- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" comes from Hillco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy.

Claire and Carl Stuart.

Christine and Philip Dial.

Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation, and public affairs communication.

EllerGroup.com.

Diane Land and Steve Adler.

And Karey and Chris Oddo.

- I'm Evan Smith.

He's a Princeton University professor, a cable TV commentator, and a bestselling author whose latest book is "America, USA: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries."

He's Eddie Glaude Jr.

This is "Overheard."

A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

You've really turned the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving in to the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

This is "Overheard."

(audience applauds) Eddie Glaude, welcome.

It's so nice to see you.

- Oh, it's a pleasure to be with you.

- Always good to be with you.

Congratulations on your latest success.

- Thank you.

- This is a great book.

- Thank you so much.

- And I want to talk about the theory of the case and the origin story of this book first.

- Sure.

- So you are literally, as the title suggests, looking at America through the lens of, first, significant anniversaries, significant birthdays, the centennial, the sesquicentennial, the bicentennial, the semi-quincentennial, right?

- Good job.

- All of those.

- We're in, of course, the 250th year.

We'll talk about that specifically in a second, but you are using race and America's, at least, theoretical values of freedom and equality as the lens through which to consider America in those crucial moments.

- Yeah, you know, I was trying to figure out, how did we arrive here in the 250th year of the country?

Trying to make sense of it.

Every present demands a past to account for itself.

- Yeah.

- And I'm not Jill LePore.

I didn't want to write a 700-page, 250-year history of the country.

And so how could I think about that?

How could I contextualize our current moment?

Here we are, the 250th anniversary, having to tell ourselves a story about who we are.

And so I decided to look at the other milestone anniversaries, these moments, these ritualized moments when the nation has to tell a story about its founding.

And it just so happens that at every one of them, the nation's central contradiction is in full view.

The centennial, the collapse of Reconstruction.

1926, the sesquicentennial.

This is the height of nativism, the decade of the Klan.

1976, the bicentennial, we're coming out of, you know, Watergate, Vietnam, the Black Power Movement, the Black Women's Movement, the students movement.

All of this is happening right at this moment.

So I saw in the story, in the story of these milestone anniversaries, the central contradiction at the heart of the country.

So it became a wonderful way to organize the 250-year history of the nation.

- There are some people who would say to tell the story of America today, you set the story today.

But the oldest saying in the world is also true, which is you don't know where you're going unless you know where you've been, right?

- Absolutely.

- You have to look back to contextualize the place that you have gotten to.

- Absolutely.

Faulkner was right.

The past is never dead.

You know, the past is in the present.

We walk with it.

We are living.

And, you know, when I think about our current moment, Evan, I can't help but think that the ghosts have us by the nape of the neck.

- Say more about that.

- You know, there's something unprecedented about it, but there's something also wholly familiar.

That the country's contradiction.

I argue in the book, as you know, that America suffers from a kind of divided soul.

- Yep.

- That in 1903, W.E.B.

Du Bois wrote this amazing book entitled "The Souls of Black Folk."

And there he talked about the double consciousness of Black people, that we see ourselves through the eyes of those who despise us.

And that gives us a certain kind of vantage point on the American experiment.

Well, what if that double consciousness is actually a consequence of the divided soul of the nation, of the doubleness of the nation, that America imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom?

- His phrase was a two-ness.

- Two-ness, yeah.

- Two-ness.

T-W-O, two-ness.

- Right, it imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic.

- Right.

- And you can't hold those two claims together without contradiction, without depositing a kind of madness at the heart of the country.

- But it's possible for those two things to coexist.

It's not either or.

It can very much be and is both and.

- Yeah, I mean, it's maddening, right?

- Right.

- I mean, it's a sign of a certain kind of schizophrenia, as it were.

You know, Martin King said this in "Where Do We Go from Here," that the nation suffers from a certain kind of schizophrenia.

- Right.

Are we any better off today?

I mean, I keep asking people, you know, in another context, the question often comes up, is this the worst it's ever been?

Are we in a moment unlike any moment we've seen?

And people are very quick to say, "Oh God, it's always been bad and it's been worse before.

It'll be fine because we've escaped those demons and times, and we'll escape these demons and times."

I wonder if you agree with that.

- Well, it's the worst it's ever been for me.

- It is?

- Right, I mean, look, I was born in 1968, so the conflicts of 1968 weren't mine.

