The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show – Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Episode Date: July 14, 2020

Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Eddie S Glaude Jr. Princeton.edu NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race. In our own moment, when that confrontation feels more urgently needed than ever, what can we learn from his struggle? “In the midst of an ugly Trump regime and a beautiful Baldwin revival, Eddie Glaude has plunged to the profound depths and sublime heights of Baldwin’s prophetic challenge to our present-day crisis.”—Cornel West We live, according to Eddie S. Glaude Jr., in a moment when the struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the election of Donald Trump, a president whose victory represents yet another failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. From Charlottesville to the policies of child separation at the border, his administration turned its back on the promise of Obama’s presidency and refused to embrace a vision of the country shorn of the insidious belief that white people matter more than others. We have been here before: For James Baldwin, these after times came in the wake of the civil rights movement, when a similar attempt to compel a national confrontation with the truth was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. In these years, spanning from the publication of The Fire Next Time in 1963 to that of No Name in the Street in 1972, Baldwin transformed into a more overtly political writer, a change that came at great professional and personal cost. But from that journey, Baldwin emerged with a sense of renewed purpose about the necessity of pushing forward in the face of disillusionment and despair. In the story of Baldwin’s crucible, Glaude suggests, we can find hope and guidance through our own after times, this Trumpian era of shattered promises and white retrenchment. Mixing biography—drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews—with history, memoir, and trenchant analysis of our current moment, Begin Again is Glaude’s endeavor, following Baldwin, to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America today. It is at once a searing exploration that lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is a scholar who speaks to the black and blue in America. His most well-known books, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, and In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, take a wide look at black communities and reveal complexities, vulnerabilities, and opportunities for hope. Hope that is, in one of his favorite quotes from W.E.B Du Bois, “not hopeless, but a bit unhopeful.” Other muses include James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Bobby “Blue” Bland. In addition to his readings of early American philosophers and contemporary political scientists, Glaude turns to African American literature in his writing and teaching for insight into African American political life, religious thought, gender and class.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com welcome to another podcast of course we always have the best guests here today on the chris voss show and as always be sure to subscribe to the show refer to your friends neighbors relatives get them involved uh if you listening to the audio version on this on our channels,

you can also watch the video version on YouTube.com for Jess Chris Voss. Today we have a most excellent guest, a man that I'm very excited to have on the show. He's written a great book, introduced me to an incredible thinker and writer. His name is Eddie Glaude Jr. I'm sure you've seen him. He's an American academic. He is the James S. McDonald, McDonald Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.

He is also the chair of the Center of African American Studies and the chair of the Department of African American Studies. He is the author of the great book, 2020, Begin Again, James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. Welcome to the show, Eddie. How are you? I'm doing well, Chris. How are you? Good, good, good, good. I'm excited to have you on the show. Can you give us some plugs where people can order your book and take advantage of it?

Go to bookshop.com. That's an independent bookstore. Seller Amazon. Please go to your local independent bookstore. So the book is everywhere, really. So Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, a whole bunch of places. That would be great. And I mentioned to you this in the pre-show.

I want to give a plug out to this book. I encourage everyone to go buy this book to help understand not only what's going on in our world, what's gone in the past, what we'll talk about in the show, the lie, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, I watch Eddie on MSNBC. He's one of the people on there like Mike Barnacle and the Rev and everybody that when you guys say something, I turn and go, wait, okay, I've to pay attention to what's, what he's about to say. And, um, uh, and also John Meacham, I should put a blog in there and Eugene Robinson. Um, but, uh, I'd seen your book getting promoted and I never heard of James Baldwin before. And I, I, I feel like an idiot and I feel like I

wasted half my life not knowing who this man was. But I'm consuming it now. And so I was like, okay, well, I'll find out what this book is about when I get Eddie's book. And we had the Nicholas Bacola on with The Fire Upon Us, and he talked about William F. Buckley. In fact, he sends his regards. We had him on the show, and just as a matter of serendipity. And so I was like, like well i should watch as research

this william f buckley uh james baldwin famous thing that i'd never seen before i feel i feel like my half my life is just gone um and i was taken i was stunned i was riveted i was blown away i you know i i love great orators great thinkers christ. Christopher Hitchens, I love just sitting and watching him talk. And so I was just enthralled. In fact, I started watching so many James Baldwin's videos. I showed up five minutes late to Nicholas's interview. So I want to thank you. The great beauty of this book is helping me understand James Baldwin,

and it's a beautiful tribute to someone that you revered all your life. And moving there a couple points that got me tearing in the book. So I want to thank you, and I want to encourage everybody to go out and buy the book. Thank you, Chris. How's that for a plug? I love it. I love it. I poured my heart into this one, so this is great.

