Hello, everyone, I'm Gabi Starr, President of Pomona College, and I'm pleased to
welcome you to the first of several dialogues with
distinguished speakers from around the country. Conversations such as
these are truly important at this point in time, divisions are wide, and the only way to breach the divide is to build bridges of
empathy and understanding. Empathy does not come naturally, but it is a skill worth
cultivating, and joining us for this first conversation is
Professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. of Princeton University. He is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of
African American Studies. His most recent book, "Begin
Again: James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons
for our Own" explores the complex tangle of
race, trauma, and memory. He writes, quote, "Baldwin's
vision requires a confrontation with our history, with
slavery, Jim Crow segregation, whiteness, to overcome its hold on us, not to pause the greatness of America, but to establish the ground upon which to imagine the country anew," end quote. Professor Glaude, thank
you for joining us today. It is a true privilege to
be able to speak with you and to bring your voice to our
students and our community. - It's my pleasure, Madame President. I'm excited and honored. - [Gabi] Well, I'd like to open up by telling you a little bit about why your most recent book
really might resonate with some of our students. We have a series here
called "Know your History" at Pomona, and it was
launched a few years ago in order to make sure that our
current students understand what past struggles have to
tell us about the present, and so that we can learn from them, take tools from them, but also realize that in many ways, our
struggles are not unique. So a lot of students
have read James Baldwin, especially one of our first
year dialogue books was "If Beale Street Could Talk," and our Politics Department
hosted just last year a replay of the infamous debate between James Baldwin
and William F. Buckley. And I was wondering if you would just give us a few opening points
about what Baldwin has to teach us about the now. - Wow, I mean, I had an opportunity in a very intimate setting to talk with some Pomona students in Professor Susan
McWilliams Barndt's class. I actually sent her the manuscript of the book, so many of
the students got a chance to read it before it came out, or read chapters from it, which is great. But what does Baldwin teach us? I mean, so in so many
ways, Baldwin teaches us that the country has repeatedly failed to live up to its promise, that he's trying to imagine in the period I'm writing about, how
does one continue to fight for democracy in the
midst of repeated failure, in the midst of repeated betrayal? And so there's a sense in
which there's this demand for a certain kind of honesty
about that fact, right, that we have to confront
the ugliness of who we are and what we've done as a precondition to imagine ourselves otherwise, right? And I think, too, is to kind of really see that we have the possibility
to imagine ourselves otherwise, right, that we're not permanently docked in the station, as it were. So I think it's a kind
of honest confrontation with our past, in order to open up pathways
(indistinct) otherwise. But that's a hard tone, and that's a lesson we
need to learn, yeah. - [Gabi] So I was interested just now by your use of the word "we," repeatedly, and also your call that we, your statement that we failed
to live up to our promise. It seems in that statement,
that use of the word we, that it is a, you're calling us to
acknowledge a shared burden, even though it may be differentially felt by different individuals. You're not talking about an us or a them, or a we and a they. Could you clarify that a bit more for me- - Sure, sure, so I get it. It's a habit I get from
James Baldwin, in some ways. And so the we sometimes, at moments, reflects my attempt to
occupy the narrative voice of white people. In another moment, it might
be an insider discourse, where I'm just talking to black folk. And in another moment,
it's an aspirational we, it's a we that together, right, we as Americans can imagine
ourselves otherwise. But I think your initial
point is really important. I play on that for a reason, right, 'cause I don't want to, us and them binary, it isn't nuanced enough,
it isn't complex enough to my mind. And so I'm constantly reaching for a way of talking that implicates
us all in the mess, that there's no place, no pristine space from which to engage the current doings and sufferings of the country. So my we is always kind of, shall we say, doing
unsettling work. (laughs) - [Gabi] That's fascinating,
and one of the things that I think that I hear you say, besides that we have,
the fact that we need to all own up to our part in the present and our parts in the past, but that there's still maybe
a few things to celebrate. And in turning to James Baldwin,
there's certainly a flash of hope, but we're not
blaming James Baldwin for not having come as far
as we want to go, (laughs) right, or where even he
would think we should be. We are drawing on his past, his strength, his thoughts, in order to
find new possibilities. So could you say just a little bit about where discussions of race
stand in the United States, in terms of our past inheritance? And in particular, ways in which
current political discourse around race, or discourses
around race might match up or not match up with
those of Baldwin's time, like the conservatism
