How Much Longer Can The Politics Of Grievance Sustain Itself?

I started reading James Baldwin in college, as a politically curious renegade-in-training. What appealed to me was his deeply philosophical outlook on race in America, the beauty of his prose, and how he brought it all to bear in his writing about the pop culture of his day. Like so many young critics over the generations, I was greatly inspired by the way he wrote about movies, books, and music, assaying their aesthetic merits as well as their political weight.

If there was one thing I bumped my head against with Baldwin back then, it was of his analysis of this "moral question" of America: basically, why did this country invent something called "the nigger"—the other—and how long would it decide to hold onto the idea at the expense of the nation's very soul and therefore its prospects of survival? How long could it hold this moral rot within itself?

It is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger who they have maligned so long. What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a “nigger” in the first place, because I’m not a nigger, I’m a man. But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need him. ... If I’m not the nigger here and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it is able to ask that question.

— James Baldwin