Throughline - James Baldwin's Shadow (Throwback)

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

James Baldwin believed that America has been lying to itself since its founding. An insightful commentator on Black identity, American democracy, and racism, he saw something deep and ugly and stubborn in American culture, and never hesitated to call it by its name — to bear witness, regardless of what it cost him. As the United States continues to reckon with all aspects of its history, writer and professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. guides us through the meaning and purpose of James Baldwin's work, and how his words can help us navigate our current moment.For sponsor-free episodes of Throughline, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. A quick heads up before we get started. This episode contains some strong language, including a racial slur and mention of suicide. American people are able to accept the fact that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors were both white and black, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other.

Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream, because the people who are denied participation in it by their very presence will wreck it. And if that happens, it's a very grave moment for the West. Thank you. Hey, I'm Rand Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arab-Louie. And this week on ThruLine from NPR, we'd like to revisit an episode we think is timely. The shadow of James Baldwin. You may have noticed a quote making the rounds on social media.

It goes, not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. Those words were written by James Baldwin, whose voice you heard at the top, in an essay for the New York Times published in 1962. For many people, it rings as true today as it did then. The words have a power and clarity that seem to cut through time and space. It also shows how ideas reemerge in times when they seem most

needed. And actually, that's something we talk about a lot when we develop episodes, historical figures and their ideas. They inspire us, challenge our assumptions, and sometimes push us to ask questions we might not otherwise have asked. So what we're going to do is bring you with us into the conversations we have with historians and writers about historical figures and their philosophies. While we're going on a trip into the history of an idea or a person that's urgent and vital to understanding our world. And what better way than to look at the philosophy of James Baldwin,

a writer who used the power of his words to confront in order to connect, something we can relate to today. Baldwin was an insightful commentator on Black identity, American democracy, and racism. He saw something deep and ugly and stubborn in American culture, and he never hesitated to call it by its name, to bear witness, regardless of what it cost him. Baldwin was a Black man, he was gay, and he was active from the 1940s to his death in 1987.

He's still considered one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. His story is amazing. But that isn't what we're going to focus on in this episode. We're going to meet someone who spent his career diving into the meaning and purpose of James Baldwin's work, of his ideas. Someone who can help us see the world through his eyes. So that maybe, just maybe, we can gather a little more strength to face the things that must be changed in ourselves and our culture. Hello, my name is Lola Mangual-Valentin, calling from Charlotte, North Carolina. And you're listening to ThruLine from NPR with Roundup Del Sata and Realm Team Ada Bluey. Keep up the great work, guys.

This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Keep up the great work, guys. This message comes from NPR sponsor, the NPR Wine Club, a place to explore the exciting world of wine, including wines inspired by popular NPR shows, like weekend edition Cabernet. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, all purchases help support NPR programming and fund quality reporting developed to connect people to their communities and the world they live in. More at nprwineclub.org slash podcast.

Must be 21 or older to purchase. Support for NPR and the world they live in. More at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. Part One. Confronting the Lie. I started reading Baldwin seriously in graduate school. I fell in love with the sound of his voice, the power of his pen, his courage, the way he queered politics, how he inhabited his own misfittedness, the way in which he balanced his rage and love.

This is Eddie Glaude, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. I'm the author of Begin Again, James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. In 2018, Eddie was starting to write that book about Baldwin, but he was struggling. So he went to Heidelberg, Germany on a fellowship to try and figure it out. You know, I had been thinking I was going to write this intellectual biography of Baldwin. And I was having all of this trouble. The archives weren't yielding what I hoped they would yield.

I'm in Heidelberg, and I experienced this horrible scene. He'd just arrived at the train station when he saw something disturbingly familiar. Here's how he describes it in his book. As we entered the station, I heard screaming. People in front of us stood still and stared at some kind of commotion. I followed their eyes. Four policemen were piled on a black man. One officer had his knee in the man's back. The others twisted his arms. His pants were halfway down his legs. His bare ass was exposed. The police pressed his head

down into the concrete as if they were trying to leave the imprint of a leaf there. With each attempt to cuff him, the man let out a blood-curdling scream. All eyes were on him as the crowd stood by and watched intently, like spectators at a soccer game without any real attachment to the team's playing. I watched them as they watched the police and the black men. Their faces revealed nothing. They were inscrutable, at least to me. I had not been in Heidelberg for two hours, and police had a black man's face pressed down on the concrete with a knee in his back. The intensity of that scene snapped things into focus for Eddie.

