Endless Thread - Endless Thread Presents: Truth Be Told

Episode Date: June 4, 2020

The Endless Thread team has been watching as protests and police brutality have broken out in cities around the country, and around the world. We are working on covering these events thoughtfully and carefully. If you have a story or perspective you want to share, reach out to us at [e-mail].  In the meantime, instead of our regular programming, we’d like to play you an episode of the KQED podcast, Truth Be Told. It’s hosted by one of our colleagues, Tonya Mosley, the co-host of WBUR and NPR’s Here and Now, and their episode from this week is called “Protesting for the Soul of America: The New Civil Rights Movement.” Take a listen. 

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Merotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, everybody. The Endless Thread team has been watching as protests and police brutality have been breaking out in cities around the country. We're working on covering these events on our show, thoughtfully and carefully, and amplifying voices that are important for all of us to hear right now.

If you have a story or perspective that you want to share, reach out to us at Endless. thread at WBUR.org. We would like to say this. Simply put, the existence of systemic racism is not a perspective. It is a fact. It is important for us to say that. We are here if you want to get in touch. In the meantime, please take care of yourself and the people you love. And today, instead of our regular programming, we want to play you an episode of the KQED podcast, Truth Be Told. It's hosted by one of our colleagues, Tanya Mosley, who's also the co-host of WBUR and NPR's here and now. Truth Be Told's episode from this week is called Protesting for the Soul of America, the new civil rights movement.

Take a listen. I am Carval Wallace, and I'm about to read to you an excerpt from an article I wrote in June 2017 called If You're Black in America, riots are a spiritual impulse, not a political strategy. In the summer of 1967, the city of Detroit burned. Milwaukee, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Newark were all engulfed in flames. Even forgotten towns like Cairo, Illinois, and Cambridge, Maryland descended for some nights in that torrid summer into anarchy. The havoc seemed to be catching. The fire in one town sparked the fire in the next. America seemed to be coming undone. Yet for most Americans, the riots of that summer were viewed from afar, through the lens of the evening news and front-page headlines. They were not seeing their own homes burned, their own streets occupied by uniformed troops. From this safe distance, the uprisings looked like senseless violence, the reckless and short-sighted actions of a damaged people, a people with no strategy, no hope.

But the truth of riots is something entirely different, something entirely more sacred. America is unsettled land, and it remains so because it was founded on white supremacy, and white supremacy is by nature an unsettling force. The centuries-long attempt to subdue the continent by nakedly ransacking its resources only for the benefit of some creates by necessity a vast army of angry people who will forever, for the sake of themselves, for the sake of their children, be forced to resist. Far from an ugly side effect of our nation's character, white supremacy is a core American principle. This country didn't just end up this way. It was made this way.

To be black in a country like this is to forge your entire life in the dank valley between America's ideals and its actions. We are told we have been created equally, but we are treated as a separate class. We are told that we live in a nation of laws, but we watch as violence is visited upon our families with no hope of legal recourse. To be black in America and survive is to be of dual consciousness. On the one hand, you must believe what all humans must believe in order to survive, that you have a future, that your children will be safe and cared for, that things will somehow some way get better. But on the other hand, your various survival depends on never trusting, on seeing the ugly truth for what it is, on remaining ever vigilant for where and how

precisely you are being conned. To keep safe, you must expect to be attacked. To be black and live is to constantly expect to die. For black people in America, the psychic toll of having to tie your fate, the fate of your family to a world designed to subjugate you can only be withstood for so long. Eventually, inevitably, a truer, more direct action calls, and often that action is abrupt. It is violent and it is loud. It is sparked by anything that underscores the maddening discrepancy between what we deserve as human beings and what we experience as black human beings. Buildings crumble and fires burn and glass rains down upon everyone, even the children.

Why, it is asked, would these people burn down their own neighborhoods? Someone more sympathetic, but still removed, might argue that a riot is the only way for a desperate people to gain the attention their plight deserves. The problem with both of these readings is that they assume the spontaneous uprisings to be tactical, a coordinated strategic attempt to bring about a particular social or political change. It is not. It is a liturgy, a spiritual grasping for emotional justice, for an assertion of self. It is an attempt to bring back into wholeness that which has,

has been split. It is meant to reify the dual senses of life and death, hope, and fury that circumscribe the Black experience. To be white in America is to be innocent. Not of the crime, but of the knowledge of the crime. James Baldwin said, quote, people who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction. And anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence, long after that innocence is dead, turns himself into a monster. And yet, on the horizon, visible from the whittled down lawns and decks of conscientiously chosen wood, there is an amber glow, a blanket of thick and acrid smoke, the smell of burning plastic and gasoline, bodies lay unmoving on the asphalt. Your government,

has sent its troops. The clack of gunfire echoes from the acacia trees. The people wish for the lights of the fires to illuminate your monstrosity, to usher in the end of your innocence. The people wish for you to see them made complete. The people have made the demand. Thousands of us have taken to the streets.