I kind of heard that, I think, in the introduction. And you're talking about that on MSNBC. And I got to tell you, we live our lives hoping to change other people's lives and make a huge difference. And so I just wanted to give you that plug because you've made that in my life, and I'm trying to share your message out there and change the world to what we can do of what James Baldwin's vision was. So let's get into it. Give me an overview of the book or whatever you want to throw at us on what this is about. So, you know, in some ways, the book is the culmination of 30 years of reading Baldwin

and finally bringing him to the fore. You know, he's always been a conversation partner throughout my academic career. And in my last book, Democracy in Black, he in some ways provided the frame for what I was doing in that text. And so finally, I said, you know, I'm going to write a book on Baldwin. That's what I initially set out to do. I'm going to write a biography of James Baldwin, intellectual biography of Baldwin. And the archive was so difficult. And I didn't think I could say anything new. Because, you know, some of the materials embargoed for 30 years, you can't really get at it. And I'm in Heidelberg. And I just landed, I write about this in the book, an introduction.

And I'm in Heidelberg, no less than an hour hour and there are white German police officers with their knees in the back of a black guy and he's screaming at the top of his lungs. And I have the distance, you know, thank God I don't have to go on MSNBC to talk about what I just saw. So I go back to my apartment and I just start writing. And I got the frame for the book. I finally had figured out what the hook of the book would be. And that's me thinking with Jimmy about our current moment. How might I grapple with my own despair and disillusionment and reach for a faith that we could actually change things? And how might Jimmy offer me resources to do just that? So I wanted to kind of, as I say, rummage through the rubble,

through the ruins that he left behind to see what could be of use to me. And the result was this book, Begin Again, where I'm thinking with Jimmy Baldwin about our current moment. And when you went to Heidelberg, I believe it was in the introduction, you were talking about going to Jimmy's house. uh is there a kid i call him jimmy i always you called him jimmy so much to the audiobook that it i i call him jimmy because he's like a close walking partner you know he's like a friend you know so yeah into a friend anything you know and it was beautiful how you described going to his house what he must have seen the the gardens and everything else in fact i i ended up googling the house to see what the

what this thing was on it and it's just a it's a it's a wonderful story um you know i am one of these people that has been stuck with uh you know i voted for obama uh and we could talk about some of those other details that you had in the book. You know, I believed in his, I believed in the change. I bought it. You know, that was my whole thing. He was a great orator. He was a great speaker. He was a great thinker.

I bought all of it. And, well, I wasn't under delusion. You talk about this in the book that we had resolved all of our racism because we had elected an African-American president. I thought this is a good marker thought, this is a good marker. Like, this is a good step. But a lot of people did believe that that was resolved. And then we saw the rise of Black Lives Matter, and then we saw the rise of Trump.

And for me, you know, I'd followed Trump all my life. I used to adore him in the 86 when I was a kid. And then over the years, it just became obvious to the guy he was a scamster. You know, I watched all the stuff with the casinos, et cetera, et cetera. And then I knew narcissists throughout my life in business. So to me, I had his MO. Um, and so for me, the last four years, 2015, uh, to here five years, uh, has been a horror show. I mean, it's been, it's been my heartache, my horror show. And I'm sure a lot of people have been through that. I'm sure a lot of people go through worse in their experience of it.

So being able to listen to Baldwin and understand why the Black Lives Matter first came up at the end of Obama's thing, and now as we're revisiting again and we're looking, okay, how do we resolve this again? 55 years from when Baldwin made some of those first speeches of going, hey, we need to change some stuff. I was just blown away. Yeah, you know, it's striking.

We're in a moment of moral reckoning right now where the country has to make a choice about who we take ourselves to be. And we've experienced these moments before, at least two times I write about. One is the Civil War and radical reconstruction, and the other is the mid-20th century. And each of these moments where we had a chance to really be otherwise, the country doubled down on this ugliness. And so here we elect Barack Obama. And you hear people declaring we finally turned the corner on race. And almost immediately after his election, what do we get? We get the vitri anxiety driving the Tea Party, having everything to do with the demographic shifts in the country that were making themselves manifest in our politics.

So we heard that. We saw voter suppression and voter ID laws suddenly just proliferate across the country. And then we elected Donald Trump, or as I put it, we vomited him up, right? And what's so fascinating is that Barack Obama came into office in the midst of this extraordinary swell of grassroots organizing. Many of us forget that, you know, millions of people around the globe had organized and mobilized to protest against the Iraq war. Hundreds of thousands of people across the United States were marching and demonstrating against the war. We saw people organizing around Fight for 15, a living wage. We saw, even before Barack Obama, we saw activism around policing in the country. And in some ways, Barack Obama got green-screened.

He became the object of that organizing. And once he got elected, it was demobilized in interesting sorts of ways. And we don't really see them find their way again until Occupy, Wall Street, until Black Lives Matter. And so that activism that brought him into office had to figure itself out again. How do you hail the state when it's run by a Black man? How do you bring critique to bear on racial disparity, specifically in the context of the Great Recession, when Black communities were being devastated. And we couldn't talk specifically about what was happening to Black communities, because Barack Obama didn't want to be seen as the Black president. So all of this is happening. And then the country has this backlash, quote, unquote,

I hate that language. But you know, we vomited up Donald Trump. And then all of a sudden, all the ghosts that have haunted our politics are now haunting out in the open. Everything that's been there all along, since I can remember remembering, is now in view. And here we are today. And the thing I love about your book, and the thing I loved about being introduced to James Baldwin through it, was James is speaking. You know, I love Martin Luther King. I love Malcolm X.