of William F. Buckley, or the neo-conservatism of the 1990s, or progressive values or left values now. - Well, I think it's a complicated story. I mean, America tells itself a story that, in some ways, secures
its innocence, right? And what I mean by that
is we have a set of myths and legends that America is
the shining city on the hill, that we are an example
of democracy achieved. And then we have these
moments of exception, right, whether it's our relationship with native peoples, our
relationship with black folk, our relationship with women, child labor. And then we kind of
narrate those exceptions within the context of this
progressive narrative, that America's always already on the road to a more perfect union. And so what that ideological
frame allows for, right, is a kind of
protection of our innocence, that even when we do ugly things, even when our ghastly
failures are constitutive of who we are, we're always on the road to a more perfect union. So this kind of perfectionism becomes this very efficient way to manage and contain the ugliness of race in our country and our country's history. And so there's this sense in which we like to narrate the story
from slavery to freedom, from the moment of
backsliding with Jim Crow, but then we have the explosion of democratic energy in
the mid 20th century. Then we have, now we're
just kind of trying our best to move forward for
a more multiracial society, a more just society. I think part of what we have to do is to challenge that self conception, so that we can deal with the fact that, what I call the value gap, this belief that white people matter
more than others shapes our dispositions and forms our characters, and in effect, distorts our conception of democracy. We can't become the kinds of people that our very idea of democracy requires, precisely because we cling to this notion that some people are
valued more than others. And I would want to
argue, President Starr, that this is the through line
of American history, right? That this belief that whiteness ought to lead to a certain kind of valuation, and those who are not white are degraded and disregarded, and that's
gonna look differently in the context of slavery than it would in the context of Jim Crow, than it would in the context of the mid 20th century, or even in the context of
our first black president. So what we're seeing and witnessing in our current moment, right,
is a kind of grappling, a kind of reckoning with the way in which the society
continues to be organized along the lines of the value gap, the lies that we tell in
order to protect ourselves from the reality of what it means to live in a society predicated upon such a thing in light of, and this
is a horrible sentence, but in light of the demographic shifts that are bringing pressure
to bear on our form of life. So race continues to
confound this democracy because we've never
really grappled with it in an honest way. - [Gabi] May I ask you a slightly provocative, and perhaps
some might hear this as a perverse question, has white supremacy
benefited white people? - Well, the answer to my
mind is materially yes, morally no. And what do I mean by that? There's a moment in Jefferson's notes, and it's a moment when
Jefferson gives voice to that famous formulation about his worry about God's judgment on
the nation for the sin of slavery, but that
famous formulation comes in a section when Jefferson is writing about habit formation. And he's talking about what happens to the child in the context of slavery who witnesses the brutality
of the institution, how his moral character is
deformed and disfigured by, in some ways, coming to a moral language in the context of an institution that is, that is predicated upon violence
and the abject condition of those who are called slaves. So the idea, and this is what
Baldwin insisted upon, right, those who engage in a
kind of willful ignorance about the circumstances of our country, those who insist on ignoring the reality of what we are actually doing to hundreds of thousands of people, simply because of the color of their skin,
they become monstrous. So he says, and this is the
controversial formulation, "I'd never thought of
myself as the N word. That's your invention,"
and so to paraphrase him, he says, "so I never thought
of myself of the N word. So until you come to terms
with why you needed the N word, I'll give it back to you. Who's really the N word here," he says. - [Gabi] This is fascinating. I want to stick with
this for just a moment. I was reading an editorial and I do not remember the author of it. But one of the points that
he was making was that combining the moral, spiritual,
and the material benefit from the perspective of class. And was essentially making the argument around the US Civil War
that you had poor white folk who died in order to preserve
the rights of slave holders to black bodies. And they accepted, implicitly, the idea that
white supremacy was a cause to die for. Now, some people would argue with that. This is what give and take is all about. But to me, it suggested
that there was some untapped discussion we need to have about the way in which the idea of white supremacy, meaning, in this case, the ability to own, manipulate, take the
wealth of that produced by other bodies, did not benefit the majority of white folks, in terms
of who was going to die for this cause. And in the context of your own work, there's some resonance there, I think, around the question of how we can have it in a penetrating dialogue
about race and class that is, does justice to both of those categories, as they are implicated
in this broader system of power within the United States, so- - Yeah. - [Gabi] I just would