I came in the world during those storms.

- Right.

- This is not to say, right, I mean, these comparisons are akin to, you know, is Kobe Bryant better than Michael Jordan?

Is Michael Jordan better than Dr.

J?

These are different eras.

- Right, well, it's a subjective characterization.

- Exactly.

So I think, you know, it's a moment of extraordinary trial and tribulation.

- Yeah, I want to read for the benefit of the audience, people who have not read the book, the first line of this book, which it's not, "Call me Ishmael," but it's pretty memorable.

The first line of this book is, "I do not love America and never have, especially now."

That will get you run out of rooms all over this country.

- Yeah, I got my head on a swivel.

I am in Texas, you know?

- Right, right.

(audience chuckles) I mean, I think it doesn't do justice to the point.

I've read the book.

I understand where that fits within the context of the arguments you're making.

But for the average person who doesn't take the time to read the book, what they hear is this guy's first line is, "I do not love America."

- Yeah, you know, the first sentence, I remember when I wrote it.

I got up and started pacing in my study.

- Oh, I bet you did.

- But I had to be true to what I felt in my gut.

- Right.

- The first sentence operates on three different registers, Evan.

So the first is that I'm suspicious of the idolatry of the state.

What does it mean to love something so abstract?

And here is my egghead kind of approach, right?

This is Hannah Arendt, right?

You don't love abstractions.

You don't love states.

You don't love the abstraction of people.

You love actual human beings on the ground.

And for me, every time I hear the love of country, it sounds to my ear like a rebel yell because something always comes in tow.

People who wrap their ugliness in the flag, right?

And so I'm always suspicious of abstract declarations of love that ignore everyday ordinary people right in front of you.

That's the first claim.

The second register of the sentence is a disagreement with James Baldwin.

I wrote a book on James Baldwin entitled "Begin Again."

And Baldwin is my walking partner, right?

But Baldwin declares in "Notes of a Native Son," you know, that I love this country more than anything and by virtue of that fact, I reserve the right to critique it perpetually.

That's a paraphrase.

Well, I don't begin there because of the third point.

So I'm differentiating myself from Baldwin.

Baldwin's from Harlem.

I'm from Mississippi.

- Right.

- Born and raised.

And I remember my dad who was the second African American hired in Pascagoula at the Pascagoula Post Office.

And back in the day, that was high cotton, right?

- Yep.

- We lived in Moss Point, the Black labor town of Pascagoula.

You know, Pascagoula, some of us might remember that's Trent Lott's old hometown, right?

- Right, right.

- I remember being thrown out of his house.

But anyway... (audience chuckles) - I have to ask you why you were thrown out of his house.

I'm sorry.

(audience chuckles) I don't want to interrupt you, but come on.

You held the door open.

I'm gonna walk through it.

- It was Isadore Hyde's house, but, you know, he was a Black supporter of Trent Lott, and he was trying to give me the argument of why Black people should support Republicans in Mississippi.

And I was a precocious young high school student.

- Imagine that.

(audience chuckles) - And I think I was in the ninth grade, and I said, "Mr.

Hyde, you're just supporting Trent Lott because it helps you financially."

And he told me to get the hell out of his house.

- Is that right?

- Yeah, I think he should have.

- That argument's being made on social media on both sides every day.

- On both sides every day.

- Every day now.

- I think, but in his case, it was true.

- Right.

(audience chuckles) So the third thing.

- The third thing is my dad got hired at the post office.

Moved us from one side of town to the other.

- Yeah.

- I'm playing with my Tonka truck with my new friend.

I imagine him red haired and green eyed, or blue eyes or blonde hair.

And his dad walked out of the house and said, "Stop playing with that," N word.

And it was the first time I had been called that.

- What year?

- 1970.

I can't remember, '70 something.

- Right.

- I can't remember.

We just moved there.

- Right.

- And I grabbed my Tonka truck.

I looked at my new friend.

He looked at me.

You could tell that something happened in him.

- Yep.

- I grabbed my Tonka truck and went inside.

And so that man told me what he thought of me.

Mississippi repeatedly told me what it thought of me.

The country told me what it thought of me.

And then I went inside, and my parents had to get to work to tell me, to teach me not to believe what all of these people thought of me.

And so the question becomes, and it's an ironic kind of sentence, "Why would you expect me to love the country?"