But a large part, they were talking to African-American people. The thing that, I mean, there's a lot of things that I love about James Baldwin, the way he delivers, the way he speaks the the intellectualism of it the emotion um the the the the way he lived his life um but but the way he speaks he speaks to me and you and and and to everyone he he the flesh of my flesh the bone of my blown he he speaks to everyone. And I was taken when I watched the William Buckley thing where he says, and I can't remember the exact of it, he talks about the police officer with the baton or the cattle prod. And he says something along the lines of, how should I judge him?

And to me, throughout most of his life, you talk about the beauty of this through the arc of the book, of to how he has this optimism, and then he has the depression after he loses his friends, which I can't blame him. I would be too. That would provide a lot of darkness to my life. But how he's always almost writing a love letter to all of us saying, we're all human beings.

And he gets really down to the gritty core, the manifest destiny issues, the lie. And I'd love you to talk about the lie, which you talk about a lot in the book. But basically, he gets really down to saying, here's how you can fix it, white people. Here's how you can fix it. And it's really simple. You just have to fix yourself because it can fix it, white people. Here's how you can fix it. And it's really simple. You just have to fix yourself because it's your problem, not mine. She hit it dead on the head, Doc. Yeah, I've been watching a lot of videos.

I mean, but that's it, right? So in the early stages of Baldwin's life, he felt that our love could help white Americans see that they need to be otherwise. But then he realizes by the end, after white America assassinates Dr. King, the apostle of love, that we can't spend our energy trying to convince white people who hold noxious views that they ought to hold different views. What we have to do is spend our time trying to build a world where those views have no quarter to breathe. But nothing changes, though, in this sense, right? That is, that Jimmy is, he's clear, at least to me he's clear, that the messiness of the world that we inhabit is a reflection of the messiness of our interior lives, that the lies that define us on the inside evidence themselves in our social and economic and political arrangements. And so he believes

in the Socratic dictum that the unexamined life isn't worth living. So the precondition, and this is why I barely survived writing the book, the precondition to say anything about the world is that you got to deal with yourself. So I sat down to write about Trump, and I found myself dealing with the fact that I'm a vulnerable little boy, dealing with my dad, trying to figure out how might I manage my own scaffolding of lies that undergird or support the life that I've built? And as a precondition to say anything honest and genuine about the world itself. So you're absolutely right that, you know, there's this line that I love that I always say, and it just, I swell with emotion. He says, I want us to do something unprecedented, and that is create a self without the need of enemies. And you just kind of go, damn, what would that look like?

Right? What kind of world would that be? But you're absolutely right. At the end of the day, we have to do this interior work as we're trying to build a more just world. We really have to self-actualize. Yeah. And he was so great at it, and you were so great at it.

In the arc of the book, you talk about Jimmy's vision and how he was raised and the impact of everything that happened to him in the world. But then you also talk about how this moves forward into the Reagan era and how we saw the rise of conservatism. And one thing that you taught me that I really appreciate you, just you're enlightening me and changing my life. I didn't know there was this separation of white and black churches. I grew up Mormon, and I knew that church was like garbage from the moment I was young. I just lost the Mormon audience, clearly, but I've lost them before. I just didn't believe it.

And so I left. I'm an atheist, so I've not been in churches. But to discover the racism of black and white churches, and then I learned about the understanding that they had been separated, or they had to be separated because black people weren't allowed in the white churches. Yeah, in some ways, I mean, you know, to think about the Southern Baptist Convention, Methodist South, we can talk about the split in American Christendom predating the Civil War, that it actually foreshadows the Civil War. And it's over slavery, over the issue of slavery. So, you know, Frederick Douglass said that, you know, the church people was right next to the slave auction block.

Right. There are moments, we have the records of Anglican clergy in South Carolina asking those who are enslaved as they submit to baptism, are you submitting to baptism because you want to be free or because you're giving your soul over to God? Right. of giving your soul over to God. Right? So racism, white supremacy, over-determining the very ways in which people believe in God, so much so that even the cemeteries were segregated. So death... Are you serious?

Yes. I mean, this is... Wow. I wasted so much of my life without learning this earlier. The idolatry of race. Wow. So when people say black Christendom,

that is in some ways a critique, an announcement of the idolatry of white Christendom. So the theologian Howard Thurman would say, the slave dared to redeem the religion profaned in his midst. And see, this is what I love about your book, the time that we're going throughout with Black Lives Matter. One of my most giddiest moments recently has been seeing black lives matter painted in front of trump tower i just find that beautiful uh but but to what we were talking about earlier um you know you talk about how the the white christian churches uh were helped with the rise of reagan and reaganism and conservatism and the repression of that era i