He wasn't going to write an intellectual history of James Baldwin as he had originally planned. He was going to try and write with Baldwin, to try to put him in a deeper, more philosophical context and understand what his work offers us in our world. He went back to his room, and the words just started pouring out. And to do it, he had to call back to when he started reading James Baldwin more than 30 years earlier. And I knew that when I started reading him

in graduate school, that he was going to have me deal with my own traumas, my own wounds, my own pains. And I didn't have a philosophical language for that yet. He would, in effect, open me up. And then I would have to deal with the fact, and it is a disturbing fact in some ways, that I am and remain a vulnerable little boy.

But in order for me to say anything substantive about the world, I would have to confront that vulnerable little boy, you know. So just to establish, who had stories dancing around in his head, who was misfitted and the like, but whose mind was unbounded by his circumstance and his environment. Yet, he had to fight and work desperately to hold off what the world said about him and all of its ugliness. And he willed himself into becoming one of America's most amazing and accomplished writers. I think he's this mixture of Henry James, Malcolm X, and Freud. You know, this, you know, his writing demands a kind of deep sea dive. You know, he believes in the Socratic dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Before we can say anything about the world we inhabit, we need to say something about ourselves, because the messiness of the world is actually a reflection of the messiness of our interior lives. So there's a kind of demand for self-examination. That's part of the dilemma of being an American Negro, that one is a little bit colored and a little bit white. And not only in terms, in physical terms, but in the head and in the heart. And there are days, this is one of them, when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it.

To my mind, he is perhaps the most insightful critic of American democracy and race we've ever produced. I'm terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country, these people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don't think I'm human. And this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters. In the book, you kind of refer to this notion that there's a kind of lie at the center of America's self-image. And it's something that comes out in your voice and also in Baldwin's observations.

What is that lie? And how does it apply today? Yeah, so the lie is what I call the value gap. And that is the belief that white people matter more than others. And that belief evidences itself in our dispositions, our habits, our practices, our social and political and economic arrangements. And they're protected by the lies we tell ourselves. Baldwin in 1964 wrote an essay entitled The White Problem, and he has this wonderful passage, it's so poignant, where he, and I'm paraphrasing here, where he says, the founders of the country had a fatal flaw. They said that they were Christian, they said that they were

founding the nation on these principles, but yet they had chattel. They had us. And in order to justify the role that these chattel played in their lives, they had to basically say that these men and women were not human beings. Because if they weren't human beings, then no crime had been committed. And then here's the line, that lie is the basis of our present trouble. Mm-hmm. And so we tell ourselves this story that lie is the basis of our present trouble. And so we tell ourselves this story that we're the redeemer nation, that we're the shining city on the hill, as Ronald Reagan said. And we tell ourselves we're the example of democracy achieved as if we didn't do what we did in Haiti, as if we didn't do what we did in Cuba, or what we did in Puerto Rico,

or what we did in Hiroshima, what we did in Nagasaki, right? So we do all of that to protect our innocence. So Baldwin is insisting, you know, we have to confront the messiness of who we are, our ghastly failures, in order to release ourselves into being otherwise. And that, at the personal level, also must happen at the societal level. So we have to tell the truth about who we are and what we've done, but the lies get in the way. You know, those lies that, as you say, we tell ourselves personally and socially, like as a society, we tell ourselves. On the one hand, it's that sort of self-preservation reflex that we have on both that sort of micro and macro level.

And it just makes me think, you know, there's a certain vulnerability that it takes to own up to a lie and to look it straight in the eye and say, this is not the truth. And so in some ways, you know, that process of confrontation that you yourself, it seems, had to go through just to tackle this subject is also sort of a process of confrontation that Baldwin was saying the country needed to experience.

