James Baldwin broke me open. He wounded my heart to set it free. He took a worldview I’d inherited and defended without ever examining and he burned it to cinders of it with a few simple truths.

His idea of innocence changed everything for me. Innocence as a moral fantasy. Innocence as a phantasmogoric shield. Innocence as the story white America tells itself so it can feel clean while ugly history keeps doing its work. My innocence was not ignorance, it was the willful evasion of truth. Understanding the difference was crucial.

Once that clicked, I couldn’t go back. I saw how often innocence stands in for courage, how often good intentions replace responsibility. I saw how much of my own comfort depended on not knowing too much, not looking too closely at what I wasn’t capable of accepting.

That was a brutal awakening. It cost me a version of myself I once thought was good and innocent. But it gave me something infinitely better in return—the ability to endure reality without the constant discomfort of incongruence. I wouldn’t trade that for any illusion of being innocent again.

Happy Black History Month.