that was really educational for me because i was just a kid during that era. You know, I kind of just knew the blathering old man who fell asleep all the time on the TV and got shot. But then you talk about how we recycle this again. And the narrative of the book, Begin Again, where Jimmy keeps talking about how we have to keep beginning again. We keep finding ourselves in these pathways of of of of the mirrors of ourself like you say which is trump um and then you and then you talk in the book about how that brings us trump and we we've gone through this oh this is it's like a racial hamster it's like a hamster wheel yeah right um and the thing is was was so so important about the ruins chapter where I talk about Reagan, you know, and at the heart of that chapter is, you know, this this juxtap And how John Chaney's brother, this iconic

image of his young brother weeping to the point to where his little body is shaking, how his mother had to leave Mississippi because they were still being harassed and shot at their home, and they had to go to New York, and how Beneney ended up with a life sentence in prison because he became embroiled in kind of this murder spree that was connected to the Black Liberation Army in some ways. But Reagan represents not only a sense of betrayal and false promises, and Ben Cheney represents that shift in some ways, how we move from hope to desperation and despair. But what does it mean that the country elected him, Ronald Reagan?

And what I was trying to say is that for many Black activists, many Black folk around the United States, Reagan was as bad as George Wallace. He was the governor of California during the repression of the Panthers. He was the governor of California when they were pursuing Angela Davis. He despised poor people in California. He was the avatar to the Goldwater backlash against the civil rights. So when the country elects him as the redeemer in chief, you know, black America goes, Oh, all hell's about to break loose. Right.

And so what I try to do is to show that Reagan was a fantasy of white America, a kind of attempt to return to something. And he sold it beautifully with that, you know, that, that disarming charm, right? Make America great again. And we tell the story of Donald Trump as if it's a story that only goes to Pat Buchanan, George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, as if Donald Trump is only a racist demagogue, as if the Reagan tributary isn't what led to Donald Trump. He's in some ways a caricature of the same impulse. He's not a Hollywood B-list actor. He's just a reality show actor, right? We did the same.

I want to cuss. We did the same damn thing, right? Again, as we try to double down on this idea that America has to be white in the vein of old Europe. The beauty of the book, you tie all this together. You literally can see the march of the conservatism rise, especially big time during Reagan and the Tea Party. And then, of course, we saw what brought us Donald Trump. And it's an aha moment when you read the book and you're like, holy crap, like all of this, this is the map of how we got down this route, how we got down this hole. Um, you know, I, I had all my friends, I'm a big social media person

and, and all that. And so, you know, I had all these powerful social media friends, speakers, authors, um, and we all had, you know, kumbaya, Obamas and presidents. And we're trying to make everyone better. A rising tide lifts all boats. And then I started seeing in 2015 when, you know, you saw the man come down the elevator, the orange man, and make his statements that were racially tinged or racial. Tinged, geez, they were just racial on Mexicans.

And it was his dog whistle. And then I started seeing my friends change and I started seeing more discussions on social media of, you know, the Fox narrative and the bashing of Obama. And I started to see it with that sleight of hand racial tinge where it's like you don't really say the quiet part out loud, but you're saying it. And it started to really build on me where I'm like, there's a lot of this going on. And it almost seems like I have some friends that are deep in the racial closet. And they're not really doing kumbaya.

They're just doing kumbaya because obama's president but they're seeing on the horizon this demagogue that can tell them that they can say the quiet part out loud and eliminate pc and they're feeling emboldened and that scared the shit out of me yeah and i started calling it out i started calling some of my friends out and being like, you know, I've seen enough of this stuff to know you are a racist, and you're having a problem, and you like Donald Trump. And then it became, well, yeah, I am. And a lot of us in these huge groups of social networkers, we had to start looking at our friends and going,

holy crap, who are you? I have no idea who you are. And then even then, I had to learn looking at our friends and going, holy crap, who are you? I have no idea who you are. And then even then I had to learn things about myself, the implicit racism where, you know, white nationalism taught me a lot because the key words, culture, you know, our culture, when he says that, and I go, oh, wow, okay, I didn't know these were like, you know, this is what these guys are doing you know i gotta i gotta take out some of these words in my vocabulary i've got to take a look at what i'm doing and so it gave me a search for self-actualization to to say how do i contribute

to this how what implicit biases do i have that maybe i contribute to um and and with your book that in in james baldwin that talks about how we all have to go down that journey. Yeah. You know, I mean, the thing is, is that there is this undeniable faith in our capacity to be otherwise, but it just, it's not going to happen by osmosis. Yeah. Right. We have to, you know, Baldwin's shorthand for all of this is to choose life. Yeah. Right. We can't choose the illusions and the promise of innocence or the illusion of safety.

