Laura Flanders: But this society is mostly not shut down, I mean there's an awful lot of people working because they have to. Working because people are requiring them to whether they have the protections they need or not, and there's a disconnect that Trump is obviously exploiting in his ramping up of we should open the country, people feel shut down and their ability to make a living. And I'm struck by how we live in America with these contradictions, we the people, but with slavery, we're all in the same boat, except we'll obviously not. Talk about that and how do we change that? How do we relieve ourselves of the burden of this deep contradiction, this cognitive dissonance that this country seems to put in at the core of our being?
Dr. Eddie Glaude: Yeah, I mean, I think it's to first acknowledge that it's at the core and not an exception. This is, to put aside Gunnar Myrdal's formulation of the American dilemma, that somehow the problem is that we're not just living up to our ideals, right? And if only we changed our practices, right, then we would be okay. No, we need to understand the very imagining of America, it carries with it the very contradictions you're alluding to. So at the very moment in which we're giving voice to an idea of democracy, right? We're not only do we have slavery, we have the extermination of Native Americans, right? At the very moment in which we are imagining ourselves as a democratic space, right? We call ourselves the empire of Liberty and what are we doing in Cuba and Haiti and Puerto Rico? How are we imagining Puerto Ricans in some ways? What are we doing with Japanese Americans and interment camps? In each of these moments, we see the exception that actually proves the rule of who we actually are.
Dr. Eddie Glaude: So, I think that confrontation" Because Baldwin is really key here, Baldwin begins with the interior. He wants to start with the of who we are, our own wounds, our own traumas. The fact that we haven't grappled with the pain and the hatreds that circulate in our being because he says the messiness of who we are on the inside evidences itself in the messiness of our arrangements on the outside. And so he moves from the interior to the exterior, right? So when you read him there's this kind of honesty that is very difficult to do. I didn't think I was going to survive writing that book, right? Because he's so exacting in what he's requiring of us. But the idea is not to rest in a kind of narcissism, but to imagine a self that is engaged in a kind of self examination, Socrates, right, that makes life worth living such that then it will result in these arrangements that are much different.
Dr. Eddie Glaude: So I think what we have to do is tell the truth about who we are. We're not the best country in the world. We're not the most powerful people on the planet. We're fallen finite creatures who are in this moment, in most cases, dying alone. We can't grieve with each other. Folk can't grab their mother's hands or run their fingers through their grandmama's head, her hair. We can't be the ones present when they're taking their last breath and they can look upon our eyes and say, "No, why?" Because we're revealing what we value and who we value, right? So the fact that they're rushing to open up the economy now reveals the character of the country. This is what they care about, and we have to announce boldly and compassionately that we care about other things, other people, a different way of being in the world. And this is how we want to live moving forward and to act on that as aggressively as we possibly can.
Laura Flanders: This sounds such a silly question, but what's your view of Donald Trump? He is a singular player on the stage right this second.
Dr. Eddie Glaude: Yeah, we vomited him up, right? At every moment in which the country has an opportunity to be otherwise it doubles down on his ugliness. So you think about the Civil War, you think about reconstruction -- and reconstruction is this second founding, right? What do we get in response? We get convict leasing, we get Jim Crow, the value gap as I put it in Democracy and Black returns. This valuation of white people is valued more than others. You think about the civil rights movement of the mid 20th century where we have people just arguing for basic human dignity and first-class citizenship. What did we get in response? A call for law and order. The tax revolt in California, this argument against the government, the erosion of the social safety net, that's the ugliness.
Dr. Eddie Glaude: What did we get in response to the election of Barack Obama? We get the tea party, we get voter suppression and voter ID laws, and then we throw up Donald Trump and we produce some vile, right, and catastrophic, in this instance, response, Donald Trump is us, as I've said before, right? He is a reflection of what's at the heart of the country and our challenge in this moment, even as we understand him as a singular figure, our challenge is not to exceptionalize him because now I'm going to draw on my religious studies background because what we do is we displace our sins onto the scapegoat and we think that the only thing that we need to do is get rid of him and we will be saved. And if you believe that I got an affordable flat in Brooklyn to sell you.
Laura Flanders: I often end these conversations by asking my guests what they think the story will be, the future, perhaps 50 years from now, will tell of now. What do you think?
Dr. Eddie Glaude: Oh my goodness, it was a moment of dire choice. One way the story could be told is that we faced a momentous choice and we chose to be otherwise. The nation finally left behind the baggage that has kept it from being a truly genuine democracy, or another version of the story will be in the face of a momentous choice, the nation doubled down on his ugliness, and it served as the last choice it ever could make. It served as the end of American civilization as we know it.
Laura Flanders: Eddie, thank you so very much. Professor Glaude, really a great pleasure to talk with you and I look forward to talking with you about the Baldwin book.
Dr. Eddie Glaude: Same here, thank you so much for everything you do.
Laura Flanders: You too, thank you.
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