Yeah, you know, confrontation is also a sign of maturity, you know, where we've grown into the resources requisite to do it honestly. He has this line, and I'm paraphrasing again, you know, is that, you know, the trouble we're in is deeper than we thought because the trouble is in us. You know, you're so right to say that we have to confront it. It requires, you know, being willing to be vulnerable. There is this personal versus systemic tension in Baldwin's writings in that he deeply reflects

on the personal impacts that America as a country has had on individual people in terms of what it does to their self-confidence. And and that actually brings me to one of the quotes from your book that really, really stuck with me. I want to really I want to read it really quick for you, if that's OK. Sure. America and its racist assumptions had indelibly shaped who Baldwin was, but he insisted we are not the mere product of social forces. Each of us has a say in who we take ourselves to be. No matter what America said about him as a black person, Baldwin argued, he had the last word about who he was as a human being and as a black man. Just as we must examine our individual

experiences and the terrors that shape how we come to see ourselves together as a country, we must do the same. The two are bound together. What I love is while it's deeply personal, it's very much examining the systemic of the broader responsibility of the country, of its government, of its policies. Today, there seems to be a real tension between those things for many people, with the popularity of a book like Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, where there is this very direct pointing at individuals, around individual kind of responsibility. What do you think Baldwin would have made of that tension today? Well, you know, so one of the most powerful things about Baldwin is that he goes to the

interior not to stay there, but as the launching pad to go outward. So the interior is the basis for moving to a broader form of social criticism. Some people will move from social criticism to the interior, and you end up with this kind of narcissistic kind of account, where it's just simply about the individual and their own pain and suffering, right? For Jimmy, that individual pain, as early as reading notes of a native son, where you end with him at the funeral of his stepfather, with the birth of his youngest sister,

and him leaving to get ready to go to Paris, and of course, the riots in New York. So there's a way in which the autobiographical is the kind of point of entry to the broader social context. I think that's really important in our own moment, because we live in a moment that's so driven by our own individual brands, right? You know, our social media platforms or micro reality shows, right? It's very difficult for us to move outside of our own selves into a broader understanding of our relation,

genuine relationship with others. You know, what would he make of something like white fragility? You know, what would he make of something like how to be an anti-racist? Look, those sorts of books have their place, but we're talking about something deeper. Jim, what do you

see deep in the recesses of your own mind as the future of our nation? Well, I'm both glad and sorry you asked me that question, but I'll do my best to answer it. I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive.

To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. When Jimmy says choose life, don't wallow in the illusion. Don't settle for safety. That's not about a how-to manual. That's not about a corporate strategy for dealing with difference in your midst. The point here is to choose life is a deeper existential question about who do you take yourself to be. Now the artist, no matter how he sounds,

is by definition a religious man believing that we can create and transcend all our gods. That it is entirely up to us, it is the work of human beings, to make the world more human. We travel and we move around the surfaces because we're afraid of what's in the dark cellar. We don't want to look the terror squarely in the face. But you know, America's like Never Never Land.

You know, we all want to be lost boys and girls where we don't want to be responsible or accountable. We'd rather be safe and secure in our innocence. One of the things which most afflicts this country is that white people don't know who they are or where they come from. That's why you think I'm a problem. But I am not the problem. Your history is.

And as long as you pretend you don't know your history, you're going to be the prisoner of it. And, you know, it's that moment in Baldwin's The Fire Next Time where he says people either don't know or they don't want to admit, in effect, what's happened to thousands and thousands of their countrymen. And he said, you can't be innocent in the face of that. The innocence is the crime. When, quote unquote, white people talk about progress in relation to Black people, all they are saying and all they can possibly mean by the word progress is how quickly and how thoroughly I become white. I don't want to become white. I want to grow up, and so should you. So America's not unique in its sins,

right? We may be unique in the bribe and pays a heavy price. This is Charlene Reese from Mesquite, Texas, and you're listening to ThruLines from NPR. We just want to take a moment to shout out our ThruLine Plus subscribers. Thank you so much for your support. If you don't already know, subscribing to ThruLine Plus means you get to listen to our show without any sponsor breaks. Thank you. Part 2. The Bribe. During the 1960s, different groups emerged in the movement for Black liberation and civil rights. There was the nonviolent Direct Action Wing of the movement, headed by groups like SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and people like Martin Luther King and John Lewis. And then there was the more radical wing, often called the Black Power Movement, with groups like the Black Panthers who vowed to defend themselves and their communities with arms if necessary. They were painted as extremist and dangerous

by much of the mainstream media. And James Baldwin, who was a well-known figure by this point, kind of had a choice to make. Clearly pick a side or potentially lose support from the mainstream. Sometimes you got to sing off key to be heard, you know? When everyone was turning their backs on Black Power, Baldwin didn't.

