(bright music) (gentle music) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] And now, the "Cascade PBS Ideas Festival," featuring journalists and newsmakers from around the country in conversation about the issues making headlines.

Thank you for joining us for "Fresh Air" with Eddie S. Glaude Jr., moderated by Tonya Mosley.

Before we begin, a special thank you to our members.

We'd also like to thank our premier event sponsors, Amazon and HX Expeditions, our founding sponsor, the Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation, our session sponsor, Socius Law, and our host venue, Fremont Studios.

(audience applauding) - Welcome to the "Cascade PBS Ideas Festival."

I am Tonya Mosley, and it is my honor and pleasure to be in conversation with Eddie Glaude Jr.

Welcome.

- Thank you.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) Thank you, thank you.

- Well, I'm so honored to be in conversation with you, and I think a great way to start is to actually have you read a passage from the book.

I wanna tell you guys, the name of the book is, "America, U.S.A.

: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversary."

And let's start with the very first page.

- Sure.

But before I start reading, I want to just say how honored I am to be in conversation with you, to have an opportunity to talk about this book in this moment with you is so meaningful to me.

So, here it is.

"Bitterness at the bottom of the cup.

I do not love America and never have, especially now.

It seems to me misplaced or dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious.

Love is most often felt and experienced close to the ground in the life lived in a particular place in time, and in memories that take up residence in the heart.

I suspect love of country is shorthand for the heartfelt relationships and experiences that make us who we are, things that happened in the place we call home, no matter how complicated that place may be.

James Baldwin was right, whoever's part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it and some of the people in it.

And I suppose that is why, in part, we are willing to risk our lives in defense of this place and of what it might become.

But in America, those feelings and experiences have always been stained by the ugliness of what white people believe about color, that somehow, or in some inscrutable way, the color of one's skin determines your value.

You end up spending much of your life trying to prove to others and to yourself, not because you are obsessed with white people, but because you want to live, that you are not an n-word.

Some Americans may believe that this view is a relic of a past that we have long left behind.

'After all,' they might say, 'We elected a black president and vice president.

Look how far we've come.'

'Stop complaining,' I hear them say, 'You teach at Princeton University, you are not a victim.'

But I speak from the experience of a life lived in this country, and I trust what I know, what I've seen, and what now sits in the pit of my stomach."

(audience applauding) - When did that sentence, "I do not love America," become true to you?

When did you consciously realize that that was a truth for you?

- I had written some version of the introduction, and it didn't land.

I thought I was holding something back.

And so, you know, writing is mostly about revision, and so I returned to that first paragraph, and suddenly this sentence just came on the page.

And I got up and I started walking around my study.

And I was afraid of what this would mean if I left it there.

And almost as if, you know, something inside of my head just simply said, "But this is what you have to say.

You have to begin here, and then you can explain it."

So I left it there.

And I decided, you know, in this time, you have to be courageous, and vulnerable, and daring.

And I couldn't- - [Tonya] And truthful.

- Yeah, exactly.

- One of the things that struck me from the very beginning of this book was that I realized I wasn't reading from the same man who wrote "Begin Again."

Because, in "Begin Again," which is a previous book of yours, you use James Baldwin's work to kind of beat back despair.

And in this book in particular, I felt that optimism of a truth teller, of a freedom fighter, it was gone.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Am I right in that feeling, in the same way that Langston Hughes, we felt in his later writings, and in James Baldwin?

- Yeah so, in so many ways, I'm arguing with Jimmy.

In "Notes of a Native Son," Baldwin says, you know, "I love my country more than anything.

And it's because of that love I reserve the right to criticize it relentlessly," to paraphrase him.

I never begin there.

I didn't begin there.

Maybe it's because I'm from Mississippi, you know?

But I'm rageful.

There are moments when I'm battling depression because the country has done this again.

At the end of "Begin Again," I said, well, you know, we have to make a choice, right?

Will we do this or that?

And we have a choice to put this moment behind us, and look what we did.

And now people have to raise their children in the midst of this.

They've gutted the Voting Rights Act, they're redrawing districts.

We're in the midst of what could very well be described as a second redemption, a second lost cause.

And, you know, the last sentence of the book speaks that emotion.

And so what I was trying to do with this book was kind of write myself some security underneath my feet.

Right?

So that I could actually get this rage under control.

To get my sadness, my melancholia under control.

- Why anniversaries as a way to look at this country's relationship with race?

You could have chosen court cases, you could have chosen lots of different ways.

What is it about our nation's anniversaries that allow us to see the problem so clearly?

