Princeton Professor on Race Relations: “Our Democracy Is Broken” | Amanpour and Company

and now of course to america's reckoning with racial injustice dr eddie glor jr is the chair of the department of african american studies at princeton university his latest book begin again james baldwin's america and its urgent lessons for our own analyzes the current moment in the context of one of america's greatest writers and it asks what we can learn from baldwin's own struggle and he tells our walter isaacson why america must confront the lies it tells itself about being quote a redeemer nation thanks christian and professor glad welcome to the show it's my pleasure you know this book is incredibly timely on james baldwin and when you started it you probably did not know how timely it was going to be why did you undertake this project you know in some ways i had to deal with my own despair and disillusionment you know i had um i didn't believe the country would would choose donald trump and then i watched it happen and then i watched the hyperpartisanship evidence itself in very specific ways and how the ugliness of race and racism was were beginning to overwhelm and so um i had to i had to find resources walter for myself to how to pick up the pieces and begin again because it looked as if at least as i sat down to write the book two years ago as if the country was doing it again that it was turning its back on the possibility of being otherwise and i had to find some resources and jimmy was was that resource you know baldwin talks about the temptation of despair which is what you just raised how did it help you to prevent yourself from free falling into despair well you know i mean there's there you know he actually at one point he described his despair as elegant elegant despair that you know you have to turn to the reality of those you love the future that you that you hope for that you pray for and you have to figure out a way to replenish uh to find the resources uh in yourself to to to begin to um to begin again and so it was kind of rummaging through what he calls his the ruins rummaging through his writing um that i that i was able to to to find resources to to put pen to pad and to write my way out of a kind of despair so it was the work actually it sounds carlilean doesn't it sounds like but that sounds difficult i mean it sounds like a you know he writes that the messiness of our exterior lives reflects the messiness of our interior lives was it difficult for you to have to dig into your own emotional life oh absolutely baldwin is an exacting companion you know he forced me to confront the scaffolding of my own lives as a precondition to say anything about the country and so i found myself as i was you know writing you know reaching for my favorite drink jameson over and over and over again right and um and as i was confronting the fact that i'm this vulnerable little boy that who grew up on the coast of mississippi who's constantly struggling with his father even as our relationship has grown into something much more beautiful i had to grapple with that that beginning and as i started to do it walter the sentence has started to jump a bit more i became freer and and more willing to take risks because i was actually being truthful with myself which freed me up to be even more truthful about the country you talk about no name in the street being a linchpin of this book and that was written by baldwin in reaction to the civil rights movement of the 60s and the fizzling or burning out of it as a sort of second moral awakening that happened after reconstruction but then it ends it's been 50 years since that book are we due for another moral reawakening it seems that we're right there and you know at every moment that there is a kind of reckoning with the contradiction at the heart of this fragile experiment there's a reassertion of the lie and we're experiencing that right now you know i mean you think about president trump's speech at the republican national convention and the way in which he narrates history at the end of that speech you know virginal lands right it's as if no contradiction was present in our beginnings um there is this kind of redeemer nation logic that drives right the way in which he imagines our past and and then you see the the you know the memos from the office of management and budget saying no training around racial bias banning critical race theory because this is unamerican propaganda so to confront our contradictions to confront how those contradictions reside in us uh for for for those folks represent a kind of anti-american gesture so it seems that we're right there um the ugliness we're on this racial hamster wheel as we've always been you know since the beginning and now we have to figure out what we're going to do you say that underlying it all is what you just called the lie what is the lie well the lie is this belief that you know we're the shining city on the hill the redeemer nation an example of democracy achieved and we tell delight in order to hide and obscure what we've actually done baldwin writes in 1964 in this essay entitled the white problem he says there's a fatal flaw at the beginning of the country and i'm paraphrasing here he says there's a fatal flaw at the beginning of the country because these christians who decided they were going to build a democracy also decided to have slaves and in order to justify the role of this ch these chattel they had to say that they were not human beings because if they were not human beings then no crime would have been committed and then baldwin writes this line which is at the heart of the book that lie is at the heart of our present problems so the lie we've told about black people in their capacity the lie we've told about white people and their superiority the lies we tell about what we've done in the name of that superiority all of that in some ways is the scaffolding that protects our supposed innocence and as baldwin says in in the fire next time the innocence is the crime right the innocence is the crime how fundamental is the lie to trumpism oh it's at its heart you know and and and walter you're a child of the south you're son of the south you're a son of american history as well and you know in those moments when the country is on the precipice of change when a way of life is is is unraveling um violence is always on its on its heels you think about the end of reconstruction and the assertion of redemption and the lost cause you think about the end of jim crow and each of these moments represent kind of spikes in that horrid ritual american ritual of lynching so here we have the desperation of trumpism in some way as a kind of death rattle i hope of a way of imagining the country that this is the last gasp of a certain kind of understanding of whiteness that's over determining right our democratic value and commitment uh commitments so it the lie is at the heart of it it seems to me baldwin after he wrote go tell it on the mountain i wrote giovanni's room about being gay being part of queer culture in america how important was that to him and would he be somewhat surprised that uh the advances made in being uh the civil rights of being gay and being part of queer culture versus the advances being made because of uh civil rights and being black yeah you know he you know to follow up go tell it on the mountain and notes of a native son with giovanni's room in the 1950s is an extraordinary act of courage and baldwin said he had to tell you he said you can't hold that over my head i told you so it's a beautiful moment and when i interviewed angela davis for the book she said in so many ways he was out there all by himself but at the same time baldwin's sexuality you know you love who you love love is an extraordinary uh experience that unsettles that that deepens that widens uh your