And he knew the cost. He should have won a Nobel a long time ago. He knew the cost. If we were Irish, if we were Jewish, if we were Poles, if we had, in fact, in your mind, a frame of reference, our heroes would be your heroes too. Nat Turner would be a hero for you instead of a threat. Malcolm X might still be alive.

He turned his back on the New York intellectuals, all of those white writers, the chattering classes of New York that gave him the platform, that projected him out. He turned his back on them. But, you know, when the Israelis pick up guns, or the Poles, or the Irish, or any white man in the world, says, give me liberty or give me death, the entire white world applauds.

When a black man says exactly the same thing, word for word, he is judged a criminal and treated like one, and everything possible is done to make an example of this bad nigger so they won't be any more like him. When he told those young college students at Howard University in 1963, if you promise your elder brother that you will never believe what the world saying about, it says about you, I promise you that you will never believe what the world saying about it says

about you i promise you that i will never betray you and even when they question his manhood his sexuality right his dedication to black folk he never betrayed him that doesn't mean he wasn't critical he understood from whence these young folk came And he was trying to tell a story about how their eyes darkened, how these once holy fools who risked everything to transform the country and the bowels of the South as they organized nonviolently. These same children were now screaming black power and burning cities down. He said, no, no, these children are ours. We produced them. So what does it mean to do that in this moment? It's so, I'm sorry, I'm getting so emotional, I guess, passionate about it.

Because we're constantly faced with taking the bribe. Jimmy, he could have taken the bribe. And what is the bribe? The bribe is your silence. The bribe is, you know, just pursue your craft and make your money. The bribe is to adjust yourself to injustice. And then in the context of the world in which we inhabit, that bribe involves the deformation of attention. So we start producing work that doesn't capture folks' attention.

It actually becomes a part of this white noise that leaves folks' eyes blank. It doesn't force them to do much. I'm sorry. No, no, don't apologize. I mean, there's something in that emotion that you're expressing, just the literal feelings that are bubbling up that like come through in so many of Baldwin's writings, right?

Like he had so much emotion packed into what he was saying because of the things he was seeing, right? And he was angry. And I wonder what you make of that anger and how it related to the country's anger. I mean, was he channeling it? You know, in an interview in 1968 in Esquire, the reporter is asking him, how do we get Black people to cool it? He says, it's not for them to get, it's not for us to cool. He said, but aren't you dying? You know, but aren't you the ones dying? And he responds, no, we're just the ones dying the fastest. And the reporter didn't quite get what he was saying. We tend to think of the Black Power Movement and the Civil Rights Movement as if they were wholly separate, as if the people who

inhabited Black Power, who advocated for Black Power, weren't at some point risking their lives just a few years earlier engaged in nonviolent protest in Selma. Stokely Carmichael was one of the most brilliant nonviolent organizers in the movement. What happened to him? John Lewis wasn't just simply this man who risked everything on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He was the chairperson of SNCC from 1963 to 1966. But these movements are continuous. They're linked. The rage, the anger. If you weren't angry, what the hell was wrong with you? So I think for me, he gives me license to be rageful. And then he says, if you're not rageful, then what is wrong? What is wrong?

We have to go through this brook of fire to get to the other side. There's no going around it. Throughout the book, just to follow up on that, there is this feeling that while he holds that rage, as you just said, he's also capable of simultaneously understanding that the white citizens of the United States who are responsible for the state of, play a major role and responsible for the state of racism in the system in America. He also holds a deep love and a sense of brotherhood and sisterhood for those people.

And do you think part of the reason he was able to do that so well, beyond just his ability to write and think, was that he was a witness and not necessarily a participant in the sense that he wasn't an activist. He intentionally chose to be a witness, to bear witness, to document in a lot of ways what he was seeing. What does that tell us about kind of where, you know, many of us sit? And do you think that was what really enabled him to kind of really be able to balance those heavy emotions you know i i don't know um to be honest with you

it it there is a sense in which you know baldwin is is the poet in in the Emersonian sense. Baldwin never gave up on the fundamental sacrality of human being. We're all sacred. And then that line where he says, you know, I want us to do something unprecedented, and that is to create a self without the need for enemies. Oh, my Lord. Every time, I mean, that's just, I just love that line. So part of what he's saying, I know I'm going around in circles, he's saying that what white supremacy does, it not only causes all of this hell for me and how I have to raise my children and live my life, it is literally deforming and disfiguring the character of the people who embrace it. Your character is fundamentally affected by all of this.