love to hear your thoughts on how you can have a really productive friction
that comes out of that. - Yeah, it's a fascinating question. My initial instinct is just to reach for the late Stuart Hall's
formulation, and that is that race is the modality through
which class is experienced in the United States. So it becomes a very dangerous proposition to disentangle the two
in any substantive way. What does it mean to keep track of the material conditions
in folks' lives, where they reside, right,
in the broad scheme of the economy, and to understand how
racial logic saturates, right, every nook and
cranny of our way of life, such that poverty gets
experienced differently, in terms of whether, how one is raised. What might the wages
of whiteness afford one in this regard? So that's what we're
trying to grapple with in this place that, that is extraordinary in the convergence of three currents, that
is, the fragile experiment of democracy, unfettered
pursuit of surplus value, right, and the ideology
of white supremacy, all kind of mixed together. I'm from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, so it's kind of like a gumbo, a kind of succotash, as it were, if it makes sense. - [Gabi] Yeah, I'm from
the Gulf Coast of Florida, it tastes much the same. - Indeed, (laughs) indeed. - [Gabi] So... One of the things that I
think we're seeing right now, in terms of a resurgence of
populism in the United States, let's put the European context
aside for just a moment, but American populism
really puts a fine point on these intersections of race and class, and I have been watching
in the past several days, the several African American entertainment figures,
Lil Wayne, for example, or 50 Cent, have pointed out that they feel a kinship with the idea of, to use your terms, this pursuit of surplus value
that is the clarion call for some, one of the
presidential campaigns. Can you talk a little
bit about that desire that many African Americans
certainly may feel, and we're not all the same, obviously, but in terms of access
to the capital structure, and how that plays out for black men in particular? - Yeah, I mean, so Lil Wayne, Lil Pump, 50 Cent, and a range of, a couple of others
revealed their investments. Look, so you hit it right on the head. The black community is not monolithic. There's class stratification
within the community. Oftentimes, we want to read
our communities as homogenous, and then in a very ironic sort of way, invoke a kind of trickle down
economic philosophical frame, that if we create more
millionaire, black millionaires, that somehow that will trickle
down to the black poor. We need more Oprahs, more
Rob Johnsons, and the like, and then that somehow
will impact black folk who live in poor communities. That doesn't, it never pans
out, it doesn't make any sense, it's an old argument, right? It's an old kind of description,
reflective, in some ways, of the kind of racial
landscape that we're resisting. So to acknowledge that
black folk are diverse, that black people, black
communities are diverse is to say that there are
some who are invested in economic systems that
presuppose disposable people, that will allow for the
accumulation of resources for their own benefit and gain. And what we saw very clearly with 50 Cent and Lil Wayne is that they were worried about their tax brackets, right? That they were going to get taxed and that they would lose resources, money, as big government sought to engage in redistributive practices in order to address the deep wealth
inequality in the country. And so in that moment,
50 Cent and Lil Wayne and a host of others like
them exhibited the kind of selfishness that
threatens the polity, right? They are self interested agents in pursuit of their own aims and ends in competition and rivalry with others. That notion, what Wendy
Brown might describe as the political rationality
of neoliberalism, that notion eviscerates
any robust understanding of the public good. And just because one happens
to be black doesn't mean that one, by definition, right, isn't complicit or
capable of being complicit with that logic. So I think it's important
for us to understand, there's a kind of shorthand that we used to say back home and, "All your skin folk ain't
your kin folk," right? So what that formulation
really is trying to do is to disrupt a kind of
essentializing understanding of black communities
that make us apolitical. Or, to put it differently,
that makes us pre-political, in the sense that, by
virtue of you being black, you actually ought to hold a
particular sort of politics, when in fact, there's no
politics necessarily follows from being black, right? I mean, that's just the basic claim. At least from the-
(overlapping chattering) - [Gabi] Right, that
sort of broader humanity. In what you're saying
here, and in what I heard you say earlier, I'd ask you to draw on a little bit of your other expertise as someone who knows quite a lot about African American's neutrality, about religion and theology, and could you speak a little
bit to the relationships between spirituality and
African American activisms? Right now, the role of a
variety of black churches, and possibly even kinds
of coalitions across Christian groups, or
outside of Christian groups for various kinds of forms of social justice? - Sure, so even the use of
the word spirituality suggests a much more conflicted
environment, religious landscape, 'cause the idea of
spirituality pulls us out of these kind of denominational
kind of settings, this kind of Christocentric
orientation that's, in the African American community, is really Afro Protestant
