's a, it's a theme of Jimmy's life, but also of the book. Paris, London, Istanbul. Do you have to leave home to, to get perspective or it's clear that Jimmy Baldwin did, but you have to get some kind of distance, you know. There has to be some kind of distance. Excuse me, sorry. There has to be some kind of distance. The hazards of, of, of home. So there has to be some kind of distance in the sense that once relationship to the operations of power can can become blinkers. You can find yourself so ensnared by the way in which the society functions that you can't get the requisite distance to say anything about it critically. And so, in this sense, I'm like, I've drawn Edward Said and, and, and Michael Walzer as critics and there's something about inhabiting what say it would call this exilic space. But all of us can't afford to go to London or to Istanbul or Paris or the like. You damn sure can't travel up with $40 in your pocket like Baldwin did in 1948, you know. So what I try to suggest is that we have to figure out even within the spaces where you'd have it. Even within the country, how to create those that distance by by really, you know, finding an elsewhere in communities of love that allow you to laugh full belly last to cuss at the top of your lungs. People who got your back when your knees buckle, you know, those communities that aren't reducible to the gaze that's tried desperately to exist outside of it. So you need that distance but you don't necessarily have to leave the country to get it in my view. Right. One of the results of last summer's demonstrations. And it was great to see it happen so globally and then the UK. They were happening in places that we were surprised at so coastal towns and rural villages and people really with the conjunction of the pandemic as well. I have time, I think to engage and to suggest something about the future they wanted. But we ended up with a government responding by worrying about statutes. And a government that's responded by trying to ban critical race theory from our classrooms and the government that's responded by calling work on addressing racism as divisive. Now we've seen all this before, right? So it's not as if these are new responses. But there was a moment of mass mobilisation which seems to have dissipated from very, very quickly. And I wonder whether it's in elsewhere that we need to find the responses or come and draw some strength from what Jim Baldwin did despite his despair. Go ahead, I'm sorry. No, I think, I think, you know, I should say this very carefully. I mean, very, very clearly. America's original sin is not ours alone. It's also yours. You know, I keep saying this, you know America's original sin is not slavery. It's not the genocide of native peoples. Those are consequences. America's original sin is the belief that white people matter more than others. That's the price of the ticket. And that belief is not our possession alone. And so in these moments, right, when the colonists return to the metropole, right? When, you know, the movements of populations destabilise this idea of who and what the UK is, of who or what Berlin should be, or Germany should be, or the demographic system in the United States destabilise this idea that we should be a white nation in the vein of old Europe. There's going to be a reassertion of the lot. Always has been, always will be. Like you said, we've seen it before. And so I think the explosion in the face of what we saw after George Floyd's murder, right, people had to risk their lives to do that. And since then over 500,000 are dead in the US. So this is happening in the context of a global pandemic that's decimating black America. That's decimating native communities in the United States. Black and brown and poor people are dying disproportionately among that number. And so I don't know if it's dissipating. I think people are trying to survive. Right. And just yesterday, just yesterday, Rob, I don't know if you noticed, but they, they acquitted, they decided not to charge police officers in Rochester, New York, who put a hood over a man who was having a mental health crisis, and basically killed him. And they said he didn't die of asphyxiation. And if you believe that I got a cheap apartment in London to sell you right, but but but but the whole point is that we're still the celebrate. I mean, the anniversary of a model bears death was just this week, right, his mother is still grieving. So the reality that police are still killing us that's not gone away. It's just that folks are trying their damnedest to stay alive in the midst of a pandemic that's wiping us out. And that's just that's just real talk and some on a certain level. And I suppose my I suppose the despair that I experienced as a result of going back to the barricades time and time again. It needs at least some kind of soothing, some kind of balm to deal with what you describe as as the trauma. You do that incredibly well to to think about to think about trauma, but not be overwhelmed by it. Is this part of the challenge of any kind of activism. I've got to talk about the abomas and in part because I suppose we great admiration for for his skills as an orator. But it is far easier to love from this distance than he may have been in America. What happened there? I mean, what happened in terms of, you know, the way in which which the Obama story seems to be corrupted into the light? Well, it makes sense, though. You know, I mean, this is the very way in which, you know, representation works in these places, you know. It's an uncritical idea of representation, right? It can be literally deployed to arrest any significant changes. In my view, Obama's election has been one of the most devastating events in the history of African American politics. De-stabilizing it from the national level all the way down to the state level in various ways, and it has been trying to reconstitute itself over the last few years. And in some ways, Trumpism has