Can't you see? I think that you and I might learn a great deal from each other. If you can overcome the curtain of my color, This country is mine, too. I paid as much for it as you. White means that you are European still. And black means that I'm African. And we both know, we've both been here too long. You can't go back to Ireland or Poland or England,

and I can't go back to Africa. And we will live here together, or we'll die here together. And it's not I am telling you, time is telling you. You will listen or you will perish. And what he's warning us is not to fall into the trap because if it disfigures them, if we buy into his logic, it will disfigure us. We can't release the trap, man. But we can't,

we also can't fall into this stuff of sentimentality either. But anyway. Jimmy. What James Baldwin can teach us about dealing with our loneliness when we come back. Hey, what's up? This is JC Williams calling from Zurich, Switzerland, and you're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Part 3. The Elsewheres Throughout his life, James Baldwin felt the solitude of being an outsider. He was a nomad, spending many years living abroad in France and other parts of Europe.

And whether it was because of the color of his skin, his sexuality, or his fiercely independent thinking, he could never escape being alone. And the more successful he became as a writer, the more the loneliness followed him. You know, the first thing I would say is that fame is a motherfucker. You know? But I chose the photo, the image image for the cover precisely for this reason. It comes from Sadat Pekin's haunting and beautiful short film, From Another Place. And he's sitting in an old tea house in Bebek in Istanbul. And in the film, he's surrounded by people, but his eyes betray the company.

He's looking elsewhere. He's in a fragile place in that moment in his life, even though he's in the company of others. Loneliness is his companion because he has to get his work done. But I also say that, you know, we have to find our elsewheres. That doesn't mean we have to retreat to some other country, but we certainly have to find communities of love, people, you know, who allow us to laugh full belly laughs, to rage, to be quirky, to be ourselves without cost. That people who hold us to account. We have to find the way to create the distance from the status quo so that we can develop resources to say no to the bribe as it comes to us over and over again. So we avoid not necessarily the existential condition of loneliness per se, because it is, how can I say this? What I've chosen to do with my life is by definition, by definition requires solitude.

It requires a kind of loneliness, especially when people want you to sing in the chorus and you think what they're singing is wrong. I experienced that over from 2008 to 2016 with the Obama administration. But that's another story. Tell us more. No, in democracy and Black, I was really critical of the Obama administration.

I wanted him to do more. And, you know, people were, many people were delighted to get invitations to the White House and they were delighted by the symbolism of a Black president. And I was more distraught by the symbolism of a Black president, and I was more distraught by what was happening to Black communities. And so I wrote a book and called him a confidence man in the line of Melville. I'm still not living that one down, along with some other things I wrote. But if you're going to speak the truth, if you're going to bear witness and make the suffering real, you're going to risk loneliness. But in the midst of it all, you have to find the community of love that will love you to death no matter your faults, who will give you the space to replenish so that you can join the fight again. You know what I love about the way that you're

talking about James Baldwin is, or Jimmy, you've referred to him as Jimmy a few times, is this sense of intimacy I feel listening to you talk about him, that you almost know him. I mean, do you feel that? I mean, his words resonate so much today as you're repeating them back to us. I mean, do you feel that he is, his message and his ideas, you know, apply just as much today as they did then? Oh, yeah. He got to the heart of the matter. You know, I call him Jimmy because his closest

friends called him Jimmy. And even though I never got to know him, I feel like, you know, he walks with me. He has been constantly present. I mean, I could talk about images flitting by from the side of my eye when I'm writing or when someone would show up in the middle of a lull and give me an interview that would suddenly take me in a different direction or a mistake being caught. It's like he was editing the book as I was writing it. It was wild. Now, all that to say is that that's my personal journey, but because he's the most, it's like reading de Tocqueville on American democracy. You go, wow, this man really got us. When you read Jimmy on American democracy and race, it's like that. It cuts even deeper. He got us. He understands the contradiction at the heart of the country. What is it you wanted me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost 60 years ago. I'm not going to live another 60 years. You've always told me it takes time. It's taken my father's time,