We are in the midst of a rebate. rebellion, and the demand is simple. Justice. We'll be right back. Eddie Glaude is a scholar and chair of the African American Studies program at Princeton, and he describes this moment we're in as the expression of an accumulated grievance for black people. And the last time we experienced something like this of this magnitude was 53 years ago, as Carvel referenced. I spoke with Eddie earlier, and man, it was healing.

As one of my friends says, Eddie Glawd is centered and focused. And right now, it's exactly what so many of us need. Eddie Glawd has also written several books, including the forthcoming one, Begin Again, James Baldwin's America, and its urgent lessons for our own. Welcome, Eddie. Thank you for having me. How are you? I'm upright.

Yeah. This is, that's a good thing. in these times, right? Yeah, I mean, it's true. You know, we've been seeing quotes from James Baldwin all over social media right now. We just heard a very powerful one from Carvel Wallace. But the one that people often refer to is this one. To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage most of the time.

What is one of the lessons from James Baldwin that sticks out to you in this moment? we're in. That the problem isn't us. Baldwin engages in this amazing inversion, right? That there's no such thing as the Negro problem. He would insist, and, you know, in the sense he says, if there is a Negro problem, it's a problem that black people have with white people. White people is the source of it. And what he means by that is, you know, there's a famous line.

And, you know, he says, I'm not the N-word. Never been, never thought of myself as bad. Yeah. The question is, why did you need to invent the inward in the first place? Yeah. And until you figure that out, we're going to be in this mess, right? So he inverts the white man's burden, right? So they become their own burden.

They are the need in some ways. Yeah. And so I think it's really important for us in this moment that seems so much like Groundhogs Day to understand that we're not the problem. But you know what, Eddie, when you say that, I mean, it's like, it's just like almost so powerful that it's hard to take in. Like, I feel really emotional in that because even in this moment, we're talking about the looting and the activity of protesters. And like we're focusing in on the actions, this calling out and this crying out and not the reasons for it. I mean, and when I say we, I'm talking about collective society.

and the news media and what we're seeing on the news. And that gets back to the idea that while it's not being said explicitly, the implicit message is that it is us, that it is our problem. You know what I mean? Yeah, no, absolutely, you know. And because, you know, in some ways it's a version of the question, the question is always asked, what is it that the Negro wants? And so they think we want Chanel.

They think we want Gucci. We might want those things. But those things are really symbolic of the deep inequality that defines this country, right? That we're catching hell. We're dying because of COVID-19. And these people are making billions of dollars, right? So when they ask that question in the context of looting and rioting, quote, unquote, and the violence of protests, it says, what else do they want? Oh, they just want to steal things, right?

We really don't want to confront what's really motivating this because if we do as a nation, it says something about who we are. Yeah. Or more specifically about who they are. You know, when I was a little girl, I remember reading about 1967 and 68, and it felt like such a far off distant event. It felt like from a child's eyes that we were so far away from that type of desperation, and yet we're here.

Yeah, yeah. When you would think back about 1967, did you that you wish you were born, in those times? Or how did you view it? Is it just as distant past? Yeah. My parents were very vocal to me about that time and about the oppression of black folks

and the importance of the civil rights movement. And so when I thought back to that time, they were young themselves. They were children themselves. And so, you know, as a young child, and then you're thinking to your parents as children, it was that. But then it was also, you know,

because you grew up in this country what we turned Martin Luther King, Jr. into. And so we turned him into this sort of Hallmark card character where he was talking about love and unity and we didn't really know so much about the desperation and the chaotic nature of the civil rights movement.

And so while I would see little glimpses, like we would see little clips of the rioting that was happening during that time, or the rebellion, we should say. And when I learned about all of the sacrifices and then the ultimate deaths of all of our leaders, it just seems so far away from the reality of the moment of the late 80s and the 90s. But now we're in this moment. And, you know, my kids are right outside the door here.

And I'm thinking about they're in this moment. And we're here. And I'm also thinking about what this moment means. You know, so let me just say this. I asked you that question because when I used to think back about 1967 and 68 and even before then, you know, thinking about the Panthers and thinking about, you know, when black folk were struggling, I always thought I was born out of space and out of time. Oh, yes, yes. You know, that, oh, I wish if I was, if I was, if I was a girl back then, I would be, I would be in the Panthers handing out breakfasts. Okay, you're right. I thought that too. Yes. I would be in Mississippi, working with SNCC.

