What I Learned When I Went to Class

Reading James Baldwin the old-fashioned way

Mar 04, 2025

My job involves helping college students learn, but it’s been many years now since I’ve been in a classroom. Instead, I mostly help the educational apparatus run smoothly, which involves meetings, emails, and occasionally trying to make something new and interesting happen. The rhythm of higher ed jobs is inevitably predictable: there’s orientation, semesters, finals, and graduation – an unremarkable, but comfortably familiar narrative sequence.

But this year included an unexpected surprise: an opportunity to meet with my colleagues to read James Baldwin, whose one hundredth birthday fell at the start of this school year. My university’s Humanities Council issued a campus-wide initiative to form “Baldwin Circles” – groups of colleagues who agreed to convene throughout the year to discuss readings drawn from Baldwin’s published work.

Reading Baldwin with my colleagues has been memorable and exciting, and not just because I’m somehow only now reading Baldwin for the first time. It’s memorable because I’m reading a book – a real, hard copy book – and talking about it with other people, in the same room, in person.

In other words, I’m going to class.

I graduated from college in the nineties, when everything that we read was accessed through a printed page. But like so many others, I’ve mostly migrated to digital reading, save for the newspaper I get delivered on weekends and the novels I read for pleasure. Reading Baldwin the old-fashioned way took me back to my own college years, and how the physical experience of reading affects how we engage with a book’s ideas.

Having a hard copy book means you can underline things, write notes in the margins, dog ear a page you want to revisit – all of the “active reading” strategies we encourage undergraduates to employ, but which become more difficult with digital PDFs or e-books read online.

Coincidentally, I’ve also been reading Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World over the past couple of months. Wolf is a cognitive neuroscientist who studies how the brain navigates the reading process, and who argues that our brains process text differently when we read online. Her arguments are too complicated to summarize adequately here, but the gist is that digital reading makes it harder to read deeply, activating “an emotional dimension within the reading experience” which is “the capacity to communicate and to feel with another without moving an inch out of our private worlds.”1

I was thinking about these two writers in tandem, even though Wolf and Baldwin might appear to have little in common, at least at first glance. But Baldwin, like Wolf, also writes about the challenge of taking on another’s perspective – specifically, the reluctance of white Americans to acknowledge their complicity in the enduring project of white supremacy. There’s a quiet assent to the status quo that Baldwin wants his readers to apprehend, and in which perhaps to recognize themselves.

For her part, Wolf warns that the digital world threatens our shared ability to read in ways that encourage this kind of reflective engagement. When we read digitally, as you are no doubt reading this post, we are more prone to skim, our eyes glancing up and down a column of text, spotting key words and darting from one sentence to the next. We don’t stop and underline, thumb back to a dog-eared page, sit with a passage that struck us deeply. Yet this kind of reading is the form that is most alluring in a wired world, crowding out its old-fashioned progenitors.

I read Wolf’s book slower than I had intended, over a period of several weeks. Part of the reason it took me awhile is that I tend to read when I get into bed, in the twenty or thirty minutes I can hold my eyes open before they get heavy. But in these precious moments of reading, I’m inevitably making a choice: Between a hard copy book and my phone, which is where I get my news, including many publications that I would have read in hard copy fifteen or twenty years ago. I can easily slip into the comfortable lull created by the familiar, reflexive motion of my right thumb scrolling up and down on edge of my screen. And if I start to feel overwhelmed by the day’s news, I can move on over to Instagram and find some cute reels of puppies.

This is, of course, the very kind of digital “reading” that is stifling our democracy, lulling so many of us into cocoons of complacency or isolated retreats of like-minded enclaves. As Baldwin wrote more than six decades ago: “One hasn’t got to have an enormous military machine in order to be unfree when it’s simpler to be asleep, when it’s simpler to be apathetic, when it’s simpler, in fact, not to want to be free, not to think that something else is more important.”2

In spite of the decades and disciplines that divide them, both Baldwin and Wolf led me to the same conclusion: I’m the problem. Or at least, I recognize in myself the symptoms of the disease.

I realize the irony of making this confession in the digital forum which is Substack, one that I admittedly enjoy and which has led me to so many new writers that I now read and follow. I don’t want to give that up. And Wolf is clear-eyed that we won’t return to a world of exclusively paper, hard-copy reading.

But she does think we need to be aware of moments when our digital-reading brains are taking over, depriving us and our fellow citizens of opportunities and settings in which we can read carefully, consider arguments, pause to think and be challenged and changed. For this deep work, we need to come home to the original print medium in which most of us first learned to love and value reading.

I think that’s what I felt when I was with my colleagues in our first Baldwin Circle meeting – the joy of remembering what it was like to be in class with others, reflecting on ideas as we discovered them in a shared text. We weren’t using the reading as a jumping off point for discussing our individual experiences – a classic move of unprepared students – but building a shared reality from reading and pondering the same words.

In the midst of the familiar routine of the academic year, this made me excited to be in the field of education. It’s a remarkable thing to help students go to class, to read a book, to engage with a new perspective around a shared table.

And perhaps most importantly, it’s extraordinary — and vital — to make it possible for young people to confront head-on the injustices that continue to hamper our country’s ability to fulfill its promises. I may be a part of our current problems, but today’s students will be the ones who ultimately decide if and how they want to address them. In Baldwin’s words:

Now, this country is going to be transformed. It will not be transformed by an act of God, but by all of us, by you and me. I don’t believe any longer that we can afford to say that it is entirely out of our hands. We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.3

If you enjoyed this post, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. How do you balance hard-copy and online reading? Which forms do you prefer and why?

No Small Thing

Discussion about this post