We have to choose life. And in choosing life, that means we have to confront the ugliness, the funkiness of it all. And there's this wonderful line in The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry, this Kentucky bred white boy whom I love, right? And Wendell Berry says racism comes to him as natural as language. And that he has to, as a person who's trying to transform the world, he has to be mindful of that regularly. And so this is not about how to be anti-racist. That's different. That's too corporate for me. This is more about how do we fundamentally change how we exist together, how we live together, how we rid ourselves of the categories that blind me to you. And what is being revealed in this moment is what we knew in 2016,

that sociological data was clear, the social science data, more generally, was clear that the voting, that the partisan divide mapped onto a deep racial divide in this country. People are unsettled by those damn Cheerio commercials with those racially ambiguous kids and all of the same sex love and that, you know, something is going on in America on Madison Avenue and in these cities that's really upsetting people, right? That America is not American. So we're going to make it America again,'m watching the same thing you're watching. I'm hearing it. I'm worried about my child, who's now a grown man, right? I'm worried about the people I love in this world. And I'm getting angry, and I'm despairing, and I'm disillusioned, and I'm pissed. And Baldwin is angry. He's disillusioned. He's pissed and baldwin is angry he's disillusioned he's rageful he's pissed yet he finds the resources to pick up the pieces to get in the fight again and that's where

um moving you know rummaging through the rubble in the ruins as he puts it that's what i found man and that's what led me to write the book begin again uh yeah i mean the black lives matter i i think what's beautiful about the black lives matter is we're tearing down these these these idols of of racism you know i didn't know up until the black lives matter during uh obama and i started learning and listening that those were symbols uh that were put up in the jim crow era and i just thought there were symbols that were put up in the Jim Crow era. And I just thought there were some crap somebody put up after the Confederacy War. But this is the problem.

Everyone needs to get educated, especially us white people, as to what our contribution is to this, what the lie is, how we need to fix it within ourselves. James Baldwin said, this isn't my problem, this is your problem. You hit it dead on the head. He's like, this is your problem. You created this. You made these names. You made these biases. This is your problem that you have to fix.

And so looking at, you know, and I want people to, as they read through your books and they look at black lives matter is to understand the struggle of what's going on uh i had a wonderful author on dr lawrence chatters on the show and he talked about growing up as a child he he he found that one out of three black people end up in prison and so he had two brothers and so literally at five years old he looked at his two brothers and went which one of us goes to prison and uh sadly one of his brothers to go to prison he fit the mold um you know with black lives matter unfortunately we had to watch what uh uh nicholas piccolo who

showed up on the show he said chris that was a modern day lynching and we all got to see that and you talk about the i i really want to visit that uh the lynching museum i believe it's in alabama montgomery yeah it's amazing yeah i've seen the things i just you just tear up looking at it uh and you talk about in the book about your journey uh touring it uh but what people need to realize is there's there's and hopefully we are there's these oppressive elements. There's racial elements throughout everything we do. I mean, we have, what is it, 5% of the world's population, yet 25% of the people incarcerated, and the majority are African American or Hispanic.

And we can see now the police policies and the problems that feed this prison industrial complex up to the judges. Reuters had a great article on judges that it did and the issues in there and how they racially profile and they racially punish. And then it goes up to the prison systems, which, you know, a lot of these people lobby to keep, you know, their private prisons, everything. I mean, we are just I remember that was that old was that old line from, it was in Newsroom, where he says, America isn't great. What are we great at? People who believe in angels and people, and having the most people in prison?

Like, that's what we're great at. You know, Baldwin saw this in 1972 in his book, No Name in the Street. In some ways, I was interviewing Angela, the great Angela Davis in Princeton. And, you know, because I saw this video of her and Baldwin and Baldwin was introducing her. And, you know, Baldwin wrote a letter in 1970

on behalf of Angela Davis that's just stunning. And as she was on the FBI One Most Wanted list and Angela Davis is at this event and she's just smiling and giggling like a little girl, right? It's just so beautiful to witness. And so I'm interviewing her. And as I'm interviewing her, she says, in so many ways, he was out there by himself. He was so alone. But No Name in the Street, Eddie, quote, may very well be the first book in carceral studies ever written. Because she's talking about Baldwin reflecting on the Safe Streets Act, talking about Baldwin writing about a particular form of policing, dealing with the Tony Maynard case in that text, right?

So Baldwin is seeing the cornerstone of the carceral state put in place. And it's not just a Republican story, right? So if you look at the back of the Kerner Commission report in 68, there's this stuff about expanding police and statistics around Black communities. Why? Because they want to control these communities that just exploded. When you hear the way in which Democrats are talking about nonviolent demonstrations in the early part of the 60s, there's a call for law and order. It's not just Richard Nixon. It's not just Ronald Reagan. So, you know, I think there's so much to talk about with regards to this moment and dealing with the lie. You know, there's this line that Baldwin wrote in 1964 in this essay entitled The White Problem. And I write about it in the book.

