1/ It is James Baldwin's birthday. There are so many pieces by Baldwin worth reading, but you might pick up The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction or The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. One can never go wrong with The Fire Next Time!! You might have a read of…

2/ …Nick Buccola's ( @buccola_nick) wonderful book The Fire is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, and the debate over Race in America or Eddie's Glaude's ( @esglaude) soul-stirring Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our own Time.

3/ If Americans read it carefully, we should find ourselves in pieces with some guidance on how to make ourselves whole and new. But why are we so drawn to Baldwin these days? These two books have answers. I share some of them.

4/ I think it is Baldwin's brutal honesty about America at a moment when many folks are interested in pulling back the curtain. That honesty carries a darker possible truth about our condition.

5/ Baldwin wanted us to confront the mythos of American redemption and the persistence of black pain.

6/ What does it mean--what does it really mean--to remain committed to America as a place of aspirations, a place that is always working to be better than what it is (we hope), amid the history of black pain?

7/ What does it mean to live with the horror of one's past, without the illusions that improvement (or perfection) might invite? These are tough questions to confront because they ask us to step behind our institutions and our laws and to look at ourselves.

8/ The mirror is great when you like what you see, but it is a different matter when what is looking back at you is morally and politically ugly.

9/ And yet Baldwin insisted that to address these two questions we must abandon our quest to measure progress based on its success in achieving redemption from the sins of white supremacy and racial domination.

10/ And the reason we must abandon this quest is simple, for Baldwin: the deed of white supremacy, he would come to see, is irrevocable. Our society bears the imprimatur of white supremacy's horror.

11/ So what Baldwin does is to try and make that truth something for which we are responsible and something to which we must be responsive.

12/ Let us construct our agency and freedom in response to a fundamental failure of the country--to construct ourselves in light of being responsive to that failure.

13/ You see, this would keep alive our ability to properly listen, see, and feel the ways that past lives in our present moment.

14/ But this way of thinking of our agency--our freedom--also means that for Baldwin even our positive responses to dismantling white supremacy only make sense because we remember the nation's constant attraction to racial disregard. This is what leads to that unsettling…

15/ …conclusion I mentioned earlier, but one from which we cannot be extricated: black Americans must always look on their white counterparts with suspicion and white Americans must always look on their antiracist activities and that of the country with doubt.

16/ With this, we do not overcome the ever-present danger of racial disregard, but we may confound its workings. This is a tough pill to swallow. But it is, to my mind, Baldwin's enduring gift. So Happy Birthday Jimmy.

17/ And even if we don't listen, you said it, and you said it true.