accelerated that effort to reconstitute it after the demobilizing effects of the last of the eight years of Obama's administration. Now, some people will get angry at me for saying it, but I think it's actually true, right? Bob Moses, the great snick organizer, told me that one of the interesting things about having electoral processes as the object of one's organizing is that whether victory is attained or defeat, it ends up demobilizing your efforts. Because if you win, yay, and if you lose, ah. Right? So you get this, so part of what Obama has done or what he did or what the Obama phenomenon did was it wrapped clitinism in a particular kind of representational politics. And what we got still were a set of policies that tinkered around the edges but left in place deep wealth inequality. You know, Black Lives Matter didn't emerge, under George Bush, it emerged under Barack Obama. And we didn't get any substantive legislation that fundamentally addressed criminal justice reform. We didn't get any fundamental legislation to address police reform. Right? What we got are a series of lectures about how Black folks need to be responsible. You know, you think about the speech at Morehouse or the lectures to Black Lives Matter about the nature of politics and what does it mean to compromise in the life, right? So I think the short answer to your question and not to personalize it to the Obamas is to actually say that they represent the dangers of representational politics. It's not enough just to have different bodies, right, in high spaces and high places. That's baseline. It's not enough to just have representational forces, you need transformational forces in these places. And to my mind, outside of the symbolic significance which was important, you know, he wasn't a transformational personality. But let me say this too. My son grew up with the Obamas in the White House. He's 24 now. So for eight years of his life, that's, that was the image of his politics, right? But he also grew up with Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Ayanna Jones, Sandra Bland, you know, Casey Goodson, I can go down the line, right? The generation that grew up politically with Obama in the White House, they are kind of, I like to call them what it's not like, I call them the catastrophic generation. Mass shootings, global recession, one storm that's supposed to happen every hundred years are happening every other month. Credit card debt, student loan debt, surpassing credit card debt, global pandemic, economic economy and tax. Obama? Yeah, no, and very, very clear, just as the book was being published when, I don't know how to describe them, but the terrorists tried to take over the capital. It feels like beginning again would be a wise choice if it was simple, but clearly you're not saying beginning again is an easy task. No, because you know, in some ways, you know, what Baldwin so brilliantly laid bare for us is that the problem isn't us. It never has been. He says, I'm not an inward. I've never thought of myself as the inward. The question is, why do you need the inward in the first place? And until you answer that question, we will find ourselves here over and over and over again. And so part of part of the, I think part of the challenge of the book is that the spine of it is no name in the street. The anchor of the book is Baldwin trying to figure out how to pick up the pieces in the face of all of this trauma wound pain, the trail. How do we continue to push this damn boulder up the hill in the face of the unvarnished truth that white people cling to this idea they cling to this idea that they have to matter more than others. What do we do in the face of that? And one of the things that you suggest is to tell a different story. We've seen from here, but we've also had a response in terms of our media, seeing voices like Michaela Cole come forward, but also Ava de Verne and others who are transforming what television is doing and what Hollywood potentially could do. How many stories do we need to tell? We need to saturate with different kinds of stories because we're having it to use Ralph Ellison's phrase on the lower frequencies we're speaking for you. There's a sense in which what's happening at the level of culture on the ground. This is the source of the terror and panic. At least in the United States. I don't know what's happening in the UK, but people are going on TikTok and seeing all of these interracial couples. They're looking at these racially ambiguous children on television commercials. They're hearing sounds. They're seeing the change in aesthetics. They see the browning of America evidencing itself already in popular cultural forms and in mass media, and they don't know what the hell to do. Part of what we have to do is begin to narrate. It's like on HBO in the United States and you're watching the watchlet. It begins with the Tulsa massacre as the ground of this comic, this DC comic. Folk are like, what the hell is this? What is that? Or you watch blindspotting? I can just pull up all of these films that have been coming. Or even Judas and the Messiah. Black Messiah. We need to tell ourselves different stories. But at the very moment in which we do, guess what they do? They publish the 1776 commission in response to the 1619 project. The lie constantly reasserts itself because people believe, Rob, I think, and you tell me if I'm wrong. I think at least the white Americans believe that without this idea of whiteness, they would be lost. But they would have no identity. And I think that's just wrong. I have the urge to impose, and I don't see another group to stop the conversation about their own identity. But it has also made my identity much more important. In some ways, it feels like a response. It feels like there's a relationship between imposing and closing down the space between other identities. That has an impact back on the oppressor. And that feels very boring. Yeah, indeed. I should remind