Today in class we discussed James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, most of which was published in The New Yorker in 1962. By way of introduction, I brought to class the news of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s National Book Award win last night; I offered that Coates, who was inspired by The Fire Next Time to write Between the World and Me, seems compelled by Baldwin’s charge to “accept one’s past—one’s history,” which, he says, “is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” This was an important passage for us today, and I made the case that Coates’s reporting in recent years (his case for reparations and a story about mass incarceration) has made good use of the past in service of the present.

I borrow the title of a recent story for Harper’s from a line of Baldwin’s, my own effort to make use of the past. Below is that important snippet from The Devil Finds Work. My story is “Our Common Trouble: In Search of Justice and Forgiveness in Florida.”

I write all this in advance of a public conversation just announced for the New School community. Below is the announcement from Dean Stephanie Browner, of Eugene Lang College.

This Monday, November 23rd in the Orozco Room at 5:30pm, two students and one professor will join me in facilitating an open conversation on racial justice/injustice.   All are welcome.

Given recent events on campuses around the country, and in recognition of conversations already underway in many venues here at The New School and elsewhere, we know this is just a start, an opening to a sustained dialogue focused on race, equality, and justice.  This will be a safe, open space for all members of our community to share, listen, and learn from one another.

Open Conversation

Monday, Nov. 23

5:30pm in Orozco

Room 712, 7th Floor

66 W. 12th Street

Please consider joining us on Monday for what I know will be an important discussion.  The discussion is open to the entire New School community.

Photo by Bettmann/Corbis