And it's almost the same, it works the same way, Evan, as the way in which we needed the happy slave.

You need the happy slave because the happy slave keeps us from dealing with the barbarity of slavery.

You need me to love the country and to declare my love for the country so you don't have to confront why I don't.

- So we're in a moment where love of country equates to patriotism.

And, you know, if you're patriotic, that's good.

If you're unpatriotic, we attack you for somehow undermining all the values of America.

There are a lot of assumptions in there, right?

Values is doing a lot of work in that sense.

- Mm-hmm.

- But you understand that by saying, "I do not love America," you are putting yourself in the sights of those who would diminish you, would diminish your work, and would seek to have you effectively in the kind of current parlance of the political moment deported from polite society.

- Elon Musk actually tweeted this.

- About you specifically?

- Not me specifically, but he said, "If you don't love the country, you need to get out of it."

It was a shadow tweet, I suppose.

But, you know, I think part of what I'm trying to do is to, one way to think about what I'm up to in the book is to change the preposition to a conjunction, to take out love of country, and think about love and country.

What does that look like?

What does that difference mean?

- Yeah.

- And, you know, I think it's really important for me to say, I think explicitly that the United States positions itself as patriotic.

The ways in which its nationalism evidences itself is always the good form of nationalism.

- Right.

- It's not the bad nationalism of Europe, of 19th century Europe, the nationalism that led to the ovens in Germany.

And that distinction academically as well as in the body politic betrays some things, right?

Our nationalism is good, that nationalism is bad.

Because Americans like to believe that their nationalism is rooted in the idea that our country is creedal, that it's based on the ideas that are articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that it's not about blood and soil.

But going back to where we began.

If America has a divided soul, that it imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom, the idea, but it also imagines itself as a white republic.

Guess what that is?

Blood and soil.

- Yeah.

- So it's been there from the very beginning.

- Right, I mean, but a fundamental American value is the idea that we believe enough in love of country to allow us to, back to James Baldwin, critique the thing that we love.

We love America enough to talk honestly and openly about the things that could be better, because America's not perfect.

Nothing and no place and no one is perfect, right?

So the idea that you are obligated to love your country without regard to that contradiction, it's sort of almost anti-American to say you must love us without criticism, without comment, right?

- And, again, I'm not interested in- - The politics of the moment, by the way, are very much about like 100% or nothing.

- Absolutely, absolutely.

The politics of the moment actually wants me to be in my place, right?

- Yeah.

- The politics of the moment, you know, evidences a deep suspicion about my presence here.

- Well, let's talk about that because you are an academic, a celebrated academic.

You were at Bowdoin when you first started teaching, and then you've been at Princeton for quite a long time.

You know what it's like on campuses around the country of different kinds, private and public today.

One of the big flashpoints over the last couple years has been this idea that we're going to get rid of DEI on college campuses, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

That we're going to return academia to merit, right?

To merit.

- Yeah.

- Can you reflect on this from the inside because it's been quite something to watch how this has played out here in Texas, around the country.

- Yeah, it has played itself out.

We just got access to these places, by the way.

- Yeah.

- My son is probably the first real generation.

- He's a Brown University graduate.

- Now he's a Brown University graduate, a Berkeley Law School graduate.

But the world that made my life possible no longer obtains, right?

And so the idea that, you know, my presence at Princeton is not because I have talent or skill or I'm thoughtful.

My presence is because somebody made it possible for me.

- It's a quota.

- It's a quota, right?

Because by definition, who I am, my body announces that I'm not qualified to be in certain spaces.

They're not making this argument about the local community college, by the way.

- Yeah.

- They're making the argument about who has access to certain spaces that afford you a certain kind of social capital.

The argument is not about what's happening downstream.

It's about who has access to UT Austin, who has access to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has access to University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has access to the Princetons, the Harvards, the Yales.

- And that is both, to be clear, that is both faculty.

- Absolutely.

- And it's also students.

- And students.

- Right.

- So this idea of DEI, right, of diversity, equity, and inclusion, you know, it flows from this presumption that freedom belongs to someone else to give and to take away.

That the idea of racial justice has always been a charitable enterprise, something that you do for me, that racial equality is a philanthropic gesture, right?

And the way you finesse the idea that America is both a beacon of freedom and a white republic is that you assume that white Americans are the possessors of freedom to give and to take away.