people to ask questions. I'm sure there are plenty of questions emerging, but if you don't get in soon, you may not get in. That's a bit of a warning. You've already mentioned this, but who's the book for? Well, I mean, like I said, on one level is for me. On another level, it's for the young activists. And on another level, it's for the America that is desperately trying to be born. I think it's those three, yeah. And what I appreciated on reading it was that you managed to maintain a level of hope, that there is a potential for a new Jerusalem. I wonder, I don't get that sense of hope in British politics, but maybe that's just my positioning on it. But you've got a new president, and there's clearly a relationship with the Obama administration. And a lot of President Biden's initial allure is that it's not Donald Trump, a major bonus. But also, it feels quite an avuncular approach, which allows him to suggest compromise and that we should all come together. Yeah, as you said, yesterday courts are not making prosecutions. Jacob Blake, another case that seems to leave the police blameless. And I wonder how is the kind of rhetoric that's coming out of White House now enough, or what people need something else quite soon? Or will we just see people entrenched in these camps? Look, there are at least four political currents in the United States right now. The Civil War in the Republican Party is what people are reporting about right now, but there remains deep fissures within the Democratic Party. And the progressive wing of the party, whatever we might mean by that word, is continuing to bring pressure to bear. And we have to understand Joe Biden for who he is. He comes out of that DLC Democratic Leadership Council kind of crew. He is in that vein, but his inauguration, he used language that I've never heard a president ever use. He used the phrase white supremacy. I'll give him that. But whenever I hear bipartisanship or unity under these circumstances, I grab my wallet, I don't know what's going on. And he's already started to cave on student loan forgiveness. There was some willingness, at least he signaled some willingness to give up on a living wage on the fight for $15 minimum wage. We've got a really serious backlash push from the progressive, the left wing of the party. But look, politicians inevitably disappoint. That's what they do. And if we're going to change this country, we cannot expect it to happen by way of them. In the US, all of the innovation must happen at the local level. If there's going to be serious reform of policing, it's going to have to happen at the local and state level. If there's going to be serious reform of education, it's going to have to happen at the local level and the like. So people have to continue to organize. And what we saw in Georgia, what we saw in Texas at times, the demographic shifts are beginning to make themselves known politically in spaces that people didn't think were going to turn until another 10, 15 years down the road. So Biden, look, I don't want us to trade one fantasy for another. Trump is a fantasy. Trump was a fantasy. And I don't want Biden and Harris to make us, you know, to suddenly we affirm the goodness of America and a republic goes back to sleep. That would be disastrous because prepare yourself. He will inevitably disappoint. It's a matter of time. It doesn't matter of time. I wonder if we go to some of the questions. Really about that transition to this new Jerusalem, because I'm fascinated by it. But I'm also really conscious about talk of decolonization that we talk about here regularly. Every step is thought. It's clear that people would rather talk about public items that you would rather talk about. Would rather do anything to obfuscate and to suggest that the demands for change are unreasonable. And I wonder the message from the book is about elsewhere, but also about different stories. And I wonder how we keep our imaginations primed. How is it that we can keep dreaming, keep imagining that different? That's such a great question. And I anticipated it, I think, in the book. I use this example of slavery. There's nothing about the condition of slavery that would lead one to believe that one's life could be otherwise, in the US in particular, because of the domestic reproduction of slavery. But there are these moments. So if you're going to avoid a certain kind of afro-pessimist conclusion, that social death defined the slave relationship, that the relation of domination is so total that the slave is socially dead, which you really can't make sense of, given what these enslaved people did after the end of slavery. Many of them just started walking, trying to find loved ones. I'm walking to Alabama. My sister was sold. I need to try to find her. My mother was sold. I need to try to find her. But in that moment of the opacity of one's condition, you look in the eye of someone, and just for a moment you see deep love. Or you hear, just for a moment, the sound of the innocence of children in the play. Even though you know the brutality of the regime is what it is, you see the love in the eyes, the flit of love in the eyes, the sound of innocence. And then that becomes an interesting sort of way, the conditions for the possibility of imagining one's life beyond this. Those experiences become experiences that help, that stand in the breach, that keep you from succumbing to a certain kind of fatalism. So here we are in this moment, and Baldwin is always insisting on this. And that is, we got to raise our babies in this. I can't, he'll even, even when he's exaggerating, I can't give up on, I can't despair. I can't be a writer if I despair. He'll say it that way. Or he'll say, right, we got to raise our babies. And so what do we see him do in these moments? He says, in the 1970 he said it. He said it in such a profound way, but you know, and he had just tried to commit suicide in 69. He's in Istanbul in 70. The Ebony reporter asks him about hope, and