centric, in certain sorts of ways. What we do know is that the complexity of black religious life continues to animate African American politics in very clear and complex ways. Within the context of Afro Protestantism, we've seen over the last
few decades the ascendance and hegemony of a certain
kind of prosperity gospel, where you have a kind of sew your seed
and reap your benefits, reap your blessing kind
of theological orientation that runs almost parallel with
the logic of neoliberalism, where your success or
failure is contingent upon your own doing, as it were. So there's that component,
but there's also a sense in which there are progressive
Christian voices out there that are trying to do some powerful work, and I'm thinking here of
Bishop Reverend William Barber and the Poor People's Campaign, and before that, Moral Majority. But we've seen some really
interesting tensions between black churches, in particular, and Black Lives Matter, as well as we've seen some
interesting synergies. And what this really reflects to me is a differentiated
public landscape, that black churches are no
longer the principal site for organizing and
mobilizing black communities. They continue to provide
brick and mortar, pre-COVID, but they're also the object of critique. I'm thinking about the
Easter Sunday protest in Ferguson of black
churches and the like. So the short answer is
that it's complex. (laughs) And we're seeing progressive voices within African American Christendom, for example, speak back to
those more conservative voices, and we're seeing, I think, the importance of black religiosity that goes
beyond black Christendom. I'm talking about Islam, I'm thinking about traditional African religions, and broader spirituality movements that are having an impact on folks who are trying to make
sense of loneliness, death, right, the kind of social anomie that comes with living in a place that's so obsessed with
greed and material influence. - [Gabi] Yes, and now also, that is so profoundly isolated,
as well as profoundly- - Yeah, indeed. - [Gabi] So when you
were pointing out that, certainly African Americans don't create a monolithic group, I think
one of the fascinating things about the social movement
surrounding Black Lives Matter has been, on one hand, the way in which that particular phrase, the power of its simplicity has created an umbrella. But it's still, you're talking about, again, an ideologically complex set of views, whether it's around- - Yeah. - [Gabi] Thing, whether it's
around economic security, whether it's around the ability of groups
within groups to survive, when you think about what
people who are transgender, transgender people of color are some of the most at-risk
individuals for violence. So could you talk a little bit about that heterogeneity
of the different threads within the larger umbrella of BLM and how they might be in
tension with one another, or in support of one another? - Absolutely, I think that's
such a wonderful observation. I tend to read Black Lives Matter as more of a sensibility than a movement, and historically, I liken
it to Black Power, right? If you think about back power as a kind of historical moment, there were a number of different political formations that fell under its description. So to think of Black Power as one thing is to make a mistake, right, that is to say, the politics of the Black
Panther Party are very different than the politics of the Nation of Islam, which is very different than the politics of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, or the League of Revolutionary Workers. I mean, we can go down the line, right? So there's a sense in which what Black Power enabled
was a kind of common sensibility about a reorientation, right, to one's blackness, and how one pursued it was very different. You could go the cultural
nationalist route, you could go the kind of
pan-African Marxist Leninist route. You could go a kind of
bourgeois nationalist route. All of that was happening
underneath that category, and so those of us who
studied Black Power, right, we see it very clearly. And I think Black Lives Matter in interesting ways parallels it, right? So you now have some folk, movement in Black Lives, they're out in the jungles of Brazil
studying Marxism, right? And they're arguing for a
fundamental transformation in the very ways in
which the economy works. They see capitalist modes of production presupposing
disposable people and understanding that
that presents a threat. That leaves some elements of it, right? Then you have reformists, right, who are basically liberal
in their orientation. I'm thinking about DeRay Mckesson, whom I love, and Brittany
Packnett Cunningham, whom I love as well, right? But what do you see, you
see them wanting to operate within the context and frame
of American liberalism, engaging in a kind of reform of policing and the like. So, and that's just two examples, moving from the left to the center right. And you can see this in
the debate around policing, whether people are talking
about criminal justice reform in terms of elimination
of qualified immunity, decriminalization of the criminal code, to defunding the police,
which really has everything, people deliberately
misunderstand that phrase. It's kind of bad faith in some ways, just like they deliberately
misunderstood Black Power, and just like they deliberately misunderstood
Freedom Now, right? Defund the police is actually
about making the claim that our budgets reflect what we value, and that cities should not
be allocating 60 to 70% of their budgets to policing in this, at least understood in this way. So folks are going from