And I'm going to read the passage for you, if you don't mind. He says, the people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn't anything else but a man. But since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one's life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn't, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble. So the lie about our capacities, the lie about our passions and capabilities,

the lie to justify the cruelty of slavery, then the discourse built around that lie that justifies our actions, then the way in which the lie works to contain anything to reveal that we're lying to ourselves. Right. All of this impacts how we understand ourselves in relation to democracy itself. It disfigures and distorts our characters so that we can't even become the kinds of people that democracies require. And would you say the violence is a part of the shame of that, the internal shame? In part, yes. I can't remember if you spoke about that or James did in his book,

but I picked up on it because I see that in the kneeling officers, the batons. You know, I was lucky enough to grow up in California, so I didn't really see race much. In fact, I was in my 11th grade. One of my best friends was African-American. I didn't even know it. And the history teacher said, you know, we're in Utah where it's 90% white, which is a horrible culture in food. It's a real example of not letting white people run a country is bad

idea this horrible food um so that's my personal opinion uh i just lost the white people in utah um but the first time so uh but but uh he said he he was we were talking about slavery and he pointed him out because he was the only african-american gentleman probably in our whole school and he said uh you know, what was your feeling of that? And it was the first time I looked at him and went, oh, wow, okay. And so understanding, you know, things that I was raised with, like one of the things I was raised with was John Wayne. John Wayne was a big thing that helped shape me as a man and identity that I had and the manifest destiny of the lie and, and, and, and everything that you see. And like you talk about that fabric that is so, that is so tight in, in how we are and how we see each other. Um, and, and there's so much that we have to unbundle and the shame of that in going, uh, you know, what did we do? We did this horrible thing, and we've got to unpackage all that, and then we tell the truth about what we've done, it seems to me. I mean, think about it, right? So, you know, you have the Civil War, you have radical reconstruction, which is this attempt to do our first works over.

You have the second founding, the modern U.S. nation state comes into being. And then, you know, within a decade, you have the lost cause. And the lost cause is a lie. It's a lie. So not only did most of those Confederate monuments, most of them were built in the 1890s and early 1920s, and then in the 1950s. They were built in a moment when many of the veterans of the Confederate Army were dying off. But at the same time that Jim Crow was being consolidated in the South as the law of the land. Anglo-Saxonism began to frame our global adventures around the world. At the moment in which we're consolidating white supremacy in the South, we're annexing countries. We're bringing countries under U.S. rule that are full of black and brown people, Haiti, Cuba, the Philippines, and the like, right? It's a lie. And then you think about, we talk about the monuments, Chris,

which that's easy. Taking down Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, that's easy. The damn highways in Chicago are monuments to an ideology. They will bisect the city to keep black and white separate. Our built environment reflects this. So part of what we do when we tell the truth is not to engage in self-flagellation, to beat ourselves over the head with guilt and the like. It's to tell ourselves the truth, to free ourselves to be otherwise, so that then we can engage not only in reconciliation, but repair. We can build a more just world.

But you can't do that if you're like the Lost Boys in Never Never Land. And just as you grew up on John Wayne, we have a generation now growing up on the modern versions, modern day versions of John. They're Marvel heroes. They're the avengers right it's still this melodramatic world of good and evil although marvel is a bit more complicated it's not dc universe right but you get the point of me i think the people i'm really

concerned about is the new generation that grows up idolizing donald. I mean, to me, one of the great crises has been is that resetting. Like, I was just screaming, he's dragging us back to 1950. I don't want to go back. You know, I grew up as a child, and I remember one of the first images that really stuck out at me with Martin Luther King was watching a picture of him and his child, maybe two years old, and a burned KKK cross on his front lawn. And I remember staring at that photo for the longest time thinking,

what does a father tell his son about that experience? How does that shape his life? And one of the things that James Baldwin is great about that I think a lot of white people in this country need to listen to is what the African-American experience is with racism, what it's like to live in the ghettos, what it's like waking up. You know, like my friend, Dr. Lawrence Chatters, spoke about how he reaches that moment where he goes, holy crap. You know, there's, and he talks in our podcast about, you know, all the different levels of impression that he had to do. And to me, it would be crushing. Uh, I, I put myself empathetically in that position and go, this, I don't know how I could,

I'm not sure I could perform if you were to put those constraints on me today, um, at being able to do. And that's what we need to learn, I think, from your book, Black Lives Matter, James Baldwin, that we need to change all this stuff. Like the redlining. I heard one gentleman, he spoke about how his father would never drive down streets that were named Robert E. Lee Boulevard because the redlining of what those were designed to do, like you said, the freeways, were designed to keep African Americans

from moving into those neighborhoods. And you just see the systematic racism and the fabric of it and the complexity and the detail. It's crazy and overwhelming how deep it goes. Right. And the way it gets justified is by telling lies about Black people. Because we live in a society where White people are valued more than others. We know this. It's at the heart of everything in so many ways. And we tell the story about Black people being lazy. We tell about not having initiative by living in a culture of pathology and all of this stuff, right?

And by virtue of that, you know, it allows certain segments of White America to maintain their innocence, a kind of willful ignorance about what's happening across the tracks. And, you know, in 1963, you see my beat up version of the fire next time. 1963, Baldwin wrote about this. He says, and I know which is much worse. And this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know, and we don't know anything about it oh my god

it's like watching Wolf Blitzer on CNN is this America? it's like it's on loop and you just kind of say well where the hell have you been living? I know I feel that is this America? Is this America?