sense of yourself and the world and you love who you love whether it's a man or a woman and walden wanted to open up that space right but he also didn't want us to get trapped in the categories so what did it mean to be gay or queer or straight or so these categories can in some ways lock you in and constrain you they could spring the trap so in the last interviews published with quincy troupe there's one fellow who's trying to interview him and trying to lock him into a certain kind of understanding about the gay liberation movement and baldwin is deconstructing the category or when you read male prison or the free on his last essay uh freaks you know there's a sense in which he's trying to destabilize these categories in order to release us into a certain way of being but then there's the exchange walter with audrey lord uh and and audrey lord right rakes i mean takes him to the to the shed uh around the kind of patriarchal underpinnings of his understanding of goodness right so uh it's a complex it's a complex uh subject matter to kind of unpack but i think he would be interested in what we are experiencing today but he would also be cautious about uh how we understand the nature of freedom that is being expressed today if that makes sense you talk about him resisting being locked into categorizations being locked into the categorization of being black to what extent did he see that as a problem well you know if you know he he was always concerned about this aspect of black power that he called this mystical blackness he used a different word but you know he called this mystical blackness and he said that you know it springs the trap because baldwin wants to insist on a certain level of individuality right because he wants to say the moment that black people start you know one essay in black power i think he says the moment black people stop uh step outside of the orbit of white people's expectations we're talking revolution so this assertion not of a kind of crude and crass individualism but an idea of black individuality for baldwin becomes this kind of revolutionary act where we step outside of the stereotypes and we try to find our own voice by sometimes singing off-key but he wants to make a distinction i think between racism and white supremacy and black culture right racism and white supremacy is horrible it's irredeemable but it doesn't follow from that that the beauty of black cultural life has to be diminished the way we speak our language the way we you know our cuisine you know the music the culture that has been so critical to american life you know on the lower frequencies we speak for you as ralph ellison would say um he doesn't want to give that up but he doesn't want us to get permanently docked at the station by holding on to this notion of blackness that is apart from human experience your grandmother in moscow mississippi on the gulf coast once said to you when you're angry about something white people aren't going to change you know get that through your head do you still believe that and do you think baldwin believed that um let me unpack it when she told me when i was an undergrad at morehouse that she was trying to keep the rage from taking root in my spirit from dwelling on it but today i think i i understand it in this way those people who are committed to whiteness they're not going to change but then there are people who happen to be white whom i love dearly who are engaging in this ongoing interrogation of how race and white supremacy distorts and disfigures our soul so when i say in the book that the idea of white america is irredeemable what i mean is that there's nothing about the belief that white people matter more than others that can be salvaged so when you ask me the question can white people change i would say human beings can change but those people who are committed to the ideology of whiteness to where they can't understand themselves otherwise well if their change if they change is up to them it's up to them if that matters after a lot of the moral reckonings you know be it reconstruction the civil rights movement and even the obama era had been a backlash and a swing back now as we're going through the era of trump there are people who say okay can't we just get back to an era of call do you think that's a trap or a danger for us if we're just trying to restore an era of calm absolutely absolutely um i'm thinking about dr king's speech in montgomery after the selma march and he says some and i'm paraphrasing here some want us to go back to normal to get back to calm and then he starts listing what was considered normal and he starts listing all of the horrors of those of that of the period that is being called normal it's not calm when poor people are dying because they can't put food on the table and have a decent wage it's not normal because police were killing black folk before this moment that's not normal that's not calm um it's not calm and normal that the top one percent of the top 110 percent of the country is extracting resources while everyday ordinary people like my daddy who worked his behind off as a letter as a letter carrier busting his their behinds to make ends meet there's nothing normal about that so part of what we have to reckon with i think walter is that our democracy is broken i think young people know this and they're reaching for languages to help them imagine how to fix it a nostalgic a nostalgia for the broken a nostalgia for what was what was in the past is a way of sticking one's head in the sand to my mind in the wake of the murder of george floyd and the other shootings brianna tale and the things we've seen how do you speak to your son about the moment we're in yeah it it's a hard conversation and i've been having it with him since he was like eight or nine you know from you know he's 24 and you just think back to trayvon and how young he was tamir rice i remember we were in an airport when he found out that the police officer wasn't going to be charged and he was pacing the airport like a caged panther um or during the george floyd moment and he said he had to go protest in trenton and i was like but covet covet 19 are you gonna and i played the mama card you're gonna you're gonna jeopardize your mother and he said i got to i have to so the conversations are hard but he's teaching me now he's teaching me what it means to exhibit courage and imagination in this moment the one thing that i've been trying to do over all of these years walter is to impart to my child the lesson that baldwin imparted to me whatever you do how angry you are how grateful you feel don't let hatred take root in your spirit there's nothing good that could come of it and so he's acting but not from a space of hate but for for a love of justice so i'm i'm the student now these days what would baldwin have us do now you know i don't want to exhibit a kind of hubris to anticipate his words uh there's 7 000 pages of his words uh that we can return to the one thing that i think i've learned from all of these years working and writing and walking with baldwin in my head is that we have to tell the truth as much as we can bear and then a little more we have to bear witness which means we have to make the suffering real for those who willfully ignore it so tell the truth bear witness and create the conditions for us to imagine ourselves otherwise professor eddie glide my friend thank you so very much thank you walter i appreciate [Music] you

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Keywords: interview, CNN, PBS, Christiane Amanpour, world news, news anchor, news show, news, public affairs, late-night TV, journalist, Chief International Correspondent, Eddie Glaude Jr., Princeton, James Baldwin, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own

Id: si7dZBSAzsM

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2020