Um, wtf?

Why would someone say that about James Baldwin? His prose is painful and gorgeous and almost radically different from the sort of literary canon most of us think about when we think about classics.

In illuminating the Black experience, and the gay experience for that matter, he told important stories publishers of his era were loathe to touch. And he did it beautifully.

You’d have to have a real chip on your shoulder to read one of Baldwin’s novels and not be moved. You’d have to have a much bigger chip to dismiss him as a writer because someone you disagree with about racism quotes him.

Wow.