And, you know, and for a person who had to raise a black boy in this country, and you worry, even at 24 years old, when a grown man, 6'2", right, brown graduate, every time he walks out the door, you worry if he's going to come back home. Yeah. And what that does to the spirit, man, is part of the daily cuts, you know? So many of my friends have expressed that. We've talked about it on social media.

We've talked about it in private, about the chat they have to have with their children. And it's just so shameful to me that that has to take place in in my what my perception of america i should probably say because it's evolving um the how do we how do we fix this eddie do we have to start teaching about racism and and and teaching kids early in school how do we lay a foundation to to change this generational roller coaster that we're on to i know that's probably uh that we probably talk for hours but but i mean we're tearing down the monuments hopefully we tear down the street signs hopefully we change the name of the schools we change the name of the military bases but uh between reading your book and coming to reckoning of self and and and stuff i mean

what would some good steps be i mean mean, to me, go ahead. No, I think we have to address at the level of policy and at the level of story. We have to tell ourselves a different story about who we are as Americans. And it's a story that actually reflects the fact that we're a mosaic of people, that we're not this city on the hill or the Redeemer nation, that George Washington never lied his ass off. He wasn't just chopping down trees and never telling lies, right? Tell the complicated story of our beginning in pursuit of a more just world. It's not about perfection. It's about a more just set of arrangements where the dignity and standing of every human being is recognized and acknowledged. What does it mean at

the level of policy, right? We have to figure out how to address the wealth gap. So we've never committed ourselves to educating all of our children in this country ever. So divesting, they talk about defunding the police. They've been defunding public education since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. There's a reason why you got all of these private schools when you tell their history. Most of the dates of their founding, 1955, 1956, 1954, because they are the products of resistance to desegregation. And so we have to invest in a robust public education system. We have to begin to think about, you know, you know, Derek Hamilton, an economist at the New School, has talked about baby bonds for Black folk, right, trying to figure

out how we invest in Black children so that they, a generation, at least begin to have wealth because we were cut out from the moment in which the vaunted American middle class came into being because of the deal brokered between FDR and Southern Democrats. They cut black people out of it. So there's a reason why the wealth gap exists. It's not because we haven't worked hard. It's because we didn't have access to markets and mortgages. We didn't have access to the wealth that the government made possible. So just as policy denied us, policy is going to have to correct. We do know in this country, Chris, that there's this paradox. The country becomes more anti-racist in its public

opinion, but it doesn't agree with policies designed to address inequality. So we become more anti-racist. But for example, we hate, the majority of Americans are not for segregated schools. We see that number decline from Brown v. Board. But large numbers of Americans do not agree with affirmative action as a remedy for segregated schools. So we have this gap between our stated commitments and our practices, when in fact our practices reveal what we truly value. One of the things that really disturbs me in this moment that I worry a lot about is I saw a racial breakdown of who's suffering most under COVID-19. And you see the sadism of Donald Trump. And you have to wonder if there isn't a white nationalist agenda behind his, his, his being like, let it go because we know that Hispanics and African-Americans are going to be,

are going to be at the brunt of it according to the, uh, uh, and native peoples and native people, native peoples to have destroyed here and here in Utah, they were destroyed the Navajo nation. They're just, they're just suffering with it.

Um, but yeah, it's, it's a hell of a journey and, and I hope that, and, and I love that black lives matters it. But yeah, it's a hell of a journey. And I hope that, and I love that Black Lives Matter is continuing. Like it doesn't seem to have died out. In fact, it seems engendered by what Donald Trump has done. And hopefully we reach this moment of reckoning, awareness, or consciousness.

We're not fully conscious, but we've reached a moment where we go, this has got to be addressed. And until we resolve this, we can never be a great nation. We can never be a great nation. Absolutely. I mean, we have to resolve this. A rising tide lifts all boats. And this politics of scarcity and populism where it has to be like,

well, in order for me to get this lie of the American dream and manifest destiny means someone else has to suffer. I read early on when – that was the other question, big question I had for you. I read early on an African-American gentleman. I was trying to find it. It might have been Van Jones. But he wrote, it's actually good that we're going through Donald Trump because Donald Trump says the quiet part aloud. We now know who the racists are. They don't hide. They say it out loud. Did we have to go through this? Was this necessary that we had to puke up, vomit up Donald Trump? Did we, I mean, was this our destiny, our payment for, I don't know.

You know, I don't know. You know, it's such a Christian formulation that, you know, evil is always ministerial to good. You know, and I'm not quite sure I want to commit to that. Okay. I do know this, though, that the catastrophe of Trumpism has revealed the ugliness of who we are, whether we had to do it or not, because a lot of people are suffering. 130,000 are dead because of this guy and the incompetence of this administration. People have not been able to say goodbye to people that they love because of this pandemic and because of this nonsense. So I don't want to see, I don't see any good in it in a basic sense. But what has been revealed is who we are, right? And there's no going back. The genie is out of the damn bottle now. You can't put him back in there.