he drops that gem. Hope is invented every day. And so, and I keep explaining it to people, Rob, I said, if you got to invent hope every day, that means you trying to hold off despair every day. So you have to figure out how to swing your feet off the bed and plant it on the ground, plant it on the floor and get up. Getting up is a hopeful act in some ways, right? And so Baldwin, for me, has this undying faith in our capacity, your and my capacity to be otherwise. Even as he recognizes that we are disasters at the same time. And that's where the hope is located. That's where the possibility of the new Jerusalem can be found. In the fact that we can be, you know, as messed up as we are, we can actually be miraculous at times. Fantastic. Which is a perfect place to turn to the questions from the audience. I should definitely remember that as a way of framing. That's fantastic. So, you've got numerous questions. I'll just go with the top one. Sure. And this is a British library after all. So Farah, Farah Karam Cooper, Farah asks, what would James Baldwin say about the colonizing literature? It's just thinking in particular about Shakespeare. What would he say to those who think Shakespeare should no longer be taught? Oh, no. First of all, I don't want to anticipate anything that Jimmy would say, right? Who would dare do such a thing? What would Jimmy say about this? There's over 7000 pages of work, but in Randall Kenan's wonderful book, The Cross of Redemption, there's an essay that actually speaks directly to this, right? And it's titled, Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare. So I would urge you to read that, and then you can get a sense of what Jimmy actually thinks about it. But there's a sense in which Baldwin, even in No Name in the Street, he's going to say, at least have to have the moment where we can reject these folks. You can't stuff the West down my throat like Gerber's baby food. I've had to go through my moment of rejecting Walt Whitman such that I could read him for myself and possess him on my own terms. Just because it's your history, just because you determined that it is great, doesn't mean that I must accept it as such. So my reading of Shakespeare must come organically from my embrace of him. And Baldwin tells this story about how he came to understand the greatness of the Bard as it was. But that's really important, it seems to me. So this public history, this public memory debate that we're having, not only here in the States but in the UK as well. Question from Giselle. It's a big question, Giselle. There are lessons to learn. Do you think anything has improved since last year's demonstrations? I've been thinking about George Boyd's and Taylor's and Taylor's Day's murder. And secondly, in bigger terms, how do we solve racism? Do we use legislation? Will capitalism do it? Or is there something about the shaming of racism? Well, that last part is easy. Donald Trump was in so many ways, just as your Prime Minister is, shame doesn't work at all. So let's just put that aside. Even the moral shaming of the civil rights movement only took us so far. And that was the notion of redemptive suffering. So let me answer the first part first. And it seems to me that the judgment is still out about where we are. We've already seen, we've already heard the language of turning the page of unity, of appeals to bipartisanship, of allowing those who literally engaged in insurrection, who, I'm thinking about the Josh Hollies and the Ted Cruz's and the Republican Party, Donald Trump and all these folks who literally stoked the fires of insurrection to continue to have a say in how this country's governed just baffles the mind on a certain level. But I will say that there is an opening for improvement. That's a different way of answering. There's an opening. What it will look like will depend upon what we do now. So that's the answer to the first part. The second part is how do we eradicate? It's going to be a range of, remember that what we have to do is to, we have to finally get rid ourselves of the value gap. This belief that white people are valued more than others, organizes our social, political and economic lives. We have to uproot the habits that sustain it. And we have to discard the lies that allow us to believe that we're innocent of its deleterious effects. How we're going to do that, we're going to have to tell different stories, so we're going to have to re-narrate. And by a policy, because remember policy, policies produce the world that we live in. So policies must be the remedy to the world we live in. At least at the level of structures. So it's going to be a combination of folks, a combination of things, but at the end of the day it's going to be everyday ordinary people demanding a new world. It's going to be us doing that work. Jimmy was always really clear about, well, that's always really clear. And I'm understanding of his role as a poet. And there's a question by the Knowledge Network in Jess. He asked, who is today's poet of the revolution? Who do you think is writing to document our struggles as powerfully as James Baldwin did? Well, you know, there's, you know, that 1962 piece he wrote entitled as much truth as one could bear. Baltimore was engaged in this kind of impious act as one of the new young writers, you know, describing the shadow cast by Das Passos and Faulkner and all of those folks. And he says, you know, the simple truth, to be a great novelist, is that you must tell the truth and as much as he said, tell the truth as much as we can bear and then a bit more. So I don't want to sound impious that, you know, I'm writing a book with Baldwin. I think he's wonderful. I think he's great. But I don't want to use him as the measure for who's truth telling today. We don't need today's James Baldwin. We need today's Sarah Broome. We need today's Imani Perry. We need today's Ibram Kendi. We need today, you know, you know, though I think there are a host of writers