- So, at each of these moments, the country has to tell a story about itself, it has to tell a story about its founding.

And so here we are, in the 250th, and look at the kinds of the contours of the story, just don't look at the UFC arena.

(audience members laughing) (Tonya laughing) Or the Great American Fair, or the Garden of Statues of Heroes.

But they're gonna tell a story, it's gonna be a particular story, we're the greatest nation in the history of the world.

It's gonna be a story about, you know, the saintliness of the founders, a story about the sacredness of this grand experiment.

And in each of these anniversaries, the nation has to tell a story about itself, about its founding.

And in each of these moments, Tonya, the country is struggling and grappling with its contradiction.

In each of these moments, the divided soul of the nation is in full view.

Right?

Du Bois, in 1903, wrote "The Souls of Black Folk."

And in "The Souls of Black Folk," he says that black folks see themselves through the eyes of those who despise them.

This is what he called double consciousness.

But I believe that double consciousness is actually a consequence of the double consciousness of the nation.

That America imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic.

And to hold those two things together, you can't, really, without contradiction.

And it deposits a kind of madness at the heart of the country.

And we see it evidenced every single milestone anniversary, 1876, 1926, 1976, and by God, 250 years later, 2026.

- You know, initially I was using the word, rhyme, to describe the different anniversaries, but there's something underneath that, a deeper layer that you call "disremembering."

- [Eddie] Yeah.

- Can you talk a little bit about what that is, that disremembering, and why it's so important for us to continue to talk about it when we're talking about history and our place in it?

- Yeah, disremembering I get from Toni Morrison.

- [Tonya] Yes.

- And, you know, she takes this notion of remembering and dismembering, the violence of forgetting.

Morrison is very clear about the work that disremembering is doing for the nation.

It releases it of its sins, it absolves it, right, of its evils.

And so we tell ourselves this story in order to secure our innocence.

And what we choose, and I write about this in "Democracy In Black," what we choose and who we choose to forget actually reveals the limits of our conceptions of justice.

And so the disremembering is doing violence as it protects our innocence as a nation.

- I wanna spend some real time on two of the anniversaries that sit on top of each other, so 1876 and 1976, because the disremembering of the two, I feel like, is so potent, it tells us so much.

So, 1876 is where you note that racial justice starts to get treated as philanthropy.

- Yeah.

- It's a gift that white people can extend and also withdraw rather than something that is owed.

Can you talk more about that and why this reframe of understanding this is so important as we read through your book and your ideas?

- Yeah, I'm trying to figure out this cycle.

Why is it that we're always returning to this?

What's going on?

And one of the ways I've resolved it is that, or I haven't resolved the cycle, the way in which I describe it is, okay, if America imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic, and if you can't hold those things without contradiction, how do you finesse it?

Well, you finesse it by assuming that white people possess freedom to give and to take away.

Oh, let me be clear now before people get uncomfortable.

When I say white people, I'm talking at a certain level of generality.

This is my reading of James Baldwin.

Baldwin will say, "I happen to love," and I say this, "I happen to love a lot of people who happen to be white, and then there are white people."

(audience members laughing) You figure out which one you are.

No, I'm just kidding.

(audience members laughing) But the point is that we all bear the burden of racialization.

We're all socialized in this way in which these categories matter to how we see ourselves and understand ourselves.

But then there are folk who are invested in the hierarchy and the way in which it distributes benefit and burden.

So that's why I say I happen to love a lot of people who happen to be white, and then there are white folk, right?

So, those people believe that they possess freedom to give and to take away.

And so what we see is anti-slavery movement, right, folk are fighting against slavery, and they are arguing that this contradicts their commitment to principles of equality, and liberty, and democracy, and the like.

And then, once the Civil War amendments are passed, particularly the one that ends slavery, the 13th Amendment, what do we get?

This debate about whether or not these folk can bear the burden and responsibility of citizenship.

So you see folk who were once anti-slavery suddenly become, right, folk who are arguing against extending citizenship to black folk.

Right?

So 1876 is this moment.

Douglass, Frederick Douglass, is grappling with this.

He's an example of these freedom snatchers, these people who believe that they can give freedom, and to take away.

He was born in slavery, you know, he escaped, he witnessed Lincoln sign The Emancipation Proclamation, the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, and he lived long enough to see Jim Crow.

He called these folk the apostles of forgetfulness.

Right?

And then he would say it, he said in 1875, "I don't want your alms, I want justice."

He's skeptical of people who wanna do something for us as opposed to with us.

And so 1876 is this extraordinary moment, Tonya, when the country engages, for the first time after the carnage of the Civil War, in a national remembrance of its founding, and it engages in this horrific act, at scale, of disremembering.