that kind of argument to abolition, they're not the same thing. But what I just did presumes
the attribution of nuance. - [Gabi] Yes, you could argue that (background noise drowns out speaker) the front line in terms of
mental health calls, for example. - And we just saw that in
Philadelphia with Walter Wallace, right, they called 911 for an ambulance, the police showed up, and he's dead. And the mother had to beg for
the police not to kill him and they killed him, but
they called for an ambulance. The police showed up,
and he ended up dead. - [Gabi] A medical emergency that became something else, tragically. Would you care to comment a little bit, just in terms of these
questions of misunderstanding on the view, and I'm not gonna, I'll lead it to you, I'm not
saying it's a misunderstanding. I'm saying, what do you say to people who argue that various forms of education that focus on race,
like critical race theory, for example, promulgate racism,
rather than countering it? - Well, when I do engage the argument, 'cause oftentimes I just
dismiss it as bad faith, right? One of the things I try to do is to say it's an old argument. I can trace it back, in fact, I do in my very book, "Exodus!:
Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century
Black America," I show how debates around racial naming, should we call
ourselves American Africans, should we call ourselves colored, right, all of this, there was a
debate within the context of the black newspaper
"The Colored American" and "The Freedman's Journal" before that about should we use racial designations, because racial designations
actually reinforce the very ways in which race language,
right, operates in our lives, right, that race, by
definition, is racist. And you had responses, like, "Well, how then do we describe
the particular kinds of harms we are experiencing
if we don't have access to the language of race
to describe it," right? And so part of what I try
to do in these moments, say, this is an old argument that actually reflects an unwillingness to confront how race continues to organize our lives, and how race
shapes the distribution of advantage and disadvantage. So here a kind of epistemic
ignorance is being posited in order to sustain advantage. So to say, for example,
that critical race theory in the context of racial bias training, I'm thinking about the OMB memo, right, is somehow anti-American speaks volumes, in this sense, that it
acknowledges an ongoing refusal to confront the reality, right, of our doings and sufferings,
that means the realities of our past and present. And so whenever I hear that formulation, Madame President, it is an attempt to make an evasion sound reasonable. - [Gabi] May I ask you to
engage a little bit on that, saying, of course, you teach
at Princeton University. That does not mean you
are Princeton University. You teach at Princeton
University, which was named by the Department of Education
as subject to investigation for the president's acknowledgement that Princeton had participated in and replicated systemic racism. From your own perspective as a scholar, how do you think about systemic racism within educational institutions, and how do you think about undoing that? - Right, I mean, it's a very complicated. When we begin to talk
about institutional racism or structural racism, we're
talking about the ways in which inequalities are
reproduced in the very ways in which these institutions
are arranged, right? How admissions reflect ongoing practices of exclusion, how hiring among faculty reflect historical practices of exclusion. So when we think about this in the context of Princeton, my dad, who's brilliant, couldn't have gone to Princeton, right? Paul Robeson couldn't attend Princeton. Princeton is late in the game, in terms of admitting
African American students. And so when you go to our pre-rade or a P-rade during reunions,
you can actually see when black folks show
up at Princeton, right, as the classes march, and you're seeing really mid
20th century, 1950s, really, the first significant class
'60, then women show up, right? But it's very late in the game. And so what do you do when policy decisions for much of that institution's history
excluded a population? And then the institution
decides to undo the policy, but not address how the
policy found its way into the very structure of how
this institution functions? But you just started admitting black folk and brown folk and women, right? And so that requires a
different kind of assessment, right, a different kind of thinking. We've been trying to make this argument around faculty, for example,
just really quickly, I've been making this case, I've been confronting the
pipeline question over and over and over and over again. Well, one of the big issues for diversifying faculty is
the limited number of PhDs who are black or brown and the like. And on its face, that
seems to be true, right? There are just a limited
number who are not going to college, who are not
going to graduate school at the same rates, and the like. But what's interesting is
that it's also a matter of taste, what do you mean, Dr. Glaude? Well, if I'm in the social
sciences, particularly in a politics department
or a sociology department and that department is
quantitatively oriented, it thinks that the only serious social
science is social science that crunches numbers and the like, when we know that data shows
us that people of color and women tend to
gravitate in those fields to the qualitative subjects,
then it's not about pipeline or pool, it's about the