You know, I always think that I was born out of space and out of time, not understanding that I would be 51 years old in this time, you know, in a time that we never could have imagined. And so I'm so angry all the time because we could be better. Yeah. This is voluntary evil. Right? People are choosing this. I mean, just in the context of COVID-19, they're choosing food lines. They're choosing massive unemployment. Right, right. This is a choice in the response to it to COVID-19. And also the systemic racism that has led to the economic inequality that we see right now. Yeah.

And it could be different. That's all we need to do is look at Europe. They have a universal basic income. Healthcare is not contingent upon whether or not you're employed. And then when you think about all of the, when you think about the fact that the virus is metastasizing in the breakages and in the fissures of our society, and you think about my best friend, and he calls me and he tells me that his mother-in-law died of COVID-19.

And that his wife, who's Haitian American and the eldest woman, had to say goodbye to her via a cell phone, FaceTime. And then she couldn't go bury her because she was afraid that she would bring the disease back to her children. Yeah. And all of this is a choice. So when I say I'm angry all the time, and it's a blues-soaked anger, it's, you know,

as my great-grandmama used to say, it's what it means to wake up being black all the time. Yeah. You know, it's so powerful what you said. And then also what your grandmother said, because I have been thinking over the last few days, I'm an emotional person, Eddie. So if I cried during this, just know it. You know, I was thinking about my place and what I'm supposed to be doing right now.

And if I'm doing enough. And I was trying to articulate to a friend that just the sound of my grandmother's voice is making me emotional when I call her and I hear a voice. And part of that is because I feel like I understand now to be. in this moment. Like I understand what you what you said about about this is what it means to be black in this country. I've always known it on an intellectual level. I've also I've also known it on an emotional level but never the depths of this emotion. And I was thinking too, I was trying to also reconcile thinking is it that I am now a pessimistic person and realizing that you're,

you're 51, I'm in my early 40s. I don't ever say what exactly. I'm in my early 40s. And we're in the same moment, like 1967. And you know, I should say this. When I said, you know, it's what it means to be black in America. I don't want to confuse that with, you know, Al Green and fried fish on Fridays. Of course. Yes. Yes. Say more.

I don't want to confuse that with the joy, the absolute pleasure. Yes. Of being black, being this being in this body. Yes. Having the inheritance that makes me who I am. So oftentimes what we do, when we say blue soaked, we think that it is the totality of our experience. And this is what Jimmy was trying to suggest when he was arguing with Richard Wright of a native son. He was like, bruh, if you render black life in this way, we can't account for you.

Right? So on the one hand, I'm angry, almost every day in my privilege, I'm angry. But, you know, get me in a kitchen and calling my mom. I call it my mom and say, you know, I'm trying to cook your chicken because I'm from Mississippi. Yes, yes. So call it, Mom, I can't quite do this. Or when I cook a recipe and I cook something and I send her a photo and she's like, oh, my goodness, that's great. But to revel in the beauty of black life amid the tragedy of white folks craziness.

That's the balance I'm trying to render right there. Yeah, absolutely. And that joy is, you know, we say it all the time on this show. It is our tactic for survival. It is what has kept us, kept us whole for generations and generations, that joy. Making do was never the end and aim. It was always the condition for the possibility of flourishing. So when my great-grandmama used to make pinto beans on a stove that she bought with dimes,

being a domestic on the coast of Mississippi, and she would make those pentote beans. Oh my God, it's the best pentote beans on the plate. You probably tried and you can't get it there. With hot water cornbread and no meat. Yes, which I made from my children the other day. I made hot water cornbread. What did they think?

They were filling it. I'm giving it a couple more chances. They're going to, I'm going to make them like it. But it gets back to what you're saying. Yeah. We have an amazing inheritance in the midst of all of this nonsense. I want to ask you, though, what justice looks like, because we're in the, we're in the midst of chaos right now. You know, there have been attempts to bring justice to the latest events in ways that perhaps we haven't seen in the past. You know, in Georgia, even though it was several months late, there were arrests in the killing of Ahmad Arbery, this white woman in New York City calling police on a black man. She's been fired. In Minneapolis, this police officer accused of killing George Floyd has been arrested and charged. the police chief in Louisville has been fired,

and yet we are in the biggest moment of civil unrest in recent history. We know what the long-term systems that need to be dismantled, but what does immediate justice look like? Oh, my goodness, I wish I had to answer. You know, we know that they can arrest folk and then those folk, they're not convicted.