Frederick Douglass was actually invited to be on the dais with President Grant.

He's trying to get in.

This is in Philadelphia, not in Philadelphia, Mississippi, but Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

(audience members laughing) - [Tonya] Yes.

- He's trying to get in.

He shows the Philadelphia police officer his ticket, which puts him on the dais.

The officer says, "There's no way an n-word should be on the dais with President Grant."

He would not allow him in.

If it wasn't for a senator who sees him, Senator Conkling, I believe, who sees him and then escorts him in, Frederick Douglas would not have been able to even enter the exposition.

Then they sit him on the stage, the most famous orator in the United States at the time, they sit him on the stage, and he cannot say a word.

He's just there, silent.

Silent.

So there's this disremembering that's happening as the country barrels towards the end of the 19th century, with the violence of Colfax, the violence of Vicksburg, the violence of Hamburg, South Carolina, the violence of these coups that are taking place, political coups that are taking place in Mississippi, and Alabama, and Georgia against the backdrop of the horror that will leave over 53,000 black people dead by the end of the 19th century.

The country tells itself a story about the grandness of the American project.

My, my, my.

- I'm just so struck by this idea of it being a philanthropic effort as we bring parallels to today.

In particular, I'm thinking about 2020, when we all seem to be coming to the same realization in the same way that we found during reconstruction, where, "Oh, we understand the ills.

We want to right the wrongs.

And the white allies are in our corner, and they believe us, and they're speaking truth to power as well."

And then something happens, like the idea of it being a philanthropic effort, this idea that you can put it on the shelf, and then you can take it off the shelf when it comes to racial equality.

- At the heart of this idea, that certain people think that they possess freedom to give and to take away, is the cycle of sentimentality and rage.

You cry your crocodile tears.

I remember writing this passage, trying to figure it out.

Just five years ago, six years ago, we were in the midst of a racial reckoning.

I was crying on national television about George Floyd and the like.

And in the blink of an eye, we're here.

In the blink of an eye.

And the only thing I could conclude is that people were lying.

You weren't telling the truth.

Or you didn't have anywhere else to land, and you just returned back, returned to the status quo.

And so I was trying to describe it in a way, drawing on Baldwin's notion of sentimentality, and Oscar Wilde, and others, right?

That sentimentality is really just, you know, about your own individual feelings.

Baldwin says it's the mask of cruelty, right?

You cry your crocodile tears for us, "Oh, we wanna do this for you.

We're gonna make sure.

We're gonna resolve our sin.

We're gonna absolve ourselves of our sins by actually engaging in this effort.

We're gonna tell the truth about what we've done."

And then when the people who bear the brunt of what we've done continue to ask for justice, then the question becomes, "What else do you want?"

"We've given you enough."

"Overreach."

"How much more are you gonna ask?"

And as soon as you hear those questions, we're on the cusp of the backlash, the rage.

And here we are.

- What were some of the challenges for you as you were putting these things together, or maybe some of the big surprises for you?

Because I know that, you know, you started to see this disremembering, this continuing, with every anniversary and every 50 years.

- There are these moments when, particularly in 1926, and I'm looking at the sesquicentennial, or the 150th, and, you know, there's this moment where, we think of the 1920s, The Roaring Twenties, right?

But it's really the decade of the Klan.

You know, the most important piece of legislation that the Klan claimed as its symbol of achievement is the Immigration Nationality Act of 1924.

The Johnson Reed Act, which current folk are trying to return us to.

This is really important.

Or the fact that the Klan was approved initially to have its annual convention on the grounds of the 1926 celebration of the nation's founding.

They were going to celebrate the flag and burn a cross at the same time.

Can you imagine?

- I think I wanna take us now to 1976, 'cause this is a time period where you and I are alive, we're coming of age.

How old were you in 1976?

- [Eddie] Eight.

- You were eight years old.

Yeah.

It's the bicentennial, and the question has shifted by then, this is the apex of white flight, the thick of desegregation fights.

And it's the first time, as you write in your book, that the nation is forced to kind of acknowledge black history.

But the question isn't whether black freedom should be retracted, it's whether we should participate at all in the bicentennial.

Can you talk briefly about that?

- Sure.

You know, it's just, I remember, well, I have a photo, I have a vague memory of me being in red, white, and blue pants.

How kitschy the '76 bicentennial celebration was.

You know, from red, white, and blue whoopie cushions, to a range of things.

But this is a celebration, really, of white ethnics in 1976.