taste of the department. So how do we then disrupt that? What do we do proactively to disrupt it? At Princeton, if you bracket the expansion of African American studies
over the last four years, Princeton's numbers flat line, in terms of its
diversification of its faculty. They just flat line. So it requires, and this
is a long weighted answer, it requires an honest assessment of the history of exclusion,
which will then require, right, a deliberate effort to address it. If policy produced inequality, it will be policy that has to address it. It can't just happen on its own, although people want to
believe that it will. - [Gabi] It's whether one
naturalizes those distinctions, or sees them as culturally
produced and reproduced. I think often when we use that pipeline metaphor, and I say, "Well, if I'm
Exxon and I'm the means of exploration, as well as the pipeline, and the means of refinement, and the means of distribution, it's very difficult for me
to blame my own pipeline for its failures to transport"- - Oh, I'm gonna steal
that, Madame President, thank you so much. (laughs) - [Gabi] Petrochemicals bring
us good things sometimes. May I ask you a little bit, in terms of your own history, sir? I know you went to
Morehouse, and Morehouse is an extraordinary institution that has been supporting black men's
excellence for generations now. When you think about being at Princeton or our own students here, my
own students here at Pomona, what lessons can we take from Morehouse or other historically black
colleges, universities, for how we can help ensure the thriving of African American men
at our institutions? - That's such a great question. I experienced, I've been at Princeton now for 18 years as a professor,
and then I did my PhD at the place, so I've been at Princeton for a long time, and, or
affiliated with Princeton for a long time. And the thing that I've
witnessed and realized is that all too often, our black students are thankful to be there, or to be here. And what do I mean by that, right? That the way Princeton seems to function, and places like Princeton,
places like Pomona, is that our students
come into these places and they are grateful to be here and they don't seem to feel a sense of possession of the place. What Morehouse made me feel was that I am supposed to be wherever I am. It put a crown above my head
and gave me the resources to grow into it, gave me the confidence to be bold and to take risks. It insisted that I find my own voice. So in other words, I wasn't
a charity case at Morehouse. I never felt that it was
a philanthropic gesture. And even though I was on scholarship, even, I could tell the whole story, I went to Morehouse at the age of 16. If it wasn't for Dean Sterling Hudson, who I walked into his office and said, "I don't want to go back home." I was there for a summer science program in the 11th grade, "I don't
want to go back home," he gave me a scholarship,
I was early admit. There's all of that stuff,
they took a risk on me. I was in the office of my philosophy professor, Aaron Parker, who would ask me this
question every single day, "Eddie, what are you gonna
do with your life," right? It was just this amazing experience. My closest friends are there. Just to tell you, give you an idea, Paul Taylor, the Alton Jones
Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy
Department at Vanderbilt, Ronald Sullivan, Professor
of Law at Harvard, Charles McKinney, Chair of the Department of African American
Studies at Rhodes College, I could just go on and on. All of these were my closest
friends at Morehouse, and we never felt like someone was treating us as an
object of philanthropy. We are Morehouse men. So what does it mean to be at a Pomona or at a Princeton and feel
that sense of possession? - [Gabi] So if I could get you to rephrase that for just a moment, could you give a little bit of advice to your colleagues here
on faculty at Pomona and say, my fellow professor, if I could ask you to do three things for every
black man in your class, every person of color in your class, what would those two things be? - Wow, off the top of my head. Well, the first thing is
to treat them seriously, as persons capable of great things, not as objects of remediation, but to hold them to a standard, to expect excellence from them, and to model what it means
to be excited about ideas. I tell my students all
the time at Princeton, it's one, I said, "You need
to reverse your relationship to this institution," and they
all go, "What do you mean?" I said, "Look, Morehouse tried
to kick me out three times." They're like, "What did you do?" I was a student activist, I was President of the Student Government, ah, these institutions are conservative. "But you're a Morehouse
man, you're so proud." I said, "Exactly," but they tried to kick me out three times, right? Now while I was there, they
gave me all these tools, but in the grand scheme of my life, Morehouse was a moment,
and now they've claimed me. In the grand scheme of your
life, Pomona is a moment. Princeton is a moment for you to acquire the skills so that you can go out and
do what you've been called to do, and then Pomona will claim you. - [Gabi] And I say amen. (laughs) - Reverse your relationship
because oftentimes we come into these places and we're just thankful, oh my God, I'm at
Princeton, I'm at Pomona, and so you're too shy to take advantage of all of those resources
that have been put in place to help you because you
don't want to be seen as the affirmative action students, or you're failing in your dorm room, as opposed to going out and getting help, thinking that the school...
this is what I mean by a sense of possession of the place. We don't feel like it's ours because we feel like
somebody's doing us the favor when we're doing these
institutions the favor by being there. That's the flipping of the script. So three things, one, take them seriously, two, demand excellence, three, get them to see themselves in the grandest terms. The thing I tell my son, the thing I tell my students all the time, the world conspires to make you small, the question is whether or
not you're gonna be complicit. - [Gabi] Yes, I would say that, as well. People tell you, people
tell you all the things that you can't do, don't
ever tell yourself that. - Right. - [Gabi] Amen, may I- - Wouldn't it be fascinating
for black students, men, women, to walk around Pomona, to walk around Princeton,
not with any pretense, but just to feel like it's theirs. My Lord, anyway, I'm
sorry, I'm just thinking. - [Gabi] Oh, no, no. One last question for you. So as you know, when you
accepted our invitation, and thank you so much for doing this, it really feels wonderful for me to have you here talking, we're in this time of division. And we talked about all sorts of things, heterogeneities,
disagreements with each other, however we think of ourselves as the we. We're never gonna agree about everything. We all have a part to play in making the world a better place, no matter how well we agree
upon those means or not. But there are a couple of topics that I think we've touched on
where there is really fiery and sometimes even potential dangerous disagreement because people's passions
can be so inflamed, and we've touched on a few of those, policing certainly being one, questions of how you might or might not assign blame or virtue. As our students are going
forward in the next, let's just say months, even
though the world is going to be a complicated place
for more than a few months, what advice would you give to students who find themselves with
people they care about, or sometimes they don't,
who disagree with them about one of these things
that they hold really dear, something that they believe
so fully and passionately about any of those things. And maybe that you say
have thought about that. These could be intergenerational conflicts when you go home, that could
be someone in your church, someone in your classroom,
someone you meet on the other side of a picket line. What advice would you give our students for being able to communicate
across those barriers? - It's very difficult, and we have to admit it if
we're honest with ourselves, to avoid sometimes moving
from the disagreement around ideas to a judgment
of the moral quality of the person with whom we're engaging. How do we keep from
holding them in contempt? And to echo Cathy
(indistinct) wonderful book, it's hard not to conclude
that a person who holds that view is a bad person, right? That's hard work, and you
have to work hard to do that. But contempt and hatred distorts our souls, you see? There's a wonderful moment in Baldwin, and an interview in 1968 in "Esquire," to go back to where we began, and they're trying to get Baldwin to talk about the riots in the cities, and Baldwin is angry 'cause this is '68, this is June of 1968 during the interview. King is barely in the ground
'cause he was just murdered in April of '68, the rage
is seeping from the page, right, seeping from the sentences. And Baldwin is asked, "What would you say to these young folk who are out here burning
down their communities?" And Baldwin says, "Well,
I wouldn't tell them not to defend themselves," so I would say to those students, I wouldn't tell you not to argue with all of your passion. Baldwin says, "I wouldn't
tell them to not pick up arms. I would say, I wouldn't tell them not to defend the world that you
want with everything you have, I couldn't tell them not to do that." But then Baldwin says,
"But if you're gonna pick up the gun, and it might come to that, where you have to pick up the
gun, don't do it out of hate. So if it comes to the fact
that you have to stand in opposition to that
person who is committed to a version of the world
that denies you your humanity and you have to engage that
person with all your passion, do not do it from a place of hate." That's what Baldwin said
to those young folk, because he says, "There's
nothing productive that comes from it, in fact, hate turns us into the monsters, too." So in that moment, the advice I would give, right, is to always have love at the heart, as the animating force
to the political work that we're doing, and then we'll see what happens from there. - [Gabi] So that means to me that the goal is to build. Sometimes you have to clear some ground before you can build, but
the goal is not to tear down, but rather, to engage for survival, for flourishing, and for strength as we continue, and that
can be hard to find. I said that was gonna be my last question, but (laughing drowns out
speaker) interesting things, and then (laughing drowns
out speaker) asking- - Sure. - [Gabi] Thing, so when
Baldwin was writing, and I always found this
fascinating as a child, he was one of a line of African Americans who left the country, and I think of so many jazz musicians, I think of Josephine Baker, I think of a number of
thinkers, artists, writers who have been African Americans in exile. And one of the beautiful things
of African American studies and Africana studies in general
has taught us is the way in which black identity is
caught up in a diaspora, that we are spread out from somewhere. How do you think about this
pattern of exile and return, this sense that African Americans are creating, building a home for ourselves and our
families and our communities, and what we need to do to renew our world, rather than run from it? And we know what that, in some ways, what that meant for Baldwin, but I'd love to hear what you think
about that for the now. How do we build a home
in the midst of chaos? - That's such a great question. When I think about ex-pats, I think about folks who just
couldn't bear it anymore. I mean, the challenge of having to deal with the daily cuts, and what does it mean to have
to grapple with a society, organized along the premise that I'm less valued? And that could mean that a
police officer could decide to take my life, or take my child's life. So people just sometimes just quit and give up on the place, think about what it took for WEB Du Bois to leave after decades, a lifetime of fighting for democracy,
and then to, on the eve of the March on Washington,
to the last breath, but to leave a note basically
giving up on this place. So I want to understand that. I want to say that that's reasonable. It's not unintelligible,
it's not unreasonable or unintelligible, I
understand what you're doing. Baldwin wasn't an exile, he called himself a
transatlantic commuter. - [Gabi] Yes. - He needed to find
space in order to think about the place 'cause while you're here, you have to deal with it. I've had a headache for the last 24 hours because I've
been paying attention to what the country has been
doing politically, right? And you wonder whether
or not you're gonna have, I'm having a stroke or something because of the pressure, what
is happening in this place. Or when my son came
home, Madame President, and I tell this story, he's a 6'2" guy, he went to Brown, God bless his soul. He went to Brown and
came home, he was working for this lobbying firm
around criminal justice, and he was all excited. He was going to lobby the
State House in Trenton, had on his tight H&M suit,
he's gonna drive down to the state capitol, he comes home, and I can see the rage in his eyes. And I said, "What happened?" He said, "I was driving
and I wanted to park and a police officer stopped me, Dad, and he started yelling at me. And then he told me I should
go park somewhere else, and then I move and I
follow his directions. Then I got stopped by
another police officer, Dad, and then he starts yelling
at me," and da da da. And as he's telling this story, tears are flowing down his eyes, right, and then he says, "I get yelled at, and he tells me to go to this,
and I got stopped again, Dad. I got F-ing stopped again,
and the guy asked me who was my PO, who was
my parole officer, Dad." Now, one response is you
just want to pick him up and just get him out of here. But what Baldwin says is that we have to, how I translate it, 'cause
all of us can't go to Istanbul or Saint-Paul-de-Vence,
or Ghana, or Accra, Ghana. Baldwin and all of these, they let us know we've gotta find our elsewheres. We have to find, you
have to find those spaces within communities of love who allow you to laugh full belly laughs,
people who will allow you to rage without censure, folks who will hold you
up when your knees buckle. Those elsewheres allow us to find our feet in this place
we call home, and replenish so that we can enter the battle again. - [Gabi] Wow, Professor Glaude. That sounds like the perfect resting point for our conversation, and
I will bid you thank you for making this last hour and
that kind of special place where you and I could speak and feel free to say to each other
what we needed to say, and to know that we could
make, in this intellectual and imaginative human space that kind of temporary home. I hope that you and yours from your family to your
students and your colleagues find that wonderful series of
moments in conversation with each other and peace
with each other and dialogue with each other, and that
every single student and member of our community (indistinct)
gets to do so as well. It's not a safe space, but it's a space for us to be who we have
to be, that elsewhere. And thank you for providing us for it. This is the, you are the inaugural member of these dialogues here at Pomona, and I just want to say that coming up, we're going to have another conversation, one that I think you
might be interested in, Professor Glaude (indistinct),
excuse me, Professor Glaude. We are inviting Rabbi Sharon Brous, who's the senior and
founding member of IKAR, will be with us on November
17th at 4:30 Pacific, and she's going to talk
with us about Judaism, about minority religious rights, about the ideas of democracy, and ways that we all desperately
need to find that elsewhere. So again, thank you so much for spending time with our community. Thank you to everyone who is participating and watching, and see
you all soon, be well. - Thank you. - [Gabi] I think that's
cut, am I not supposed to (indistinct) and screw that up? You'll cut that out. - Cut my "eh" too. (laughs) - [Gabi] I have to say,
this was really wonderful. I felt like we were just
sitting around a fireside on the (indistinct). - It was beautiful. (laughs) Indeed, indeed, it was great. - [Gabi] Please tell Cornell I said hello. - I will, I will, and I'm
gonna keep you lifted. I know you're out there, as we say, fighting lions with
switches, but you win it. (laughing drowns out speaker) - [Gabi] Gotcha, back at
you, and I'll tell my mother that you gave her a special hello. - Indeed, give her a big hug for me, too. - [Gabi] (indistinct)
all right, take care. - Bye bye, take care, bye bye. (quiet overlapping chattering)