And so we find ourselves in these moments, Evan, where it seems as if we want to live up to the ideals and then we go "too far," quote/unquote, according to some- - The pendulum swings.

- And then the pendulum swings.

- You make the point in this book, which I really reacted to when I read it, and I thought that's actually said pretty correctly.

That often when there are conversations around racism in institutions, institutional racism or things in society that say they're about equality, but ultimately show themselves to not be about equality.

That often, if not always, the conversation these days turns to reverse discrimination.

- Yeah.

- Right?

So when you accuse people of not being their best selves on these subjects, they turn around and say, "You're discriminating against us by raising these objections to what we've done or what we've said."

That does seem to be not every place, not every time, but a pretty regular feature of these conversations.

- Yeah, it's a combination of two things.

One is that we live in a society where there's a zero-sum game.

There's an assumption that there are only a finite amount of resources to share- - You win, I lose.

- If I win, you lose.

If we have a racially equal society, if we have a just society, those who benefit by the current arrangements will lose out.

I always say, you know, people tell us, they try to convince us of the lie that there's only so much pie to go around.

I think we could just bake a bigger pie.

- Bigger pie, right.

- We could bake a bigger pie.

And so there's that.

There's that that's happening.

And then there's the claim that any kind of race talk by definition is racist.

- Right.

- Any attempt to identify what happened, what a differentiation in forms of policing, any way of talking about a segmented labor market, any way of talking about residential segregation in housing.

To even identify those features is somehow to re-inscribe or to re-assert racism by the very act of naming it.

Which means it leaves us without the resources to describe the kind of hell that certain people are catching, right?

And the idea is to let folk off the hook, right?

It's almost like, you know, we can go to Paris today.

We can go to France today.

There are no statistics that are about racial category.

They don't have racial statistics in the country of France.

That doesn't mean that they don't have racial discrimination in Paris or in France, right?

It's just how do we mobilize resources and attention to these issues?

And so I get accused regularly of being a race hustler on X and the like, precisely because I write books like this.

- Yeah.

- When in fact, what motivates what I do is a deep and abiding love for everyday ordinary folk to create the conditions, Evan, for us to imagine ourselves differently.

And that requires, in my view, an honest confrontation with how we got here.

You know, and oftentimes we want to be melodramatic in how we account for how we got here.

- The story of America here, again, conscious of the 250th year, you know, you talked about the American idea or you talked about things that ultimately ladder up to the American idea.

We've been talking about the American idea for this entire 250th birthday year.

This fight over what story we tell about America to me was laid bare in what happened at the Smithsonian Institution and what happened to Secretary Lonnie Bunch, who has recently stepped down from leading that institution because the pressure to revise the story that we were telling as a nation about our history was he just couldn't take it.

And he said, "I'm not gonna stand around for this."

- Yeah.

He's the first Black secretary of the Smithsonian.

- Yeah.

- And he had to face daily- - And he's all over this book.

- All over.

I interviewed- - He's all over this book.

- He was the one who told me, "America's more than an idea, it's an argument."

- Right, but his decision to step away and the most recent kind of controversy at the Smithsonian kind of follows the publication of this book.

- Absolutely.

- Right, so talk a little bit about that.

- Absolutely, so he's the one who told me that, "America is more than an idea, it's an argument."

And it's precisely an understanding the contestation around who we are that we get the fullness of the story.

But, you know, he's the first Black secretary of the Smithsonian, and he had to deal with racist arrows and slings from all of his tenure.

People saying, "We don't want that," N word.

"There shouldn't be a," N word, "running the Smithsonian."

- We're gonna remove things from, but also, and we're gonna remove things from the Smithsonian that make us uncomfortable.

- All out assault on American history.

The executive order, Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, putting Vice President JD Vance on the board of the Smithsonian to review its exhibits, right?

Even claiming that, you know, you can't even admit that Edgar Allan Poe was anti-abolitionist.

That's not something.

You know, it defames our ancestors.

It defames the nation as it were because these folk, Evan, want to be white without judgment.

They want to be white without judgment.

And if you take seriously our history, we're in Texas.

I'm from Mississippi.

There's no way you can tell that story unless you're engaged in a second lost cause.

- Right.

- Right, unless you're engaged in a kind of vicious redaction of the story that brought us to now.

And so Secretary Bunch found himself on the front line battling over the way in which we tell our story, right?

And remember, I say we're in a second lost cause, a kind of second redemption.

