Liberating Internalized Lies

Guidepost After Reading Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again

By Dr. Kendall McManus-Thomas

“To begin again is not merely to start over. It is to face what we have long avoided and choose truth, even when it costs us comfort.”

Dr. Kendall McManus-Thomas

Confronted and Exposed

Reading Dr. Eddie Glaude’s Begin Again demanded a confrontation with truths I had long buried, some I had never dared to verbalize. Through a profoundly elegant engagement with the late James Baldwin’s moral vision, Glaude offers both a mirror and a challenge. His concept of “the lie,” the enduring belief that white lives matter more than Black lives, operates as the text’s central premise and a haunting thread through America’s history.

The book is not only an analysis of racial injustice; it is an invitation to self-interrogation. Across its pages, I found myself examining how the lie has not only structured national systems but also infiltrated my own sense of worth, belonging, and truth.

Glaude describes the value gap as the structural mechanism that sustains the lie, the systemic belief that some lives inherently possess greater value than others. Across American history, that lie has justified slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, police brutality, and countless acts of state-sanctioned violence. Yet its most insidious power lies not in policy or law, but in its internalization, when those who are devalued begin to believe the myth themselves.

In reflecting on my own life, I recognized that this internalization had taken root within me and within the community that raised me. The lie was no longer just racial; it became cultural, sexual, and personal. Within many Black spaces, I witnessed the reproduction of hierarchy, how privilege, respectability, or heterosexuality became silent standards of worth.

Growing up in poverty, I absorbed the belief that wealth and status equaled value. Growing up gay in a deeply religious community, I internalized the message that heterosexual lives mattered more. These intertwined lies shaped how I moved through the world, shrinking, overperforming, and striving to prove that I was enough.

“Liberation begins the moment we stop asking for permission to be whole.”

Dr. Kendall McManus-Thomas

Communal Lies

The most painful realization was that the lie had not only oppressed us from the outside but had divided us from within. Baldwin’s insight that “the oppressed must never identify themselves with the oppressor” resonated with how I saw classism, colorism, and homophobia emerge inside my own community. We inherited the logic of hierarchy and unknowingly passed it forward.

When I attended a selective-admission high school far from my neighborhood, I became aware of privilege in a new way. Teachers offered more patience and attention to affluent students. Their confidence was rewarded; mine was questioned. I began to equate whiteness, wealth, and eloquence with worthiness.

Later, after Hurricane Katrina, I attended a predominantly white and wealthy school, and even at a private Catholic HBCU, class distinctions and respectability politics reappeared in subtler forms. Through each stage of my academic and professional life, I carried a quiet lie, that straight, affluent men possessed a social advantage that I lacked. That lie became impostor syndrome and, eventually, toxic perfectionism, the need to perform excellence flawlessly as a form of survival.

Glaude’s interpretation of Baldwin reminded me that the lie distorts how we see ourselves. Believing I had to be perfect to belong, I developed a silent anxiety, an inner policing of my every move. Mistakes felt dangerous. Vulnerability felt risky. Without mentors who reflected my experience, I learned to navigate alone, equating solitude with strength.

But perfectionism, I discovered, was a mask, a shield to hide the fear that I was not enough. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem We Wear the Mask captures this truth with haunting precision. I, too, wore the mask, smiling while silencing pain, excelling while concealing truth. When we internalize lies about our worth, we live in service of survival, not liberation.

Lies to Liberations

Baldwin’s concept of elsewhere, as Glaude interprets, is both a place and a state of being, a refuge that allows one to breathe beyond society’s suffocating expectations. Baldwin found his elsewhere in Paris, where distance offered clarity.

My elsewhere has been internal. I found it not in geography, but in the practice of returning inward, reclaiming my own humanity, sexuality, and self-love.

Hip-hop artist J. Cole captures this beautifully in his song Love Yours, reminding listeners that “there’s beauty in the struggle.” My struggle to unlearn the lie revealed a deeper truth: liberation begins when we stop negotiating our worth.

Inward, I found peace. Inward, I began again.

Glaude (2020) defines elsewhere as “that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe, to refuse adjustment and accommodation to the demands of society” (pp. 119–120). For me, elsewhere became the courageous pause, the refusal to measure myself against systems that were never built for my thriving.

“As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Marianne Williamson

To begin again is not only to free the self but to reimagine how we show up for others. Baldwin’s truth demands that personal liberation lead to communal transformation.

In my leadership, this means modeling authenticity over perfection, compassion over control, and truth over approval. To liberate myself from internalized lies is to challenge the myths that govern our institutions, myths about who belongs, who leads, and whose story matters.

Liberation, then, is not a private victory but a public responsibility. If I can stand in my full truth, perhaps others, students, colleagues, and community members, will dare to do the same.

Living in Liberation

Begin Again is not a text to read once; it is a mirror to revisit repeatedly. It confronts America’s national lies while daring each of us to confront our own. Through Glaude’s words, I found the courage to name my internalized lies, those that told me I had to be straight, perfect, or privileged to matter. In confronting them, I began to heal.

Liberation, I’ve learned, is not a single act of defiance but a daily practice of truth. To begin again is to wake each day choosing authenticity over assimilation, integrity over image, love over fear.

My journey now is to live as an embodiment of that truth, to model the freedom I once thought I had to earn. In doing so, I honor Baldwin’s charge, Glaude’s guidance, and my own becoming, to be unafraid of myself, and to believe, finally, that I matter, not more, not less, but fully and without condition.

References 

Glaude, E.S. (2020). Begin again: James Baldwin’s American and its urgent lessons for our own. Crown.  

Guidepost Discussion and Reflection Prompts

I. Making Meaning with Baldwin and Glaude

1. How does Dr. Mac’s interpretation of “the lie” expand Baldwin’s and Glaude’s understanding of its impact beyond race into sexuality, class, and internal identity?
2. Glaude describes “elsewhere” as a space of refusal. How does Dr. Mac’s inward elsewhere connect to Baldwin’s physical escape to Paris?
3. Glaude argues that “the lie” is not only structural but personal. What lies about yourself or your worth have you internalized, and how have they shaped your story?
4. How does the lie show up in your community or organization, not only across racial lines but through gender, sexuality, class, or respectability?
5. How does leadership change when it emerges from self-liberation rather than performance?

II. Engaging in Reflection

6. Which part of Dr. Mac’s reflection resonated most with your own journey toward authenticity or belonging, and why?
7. Dr. Mac connects internalized oppression to toxic perfectionism. How might this dynamic show up in your own professional or personal context?
8. What does it mean to begin again collectively? How can institutions reimagine themselves beyond symbolic inclusion toward authentic liberation?
9. In what ways does Dr. Mac’s discussion of leadership redefine what it means to be effective, authentic, or free in one’s work?
10. What forms of elsewhere might you or your community need to cultivate to sustain truth, healing, and growth?

III. Analyzing Craft, Critique, and Style

11. How does the essay blend personal narrative with scholarly analysis? Which rhetorical strategies make this effective or distinctive?
12. Analyze how cultural references (hip-hop, poetry, spiritual themes) reinforce philosophical and social arguments. What does this reveal about the narrative voice?
13. Compare Baldwin’s elsewhere to Dunbar’s mask. How do both metaphors express survival and resistance in oppressive systems?
14. How does the tone balance vulnerability with authority? Identify moments where this balance strengthens the argument.
15. Consider the closing passage. Does it serve as a call to action, a resolution, or an invitation to ongoing self-examination? What makes the ending impactful?