Look at the cop who killed Tamir Rice. Not only was he acquitted, He went and got a job at another police precinct. That's right. And resigned later, but still, you know, so what does justice look like now? How can I put this? Let me just put it really quickly on you. It's like this.

Anger, according to Aristotle, I'm going to be a professor now. Anger, according to Aristotle, is almost a precondition for virtue. You have to have the capacity to be angry. And if one is angry in excess, that's not good. And if one is never angry, then one is a fool. And so what he says is that anger is a result of accumulated grievance, of an accumulation of disregard, of contempt, of insult, and spite. And so when anger pops off, it's never about simply that single moment. That's right. It's about the accumulated effect of disregard. and it announces that something has happened here and that we're not going to take it anymore. We're serving notice. So what might justice look like when we have tangible evidence that these people are not disregarding our standing as human beings? Right.

When these people are according us the dignity and standing requisite of the beauty and brilliance of who we are. That's going to evidence itself in not just simply arresting these people, but having a judicial system that is fair and equitable. It's going to evidence itself, right, in a set of social arrangements that don't carry forward this idea that because you're white, you're valued more than others. Now, I say all of that to say that in this current moment, until we are satisfied that these people are not disregarding us again. Yeah. Then there would be no sense of justice. Do you feel optimistic? Never.

Optimism is like pangloss in Voltaire's candide. Optimism is that belief that, you know, you just need to tend to your gardens and win the best of all possible worlds, you know, that everything, the arc of the universe will bend towards justice. No, no, no, no. Optimism is this idea that in the end, everything will be all right. Pessimism is just the flip side of that coin. when the ugliness of the world hits you in the mouth,

then suddenly you're pessimistic. See, I'm either optimistic or pessimistic. I'm a mealy-rists. And what that means is it's up to us. The world could either go to hell or it could be saved. It all depends on what we do. There's no guarantee. So if I looked at our history, we're going to fail.

We fail miserably in these moments. if I look in our history. But I have to have an abiding faith in our capacity to choose to be otherwise. Does that make sense? Or am I just running my mouth? No, it makes complete sense. At the same time, I'm thinking about, as you put it at the beginning of our conversation, we're not the problem.

And it's really up to then white folks to be the solution. And I don't know if I, I don't know if I see it right now. I mean, we've got a president who has essentially said he can and he will take military action in every state in the country where there are protests. I know he's talking to his base of people. He's not talking to us. I know this. But I don't know, Eddie. Yeah. So this is why I wrote begin again, right? Because he's grappling with this. So the formulation that Baldwin put forward that we're not the problem, in the fire next time in 1963, he says that we have to love them to get them to see themselves otherwise. But then he gets through the murder of Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin.

He experiences the power of black power. what it's all about. And so most people will say that the late Jimmy Baldwin lost his step. He's like an old man that's gone bad in the teeth as it was. So folk don't really read, at least they didn't, his later fiction, they think his later criticism doesn't really take on the same power as the fire next time. I think he's most important and most powerful piece of nonfiction is no name in the street. Oh, wow. Written in 1972. Yes. And what happens is that Baldwin still holds on to the belief that we're not the problem. It's their problem.

But he gives up the idea that we have to save them. So what he says is this. We can't spend our energy. I'm paraphrasing you now. We can't spend our energy trying to convince white folk to hold different commitments. We have to spend our energy building a world where those commitments have no quarter to breathe. You see the move? It's not about them.

It's not about our salvation being contingent upon them realizing that whiteness is evil. No, no, no. It's about us building a world with those who are like-minded, who are willing to step outside of the straight jackets of these categories. And to imagine a world that is just, that allows us to imagine ourselves in the fullness of the creation that we are. And then build a world where whiteness doesn't accord you any benefit. fit. And so, and then if you choose to, I mean, this is what, this is what I meant when I wrote in Time magazine, I can give less than a damn what white folks are. I'm tired of trying to convince them to hold other commitments. I want to build a more just world. I only have a finite amount of

civic energy. Yeah. And we've been trying to convince them since we got here. Yeah. I've seen instances where white allies have stepped up. I actually got a note from a former co-worker who just left his job as a radio host. And he actually wrote this really beautiful piece that I sat with and cried for a while where he said, we don't need any more white guys at the mic anymore. And he's been given job offers. And he says, you need to give these positions to black people and specifically black women. And he went on to say, like, it's time. And he's time for us to step aside. It's time for us. And I felt like that was such a powerful move in that he's basically saying, you don't need to hear from me anymore. I mean, you're not an

optimist, but for me, who considers myself, maybe I'm not going to use the term that you use. I'm neither a pessimist or an optimist. But that feels like hope for me. That feels like there is a changing of the tide. I don't think I would have heard that five years ago. See that. Hope is very different than optimism. Yeah. You know, that's a very different distinction. But you're right. So I make the distinction between there's white people and there are people who happen to be white.

