"America is a possibility”: Professor Maurice Wallace on the legacy of slavery, Baldwin, and the sound of Black resistance
In a recent episode of Back in America, I had the privilege of speaking with Professor Maurice Wallace, a scholar of African American literature at Rutgers University and a deeply thoughtful voice on the cultural legacy of slavery, the richness of Black vernacular, and the enduring resonance of James Baldwin.
“America is a possibility,” Wallace told me. “It is a hope for an approach to a global community that exists in proximity, that values freedom, that understands how important interdependence is.”
That vision of America—as an idea in motion rather than a destination reached—frames our entire conversation. At a time when the national narrative is eager to “move on” from the past, Wallace insists that the ghosts of America’s original sin—slavery—are very much alive in its institutions, its culture, and its people.
“Every effort to move on will nevertheless remain haunted by the memory of a certain crime against humanity,” he said. “We’d love to pretend to be innocent in relationship to [slavery], but slavery is an extreme manifestation of a very American way of mismanaging power. If we don’t learn other ways of managing power, we’re doomed to keep repeating it.”
Baldwin as Muse and Witness
Wallace’s intellectual awakening began in a composition class at Washington University, when a professor handed him a copy of James Baldwin’s essay Notes of a Native Son. It wasn’t part of the syllabus—but it changed everything.
“It blew me away because I identified so strongly with it,” Wallace said. “I identified with a fraught father-son relationship at the time, and I identified with what it meant to be a Black subject in larger white society.”
That connection, rooted in both personal experience and literary power, still fuels Wallace’s scholarship today. He considers Baldwin not just a writer but a “model and a kind of muse,” someone whose work helped him recognize literature as both profession and calling.
In Baldwin, Wallace found more than style—he found rhythm. What he calls the “Black modernist soundscape” is central to his understanding of Baldwin’s craft.
“One reads with one’s ears as much as one reads with one’s eyes,” Wallace explained. “If you can imagine that words on the page are but approaches to sounds, then you have a different reading experience.”
The cadence, the timbre, the percussive punctuation—Baldwin’s long sentences, laced with carefully placed commas, function like gospel riffs. They aren’t just written; they’re performed.
“His writing… must be heard. Baldwin is a fantastically oral essayist and novelist.”
Slavery’s Echo in Today’s Injustice
But Wallace doesn’t dwell in abstraction. Our conversation moved directly from literary cadence to concrete injustice: mass incarceration, the failure of emancipation, and the sinister legacy of photographic technologies.
“Slavery is an extreme manifestation of a very American way of mismanaging power,” Wallace said again, emphatically.
He cites scholar Saidiya Hartman, who described the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation as a “non-event”—a legal shift that changed the language of freedom, not the lived experience of Black Americans. That continuity from enslavement to present-day exploitation is especially vivid in the criminal justice system.
“Mass incarceration… is the fulfillment, as it were, or the exploitation of that [13th Amendment] loophole. It is the warehousing of Black bodies… when the country doesn’t otherwise know what to do with these bodies.”
He encourages listeners to read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which lays bare the structural violence of America’s prison-industrial complex.
The Double-Edged Lens of Photography
Wallace also explored how photography—emerging alongside slavery in the 19th century—has both liberated and degraded Black identity. On one side, there’s Frederick Douglass, who sat for over a hundred portraits in an effort to redefine Black dignity. On the other, there’s Louis Agassiz, a Harvard scientist who used photography to argue for the inferiority of African-descended people by commissioning dehumanizing images of the enslaved.
“He performed science by having them undressed… as if to make of these people scientific objects,” Wallace said. “And almost as soon as he makes them scientific objects, it seems clear… that these objects could not have come from the same origins as the European scientists themselves.”
Photography, like so many technologies, is a weapon that cuts both ways.
Black Vernacular and the Spread of Cultural Sound
We also touched on the evolution and mainstreaming of Black American Vernacular English (AAVE). Wallace is clear-eyed about the influence of hip-hop and Black creativity on American speech today.
“There’s something about the creativity of Black speech… that is so engaging to Americans of all sorts that it is often the case that Black vernacular practices find their way into the wider sphere of public life.”
Wallace doesn’t automatically object when white students use AAVE. For many younger generations, he says, this language isn’t exotic—it’s the world they grew up in. But he notes a generational divide: what once felt like performance now often feels like fluency.
The Final Word: Read Baldwin
When asked what he hoped listeners would take away, Wallace didn’t hesitate.
“I would love people to return to reading Baldwin seriously and deeply. Read his essays. They couldn’t be any more relevant than they are today.”
Start with The Fire Next Time, he advised, Baldwin’s searing 1962 essay that opens with a letter to his nephew on the centennial of emancipation—a document Baldwin suggests came a century too soon.
Wallace leaves us with a final challenge: to not only read Baldwin, but to live according to the “higher values of ourselves as modern people… not just in America, but in the world.”
This is what Back in America is about: confronting myths, revisiting truths, and opening space for voices like Wallace’s—voices that ring with clarity, insight, and the rhythmic heartbeat of a history that still demands our attention.
Listen to the full interview with Professor Maurice Wallace on Back in America, published April 13, 2025. Available on all major podcast platforms.
Recommended reading:
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Works by Saidiya Hartman
Do you have thoughts on this conversation? Email me or reply to this newsletter. What does America mean to you?