in the US and I suspect in the UK and in Canada, I'm sure, who are doing some extraordinary work around this issue. I have some of them up in myself now. And they have their own voices. But you know, the moment we name someone as the new Baldwin, think about what has happened the time that he's the coach. And you read, I read coach and I would think, oh my God, Jimmy would lose his mind reading between the world and me. He would be horrified by the conclusions drawn in me. Well, let me say it differently, I'm horrified by the conclusions drawn in between the world and me. That's how I would begin to answer that question. But there are a lot of poets out there who are doing some amazing work in the broad sense of what we mean by poets. Yeah, including the inauguration. Oh, Amanda Worm, right, exactly. There was a question that emerged when I told my colleagues that I was speaking. And that's about James Baldwin's sexuality and how that shaped his thinking and his writing. And whether, in some ways, that notion of having a minority sexuality may have helped get that distance, find it elsewhere. Yeah, yeah. It's one of my biggest regrets with Begin Again. And in some ways, I was being a little too deferential to Baldwin. You know, it's like that moment in the short film from another place as he's describing, you know, I've loved men and women and he has the Muslim prayer beads as he's moving. It's a beautiful scene with his gorgeous hands and he's basically stating that he has this kind of purity and commitment to the privacy of his own love life, right? He makes this moment. And then there's these moments in the last interview with Quincy Trwp where he's being interviewed by some gay activist in the United States. And the activist doesn't understand how Baldwin's destabilizing the categories that the activist is trying to fix him in. And so what I tried to do in Begin Again was to figure out how sexuality, how Baldwin's sexuality could become part of the oxygen of the book. Not a kind of theorized element in the account but just a part of his life. So there are moments, King is uncomfortable, right? Elders Cleaver doesn't understand. Baldwin understood in the context of the South the relationship between sex and power and desire and the like. But Baldwin's misfittedness is at the heart of it all, right? I say it, I put it this way and I know for older generation folk they get upset about this language. But Baldwin queers every space he inhabits, right? He throws it in a different kind of relief, Rob, it seems to me. He queers black politics, he queers black literature. And when I remember interviewing Angela Davis about this, she was like, in so many ways, Eddie, he was out there all by himself. So you just think about it, the second book is Giovanni's Room, the second novel. After dropping, go tell it on the mountain, you're going to drop Giovanni's Room in 1956? I mean, so I think, so the short answer to the question is absolutely, right? But it's complicated. The way in which Baldwin renders it, whether we're reading The Male Prison or whether we're reading Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood, it's complicated. And I couldn't quite figure it out narratively in the book. And I should take every hit known to man for it. If that makes sense. There are others who've done far worse. And I really appreciate it in fact, the story that you bring to light about the assault that you've experienced. But it's like that moment in I'm Not Your Negro, there's a moment in the film, because as much as I love Raul Peck, it's just completely redacted from the film. So you're going to find out, he's going to find out that Medgar Evers has been killed and he's driving, well he's in the car with Lucien. I mean, come on. What are we going to do with these things? But I'm sorry, I ain't a reference. I suppose somebody works with a group and he was trying to reappraise and sending to another history that has been hidden. It's important that we don't ignore. Oh, absolutely. And part of, again, the way in which I was trying to grapple with it, how do I make it, you know, because Baldwin is so ahead of his times, right? He's already reaching for a language of androgyny. I think the way in which we use our pronouns, it fits precisely with how he's trying to destabilise these categories, non-gender conforming. There are languages that we have that weren't available to him, but we have them precisely because of what he did and how he did it, if that makes sense. Fantastic. We're running out of time. Oh, Lord, I'm sorry, I'm running out of time. No, no, no. It's been great. I've been in trouble and I thought we could go on for hours, but I'm sure you've got things that you need to get on with this afternoon. I just want to say thank you for this book and a reminder that people are on slightly different screens and I think everyone else has, but if you press on the tab, you can buy a copy of this. I won't suggest that you do. Thank you. And thanks for the conversation. It's been enlightening and enthusing and all the things, the conversation about Jane Baldwin and our current policy should be. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you. I think it's time back to Jonah. Jonah, right? Yeah. Thank you very much, Rob Berkley, and also a very special thank you to our very special guest, Dr Eddie Claude. Thank you, our lovely audience, for joining us this evening and a very special thank you to those of you from the Living Knowledge Network who joined us from libraries across the UK. Do remember to send us your feedback. Your feedback really is important to us and do have a look at the Bookshop tab, which will offer you an opportunity for you to get hold of Dr Claude's book. If you want to find out more information about other events we've got coming and we've got planned, then have a look at the British Library Watson pages on our website. Once again, thank you guys so much for being with us this evening. Thank you.