Hmm. Hmm. I love a lot of people who happen to be white. Yes. Yes. Me too. There's some folks who happen to be white who are my boys and who are my close partners and who helped make me possible, right?

And when I say, when I make that distinction, I'm talking about somebody who's engaged in an ongoing interrogation of how whiteness overdetermines their lives. There's a wonderful line, paragraph. I want to read it to you really quickly by Window Berry, a small book called The Hidden Wound. And I think every person who's struggling with being an anti-racist should read this. He says, I'm trying to establish the outlines of an understanding of myself in regard to what was faded to be the continuing crisis in my life, the crisis of racial awareness, the sense of being doomed by my history to be, if not always a racist, than a man always limited by the inheritance of racism. Condemned to be always conscious of the necessity not to be a racist,

to be always dealing deliberately with the reflexes of racism that are embedded in my mind as deeply at least as the language I speak. Kentucky Bowen, Kentucky Brand, Mitch McConnell. like white boy, right? Talking about the ongoing necessity of interrogation so that he can emerge as a different kind of creation. So I happen to love a lot of people who happen to be white, but then they're white people.

Yeah. Eddie, what's your message for young activists out there right now? Keep fighting, courage and commitment in the face of unimaginable challenge, you've got to keep fighting. We need you desperately. It's your time. Seek complexity and nuance.

Exemplify the very values that you want instantiated in the world in the very way you struggle. Right? And fight for your mamas and your daddies and your children. Fight for the people you're, fight for love, fight for love, fight for love. Understand we got shit back. Yeah.

We got shit back. But fight for love. Thank you, Eddie. Thank you. This has been wonderful. That's Eddie Glawed. He's the chair of African American Studies at Princeton, and his book is Begin Again, James Baldwin's America and its urgent lessons for our own. It comes out in August.

At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing, or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire.

Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from CitySpace Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships Team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org.org slash creative studio. Let's go now to more from those protesters.

We're going to hear from Tamika Mallory, Ayanna Woodward, and Mr. Fab. And so young people are responding to that. They are enrage, and there's an easy way to stop it. Arrest the cops. Charge the cops. Charge all the cops. Not just some of them. Not just here in Minneapolis. charge them in every city across America where our people are being murdered.

Charge them everywhere. That's the bottom line. Charge the cops. Do your job. Do what you say this country is supposed to be about the land of the free for all. It has not been free for black people and we are tired. Don't talk to us about looting. Y'all are the looters.

America has looted black people. America looted the Native Americans. when they first came here. So looting is what you do. We learned it from you. We learned violence from you. We learned violence from you. The violence was what we learned from you.

So if you want us to do better, then damn it, you do better. We celebrate nothing. We're standing here with our demands, and we're sitting up to see the cease of police brutality. Decease of those are able to kill us and lynch us. That's the new modern day lynching. They're shooting us on camera. Them killing us, assassinating us.

That's assassination. That's nothing to celebrate. We are here because we fed up. We have reached our boiling point America. We want better relationships with the police. That's number one. We want unity within the school district. That's number two.

All the generations, Mercedy, we cannot do this alone. Older generations, elders, talk to us. Don't dictate us. Talk to us. Listen. Take the conversation at the red table to talk about how this goes full circle. Stop worrying about, worry about us. Because guess what? They're gonna try to take it from us. And all we got to in is us. That's all I got.

I'm a young black man. Doing all that I can to stay. And I see what's being done to my kind. Every day, I'm being hurt to this pray. That's Keedron Bryant on Instagram, singing a song written by his mother, Janetta. She told the Today Show that when she heard George Floyd call out for his mother, God spoke to her and gave her these words. You know what's been keeping me standing up straight and holding my head high during all of this?

Us. Getting to hear my mother's voice, hugging my children, reading my friends' texts, and you being right here along with us. If you want to talk to us about this moment we're in, we want to hear from you. Email us at truth be told at k-QED.org or leave us a voicemail at 415-555.5.5.5. Truth Be Told is produced by Susie Racho, Issa Mendoza, Katie McMurran, and Rob Spate. KQED's leadership team includes Erica Aguilar, Ethan Tovin-Lin-Linsey, and Holly Kernan. A big thanks to Kiana Mogadam and the Good People at NPR West. Truth Be Told is a production of KQED in San Francisco.

I'm Tanya Mosley. The future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives. It is entirely up to the American people whether or not they're going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger when they malign so long. What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place.

Because I'm not a nigger. I'm a man. Thank you.