We know what that generated.

Because what you choose, I should say this really quickly, who and what you choose to forget often reveals the limits of your conception of justice.

So the kinds of stories we tell ourselves are absolutely critical to the kinds of people we imagine ourselves to be.

- Yeah.

- So who you leave out and what you leave out matters.

- Yeah, an incomplete story is not a real story.

100% I agree with that.

So in the remaining time we have, I want to come back to your time growing up.

You mentioned you come from Mississippi.

- Yeah.

- Dad was a postal worker.

- Yeah.

- Talk about, I know your mom was a big part of your life.

- Oh, my mom is my heart.

- Talk about your mom.

- I'm a mama's boy.

(audience chuckles) - Yeah, we're all mama's boys to some degree, yeah.

- My mother had her first baby in the ninth grade.

Dropped out of school.

- Wow.

- She worked at Burger King initially, and then at Ingalls Shipyard in the janitorial service, became a supervisor.

My dad was the strict guy who scared the living hell out of us.

- Yeah.

- My mother was unconditional love embodied.

- Yeah.

You're the first in your family to go to college?

- No, my sister.

- Second.

- Yeah, my sister was the first African American valedictorian of our high school in Moss Point.

- Amazing, amazing.

- And as the first African American valedictorian, it's the first year we ever had two.

- Wow.

- So there was a Black valedictorian and a white valedictorian.

- Wow, amazing.

- And I'm not talking 1960 something.

- I understand that's the point.

Right.

So you went on to Morehouse College.

- I did.

- And then got a master's degree at Temple, and got a doctorate at Princeton.

- Mm-hmm.

- Did you know back then that you wanted to be this guy?

- I knew that there was something.

I knew that there was a calling on my life.

- Yeah.

- I knew that something was gifted to me.

I didn't know what form it would take.

I knew that I loved reading books.

- Yeah.

- And that I was a fish out of water when I couldn't read.

- Yeah.

- Morehouse morphed that sensibility in a way.

But I knew that I was supposed to do something.

I can't be a preacher because I couldn't be a preacher.

- Yeah.

Let me tell you something.

Last 25 minutes, yes, you could.

- No.

(audience laughs) Evan, I couldn't be a preacher because I couldn't explain unjustified death.

- Oh, wow.

Okay, fair.

- I wouldn't be able to- - Fair.

- I don't know.

I wouldn't know how to minister to someone who'd lost a baby.

Right?

- Yeah.

- And so this has become my ministry.

And so what I try to do in this book, there's the last sentence of the book, which is so important, one of the last sentences of the book.

One of my students, she was from Texas, neuroscience major.

She was just so, she's amazing, brilliant.

She was in my Baldwin seminar, and Baldwin had her on the ropes, Evan.

Had her on the ropes.

She'd come into my office hours crying, "I don't know if I want a white boyfriend anymore.

I'm just..." right?

(audience chuckles) Had her on the ropes.

And so she wrote her final paper, and she wanted to track Baldwin's notion of love from the first book to the last book.

- Yep.

- And she wrote this sentence, "Hope is not what we need.

Perhaps what we need to do is to tell the truth with love, lit by rage."

- "Lit by rage."

- "Tell the truth with love, lit by rage."

My student was instructing me that what I'm supposed to be doing in this moment is to bear witness.

- Yep.

- To offer the nation language to understand itself differently by forcing it to confront the ugly truths about who and what it is, and to do so with love.

- Amazing, amazing.

Well, I wish you continued success with this book.

Keep preaching, okay?

Dr.

Eddie Glaude, Jr.

give him a big hand.

Thank you very much.

Loved it.

(audience applauds) Thank you so much.

(audience applauds) Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes.

- Affirmative action is debated.

DEI, who has access, right, particularly in higher ed, is really who has access to those institutions that afford you social capital, right?

So they're not arguing about admissions policies at the local community college.

They're arguing about who gets access to UT Austin.

And too many of the business elites, their kids can't get into the Princetons, Harvards, and Yales because they're saying those seats are being taken by these Black people, these brown people.

- Lawsuits on that very subject.

- Exactly.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" comes from Hillco Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy.

Claire and Carl Stuart.

Christine and Philip Dial.

Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation and public affairs communication.

EllerGroup.com.

Diane Land and Steve Adler.

And Karey and Chris Oddo.

(upbeat music)