Baldwin's airing of the dirty laundry of our American family is no less discomfiting for all that it was written more than 50 years ago. "White Americans have contented themselves with gestures that are now described as 'tokenism.' For hard example, white Americans congratulate themselves on the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in the schools; they suppose, in spite of the mountain of evidence that has accumulated to the contrary, that this was proof of a change of heart." How else to view the Obama presidency today, in 2017, but as cast in the shadow of that ever-growing mountain?

Not gonna lie: this was a challenge to my understanding. Baldwin's style is rooted in Black American Christian pastoral oratory, and though I don't think he depends on Christian theology, I do think there is an implicitly Christian ethics -- one that centers around a particular conception of "love" -- which made his analysis hard for me to comprehend. Or it may be that as a white liberal I am reluctant to see my face in the mirror he holds up.

"All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."