my mother's time, my uncle's time, my brother's and my sister's time, my niece's and my nephew's time. How much time do you want for your progress? Did he come out of the civil rights movement feeling hopeful. Because I look at the moment that we're in now, and there's a lot of potential for change. There's a lot of potential for a real kind of awareness, a reckoning with our history. But there's also a potential for things to continue as they've been. And I guess I wonder, is the ultimate kind of takeaway from Baldwin

a sense of hope in where the country's headed? You know, that's a great question. And in some ways, it's a question that is in part the motivation for writing the book. Because I focus on the later Jimmy Baldwins. I will focus on his later work for a reason. Because he witnessed the country turn its back on this liberalized movement. You know, something, they murdered the apostle of love. They assassinated Dr. King.

He collapsed. You know, tried to commit suicide in 69. So he was despairing, disillusioned, but he had to pick up the pieces. He had to bear witness because he also saw the country elect Ronald Reagan. And he, you know, Reagan for black activists during this period, was as bad, if not worse, than George Wallace. And they were calling him the Redeemer-in-Chief.

This was the man who led the hunt that destroyed the Black Panther Party. This was the man who put Angela Davis in effect on the FBI Most Wanted list. This was the man who despised the poor in California, as Baldwin put it. He became the avatar of all of those who rejected and resisted the great society and the civil rights movement. And the country elected him, this B-list Hollywood actor. He was their latest fantasy. Sounds like an echo. We live in a moment similar. And so Baldwin, in that moment, said the country had turned its back on it, on the possibility of being otherwise. And so he had to figure out how to pick up the pieces

so that we could push this damn boulder up the hill again. In 1970, an Ebony interviewer came to Istanbul while Baldwin was trying to pick up the pieces and working on No Name in the Street, and he asked him about hope. And Jimmy, who is barely keeping it together, although he's in a community of love, offers the advice that I found in the ruins and in the rubble that I offer us today.

Hope is invented every day. Hope is invented every day. And so I'll say this really quickly. There's reason to think that we are on the precipice of change, but there's no guarantee. But wherever human beings are, we at least have a chance. Because we're not only disasters, we're also miracles. We have to dare everything right now. We have to try to be otherwise. We have to risk everything to be otherwise. We have to figure out how to be together differently. I don't want to see another generation of Americans having to bear the burden of this lie.

To use an image that Baldwin used, you know, we're all midwives trying to give birth to a new America. In the past, every time we came to the moment in which the new America could be born, white supremacy was the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby's neck. And we let it snuff the life out of them. Let's be better midwives as we try to be better people. This is the demand that the artist makes of his society, which the society inevitably, unfailingly, and always resists. Resists because it knows that it could do it but prefers to believe that what it can see and touch is more real than what it knows

and feels at that moment, for example, when the baby is born. The role of the artist, the responsibility of the artist is to make you respect that moment above all other moments. To recognize that there is nothing under heaven, no creed and no flag and no cause, more important than the single human life. Eddie Glaude is a professor at Princeton University and author of Begin Again, James Baldwin's America and its urgent lessons for our own. If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988

to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. That's it for this week's show. I'm Ramtin Arablui. I'm Randabdin Fattah, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And. Jamie York. Lawrence Wu.

Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane. Kia Miyaka-Nutis. Victoria Whitley-Berry. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Julia Wool and Greta Pittinger from the NPR RAD team. Thanks also to Camille Smiley and Anya Grunman. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Also, we would love to hear from you.

This year on ThruLine, we'll be taking a close look at the past, present, and future of amendments to the U.S. Constitution. We'll be going back in time to tell the stories of why particular amendments were created, how they've been enforced, and why fights over their meaning continue to shape life in America. Tell us, is there a specific amendment you'd like to learn more about? Maybe it's the story behind an amendment you already find fascinating, something in the Bill of Rights that makes you scratch your head, or a proposed amendment that was never ratified. Whatever it is, let us know what you'd like to hear and why. Shoot us an email at ThruLine at NPR.org.

Again, it's ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening. This message comes from Grammarly. Back and forth communication at work is costly. That's why over 70,000 teams and 30 million people use Grammarly's AI to make their points clear the first time. Better writing, better results. Learn more at Grammarly.com slash enterprise.