Henry James studies today are as vibrant as they have ever been. Yet, no matter how great the fascination with the Jamesian text, a large number of readers cannot get rid of a sense of shame at their enjoyment of it. They feel that reading James is something of an evasion of the real work of the world. If earlier generations located that guilty feeling within the ivory tower that James's formal experimentation offered them, a technically more blase generation has associated its unease more often with the politically ambiguous, or plainly incorrect, stance the Master adopts. This is particularly true with regard to The American Scene, at present one of the hottest texts in James studies. Noting ‘the commonplace racial slurs punctuating’ that text, Bryan Washington, for instance, has a hard time resisting the book's ‘liberal, eminently civilized voice, sometimes sustained for pages at a time, [that] becomes so seductive, so powerful, that we forget (or want to forget) about the racial slurs, the cultural stereotypes …’. Washington regrets that the primary subject of his book, James Baldwin, succumbed to the seduction and appeared to undertake an ‘iterative valorization’ of Henry James throughout his work. ‘If such writing [as The American Scene's] is representative, symptomatic of James's nativism and of his elitism, then why did Baldwin, by contrast a progressive, bother to read him at all?’ Implicitly admitting an inability to come up with a satisfactory reply, Washington writes: ‘ There can be only speculation here, but … Baldwin almost certainly gave James the benefit of the doubt.’