Remember, 1926, there is this real intense debate around immigration.

- And this is such an interesting point in history, because this is where immigrants have the ability to become white.

They have a choice to make.

- Yes.

- And as black people, we sit very squarely in that, because we're representative of what?

- The journey of the country itself, right?

- [Tonya] Yes.

- But, you know, 1926, these white, you know, if you're from Italy, you're from Ireland, you're Jewish, you're from the swarthy part, the s-hole countries of Europe, right?

The Klan can't stand it.

They are as much against Irish Catholics, Catholicism in particular, as they are against black people in the 1920s.

But by 1976, their children are claiming the revolution as their own.

Black folk are still arguing.

We are in this moment of deep decensus, Tonya, Watergate, Vietnam, black power, the black students, SDS.

There's all of this deep suspicion and skepticism about the country, and so the bicentennial is supposed to be this ritual that's gonna bring us together over and against all of this conflict and discord that's defined the decade of the '60s and the early part of the '70s.

And is this the first year?

'Cause in 1926 is the first time Negro History Week is celebrated, in 1926.

1976, Negro History Week becomes Black History Month.

President Ford, I can't believe I just mentioned him.

- [Tonya] Yeah.

(audience members laughing) President Ford recognizes and acknowledges Negro History Week, and then Black History Month.

But there's this debate, 'cause black folk are still struggling, ought we to celebrate this?

Because what's happening is that, instead of disappearing black history, black history is being absorbed into the story of America to affirm America's inherent goodness.

- Look, I only have five more minutes with you.

So, okay.

(audience members laughing) So, you write about the Reagan years, Reagan signs the ML holiday into law.

- Yeah.

- This is the time period where we start talking about like, color blindness.

- Yeah.

- It's a sorting, it parts black history to fit into this fairytale, but we're still kind of off to the side, it's not integrated into the full story.

Why does this move matter so much?

'Cause I think about the moment that we're in now, and I think about what we just went through in 2020.

It was the breaking apart of that colorblind idea.

- Right.

What makes this moment so crazy is that they don't even accept the redacted version of our story.

So what happens with Reagan, what happened with, Ford inaugurates it, Reagan signs Martin Luther King, MLK law and holiday into law, Barack Obama becomes, it's the kind of culmination of that, right?

Even so much so he can tell the story of the march on Washington in such a way that, you know, affirms the possibility of American life.

"We lost our way with black power.

But no, no, no, no.

This is what we're doing."

The MAGA folk don't even want that to be a part of the story.

But what we see in this moment is this absorption of black history as an affirmation of the inherent goodness of the country so our story is blunted, it doesn't provide (palms thudding) a critique.

Right?

Instead, the country can tell our story and pat itself on the back.

Look at you.

Look at me.

- Exceptionalism.

- Look how far we've come.

- Yep.

- Look how decent we are.

Right?

And then, in the blink of an eye, we find ourselves here.

- You call this book an elegy.

It's pitched in the note of the blues.

But I wanna know why the blues is the right form of the story of America at this 250th anniversary.

- America has to grow up.

It can no longer hide in its adolescence.

You know, when grown folk act like kids, they're monstrous, more often than not.

And so it keeps telling itself this story that affirms its innocence.

And what the blues does, the blues, right, takes you to the heart of the problem.

B.B.

King's "Nobody loves you but my mother, and she can be jiving too."

(audience members laughing) It offers a tragic sense of the world, right?

We don't have to be all angels, right?

The devil and the angel is in us.

So all we need to do is to look in the mirror.

So we need to grow up, because if you don't grow up, you can bomb around and then tell somebody else to fix it.

If you don't grow up, you can do all of this evil in these detention centers, in these black sites, and not hold anybody responsible.

Right?

You can become complicit with evil, because you are, by definition, innocent.

So the country has to sing the blues.

And you know what?

We've deposited there since we got here.

- That's the thing you talk about too, is like, we aren't just a part of American history, we are interwoven into the very meaning of what this country is.

- It's on our tongue.

It's in our food.

We.

Your country?

No.

We, in the fullness of our diversity, make this place swing.

So on July 4th and July 5th, as Trump and JD Vance invoke blood and soil, we need to show the full diversity of America.

Let's just show our behinds (audience members laughing) (audience members applauding) in full glory and claim the country as our own.

- Eddie Glaude, this has been a pleasure.

Thank you so much for this conversation.

I would actually venture to say, when you say, "I do not love this country," actually, this book is a love letter to America.

- Oh, you got me.

- Yes, thank you.

(audience members laughing) - Absolutely.

(audience cheering and applauding) (bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues)