In it, Baldwin demanded a wholesale confrontation with a history that white America desperately avoided. The magazine signaled that something deep down had changed. The special issue of Ebony-black with a white face in profile, and a cover line announcing “The White Problem in America”-hit the stands as people took to the streets. In March, the world witnessed the brutality of Selma. In August 1965, Baldwin penned an essay for Ebony magazine titled “ The White Man’s Guilt,” a relentless indictment of white America. Just sadness, triggered by the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the violence exacted there. The distinctive sounds and smells of the region don’t find their way to the page. But one immediately gets the sense that, for him, the American South is primarily a landscape of tragic memories. This essay, like much of the book, reveals Cole’s extraordinary talent and his capacious mind. In Teju Cole’s brilliant new book of essays, Known and Strange Things, he writes of a trip to Selma, Ala. But apart from his marketability-that people can use him as an avatar of supposed seriousness-what does Baldwin offer us in this moment? What does he force us, as Americans, to confront? His words inspire on social media his phrases speak from T-shirts his face covers a throw pillow on Etsy.

To account for the latest disasters around race in this country-grief over the death of another black person at the hands of police the fact that we have vomited up the likes of Donald Trump-activists often reach for him.

Books by eddie glaude jr