And so whether we elect Joe Biden or whatever happens in November, we're going to have to make a choice because I don't think if we fail that what will follow we can bear. I don't know if the country can survive a mistake, a wrong choice in this moment. We have to change, because I'll say this really quickly. I think millennials and Gen Zers, and this is why I end the book the way I do, right? I'm looking for Baldwin's grave and this group of young men are smoking strong weed. And I'm trying to find Baldwin and I'm asking him in the weed. I'm with Carol

Weinstein, one of my close friends, and we're trying to find Jimmy's grave. And lo and behold, he's right behind the young folk. But young folk today have kind of come to the conclusion that America is broken. They are the generation of catastrophe. Katrina, climate change, Great Recession, mass school shootings, police murders, global pandemic, economic depression. This generation knows that America is broken. And like young people around the world, they're going one or two directions. They're groping for a more just America, or they're reaching for fascism and authoritarianism. You know, I keep telling people, Dylann Roof was not a baby boomer. Richard Spencer is not a baby boomer. These are young folk. The Boogaloo Boys are not old geriatric people. These are young people, the proud boys, right? So part of what we have to understand is that young folk understand that, have concluded that America is broken, and the choice we make, the choices we make now,

will determine whether or not this fragile experiment survives. Yeah, there's a beautiful piece that you have that they play on commercials on MSNBC that's just touching. You know, my biggest worry is that even if we elect biden uh uh people of minorities like we talked about african-americans hispanics the native americans are still going to be suffering we're all going to be suffering probably for the next year or two economic health wise dying families broken you look at the same thing with the industrial prison complex james baldwin talked about this how many broken families and destruction and the raging. We saw that in the gentleman at Wendy's who just didn't want to go back to prison because he wanted to raise his three daughters.

And he panicked. And, you know, he was drunk and I've been drunk. I don't make all my best choices when I was drunk either. I got to admit to that. But there was no reason that man should die for for that thing but that it just embodies and and displays the the amount of terror of and destruction that these this has on people's lives um is there any way to reconcile this with do we have to reconcile the white church thing to to to keep them from regurgitating another Trump? Because their support of him has just been...

Yeah, I think we need to call it what it is, and it's idolatry. It's the religion of white nationalism in so many ways. My good friend David Gushy says that it's clear that whiteness matters more than Christianity in these instances. And that's really what I saw in your book. The way you described it, I went, holy crap. This is why, you know, while I left religion when I was young, I've always studied why people believe what they do. Whether it's believing in Martians or believing in fantasies of stuff under your bed or whatever the case is, why do people believe what they do? Why do they grasp it so tightly? And why are they willing to kill and destroy other people, uh, with those ideas? Um, and one

of my biggest other fears is, is that we pull another Obama with Joe Biden, that we, that we, all the racism, you know, people go, okay, well, we got to go retract back in our closets and we never resolved the wound, the lie. And then we just recycle again. And I'm going to be, you and I are going to be talking to James Baldwin 30 years from now. I will be, I will be a stone cold alcoholic by that time. But you know, Chris, I think it's really important that you say, you know, I will be a stone cold alcoholic by that time. You would be. You would be, my friend.

But, you know, Chris, I think it's really important that you say, you know, typically America likes to tinker around the edges and then congratulate itself and expect gratitude. Right? We didn't. See? Now, you should be thankful. We like to tinker around the edges. It seems to me, and I'm convinced of this, that we cannot settle for normalcy, going back to what was normal. And I'm reminded of Dr. King's speech in 1965 after the Selma March. And there's this moment where he says, people want normals. And then he started listing what was.

And it's horror. Just all the death. Horror. And folks want us to go back to normal. What is normal? The wealth, the gap between the top 1% and everybody else? What's normal? People dying because they don't have health care.

What's normal? People can't get a decent education. Student loan debt is more than credit card debt. What's normal? What's normal? People dying because they don't have health care. What's normal? People can't get a decent education. Student loan debt is more than credit card debt. What's normal? What was normal? It wasn't working then. And so it seems to me at this point, we can't reelect Donald Trump and we can't elect safety. We have to re-envision America. That is what we must do. Begin again. Indeed. That's the title of your book, Eddie. Eddie, I could talk to you for hours because I love how you think and the intellectualness and emotion that you deliver everything. This is the most excellent book. Anything more we need to, you want to plug Eddie before we go? No, you know, just for, I'm on Twitter,

ESGlaude at ESGlaude on Twitter. And you know, I'm also on Instagram at ESGlaude. We can continue the conversation on those social platforms, you know, it's Chris, just thank you. Thank you for reading the book and taking the time to, to grapple with these ideas that I that I that I poured my heart into. Thank you. And I wanted you to know that you made that difference. And I'm going to try and share and get that out there and learn so much.

Listen and learn. Right. So you got to do a change. So thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate it. Go check out Eddie's book. You can go to Amazon dot com and a lot of different places, as Eddie mentioned. Go buy it from your independent booksellers so you can support it there. Begin again. James Baldwin's America and its urgent lessons for our own. Eddie, thanks for being on the show. Thanks, Moniz, for tuning in.

We'll see you guys next time. All right, man. And you take care of yourself. Be safe. You too, sir.