YouSaid · the spoken record

Eddie Glaude

lines on the record: 62
first: 2023-10-27
most recent: 2023-10-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It varies. It all depends on what day you're talking to me. But Tony Morris is one John Dewey is another. Cornell West is another. Stuart Hall is another. All of these people offer me languages to understand the moment on another day you will get a different list. Tony would stay on that list though. Tony Morrison would stay on that list.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know there are folks who are writing biographies, Hilton Ales is writing one. He has access to the papers in ways that many of us don't. But it's the family who've embargoed it. So they serve certain papers at the Schomburg in New York City that you just can't get access to. And the families behind.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have to figure out how to disrupt this. We got to do it at the level of law, at the level of policy, to create the conditions under which we can no longer be walking mysteries to each other. And I don't know if Will happen, but I have to fundamentally believe that it can happen. Otherwise, I would drink too much Irish whiskey.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As long as we're breathing. As long as he brings a breathing, we have a chance. Have to recognize as Baldwin to paraphrase Jimmy, we have to recognize that we're complex creatures, as he would put it, we're sons of bitches as he put it, but we're also miracles. And if we show up, there's a chance for a miracle. So we have to keep fighting for the new Jerusalem, as it were. What will happen? Well I don't know. I'm beginning to, we have to figure out a way. To disrupt the intimacies of the intimacy of our hatreds. And this is not just simply a kind of sentimental call for integration or something like that, but there's something about how deeply segregated we are. That allows for hatred to fester and grow in those intimate spaces.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because the crisis brings with it a moment of possibility. We are on the cusp of a new world being born. The question is, will we be better midwives? That's the question.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Conjunctual moment is revealing the bankruptcy of a particular ideology, whether we call it Reaganism or whether we call it neoliberalism. It is clear that this ideology has revealed itself to be bankrupt. Now the question is what will replace it? What will emerge? And what we see among young folk in particular across the globe, as well as in the United States, is that young folk know this country in particular is broken. They're reaching for new vocabularies to imagine the country otherwise, but some are reaching for old vocabulary. Some are reaching for the language of authoritarianism, the language of fascism. They want order in the midst of the chaos. Others are reaching for different kind of language that is rooted in a green politics rooted in much more progressive and the like. So hope is found in the crisis.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I'm always remembered, my notion of hope is not penglossy and optimism, right? It's a hope that is. It's a hope that it's blues soaked. It's one of my favorite phrases coming out of Du Bois' of the passing of the firstborn in the souls of black folk. It's a hope, not hopeless, but unhopeful. It's a hope that gets me up in the morning. Baldwin would say, we have to invent hope every day. And if you're inventing hope every day, that means you're beating back despair every day. So here I want to invoke one of my intellectual heroes, Stuart Hall, and the way he taught me about the conjunctural moment. Every conjunctural moment is a moment of crisis and possibility.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or that moment, I have to tell this story really quickly. I know I got to tell this story real quick. Or this moment in California, there's a Black Panther event. And, you know, the Panthers and us, Ron Karinga's organization or intention, a Panther, an Us guard has an epileptic seizure and starts shooting in the air. Now, on the stage is Betty Shabazz, the late widow, the widow of Malcolm X and her children. Now, as the guns go off, everybody disperses. They run. Hear this queer, effeminate black man says But the babies and he runs and he covers Malcolm X's children. Doesn't run off the stage, doesn't run for cover. Instead he runs and puts his body over them and shields them. I just have to tell, I love telling that story.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, even especially that hypermasculine's turn of black power. So Eldridge Cleaver is going to say that he's just, he just wants to be sex with white men. That's the way Eldridge described him in Solon Ice, right? It hurt Jimmy deeply, profoundly. But you know what? When Eldridge Cleaver was a fugitive and left for Algeria, the Panthers, they raised money for him in the Black Panther paper. And the first donor. On every issue is Jimmy. It's a fascinating moment.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So asexuality placed him adjacent to the movement. People didn't quite know what to do with this effeminate writer, right? So King Martin King in particular wanted to keep him at arm's length. Just as he eventually did with Bayette Ruston, who was accused of sodomy and literally had to be removed from the movement, as it were. There is a sense in which Baldwin's sexuality, of course, places him in the crosshairs of black church folk in a lot of ways. But at the same time, the power of his witness, they could not dismiss. So he's singular and unique and distinctive in a lot of ways. His voice is during this moment. And I think it's absolutely critical for him as an artist to inhabit that space because he could never be consumed. by the movement”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my God, it's so much. I struggle. This is one of the failures of the book, right? I didn't quite, I wanted to be true to how Baldwin understood his sexuality, you know? It was like, this is my choice. He has this very liberal public-private distinction that he makes, that this is my private life, my private show, even though he was out. But, you know, I remember interviewing Angela Davis for the book. And she said, and whenever she talks about Baldwin, she turns into this beautiful little girl. I mean, it's so beautiful to watch. And she said, in so many ways he was out there by himself, he was all alone.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not just simply La Pine, but those who are to the right, running to the right of Le Pin, right? He would understand it for what it is. And that is, again, these deep-seated forces, ugly forces that are decidedly white supremacist and classist in their orientation. And he would call them for what I think, you know, I'm always hesitant to anticipate his words, but I think his words already condemn them. So he sees it then. He saw it then. And I think what he saw then is applicable now.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, he said something very, very powerful and no name in the street. He said he did not trade, he did not intend to trade the American myth for the French one. He understood what was happening to the Algerians in France while he was there. He understood what his passport meant for him, this blue American passport, but he also saw what was happening to the people with whom he lived, because Baldwin was dirt poor in Paris. He was dirt poor during his time. So he was in the shadows, living with those who lived in the shadows in some ways. And he saw how the French police treated them. So this far right drift”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he had a chance to break loose, but the forces are what they are. And when he say Clintonism, we're talking about democratic leadership conference. We're talking about the third way. We're talking about that version of the Democratic Party that wanted to break the whole of unions, break the whole of black voters, and move more towards the Silicon Valley and Wall Street Engage in triangulation as it”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then you're going to miss something. Clintonism is a creature of Reaganism. And we need to understand it as such to my mind. And Obama fits squarely within that formulation. In that sense, he's a discipline. Even as symbolically I celebrate how important he is, because my son came of age with a black family in the White House, and that matters, but he also came of age with Tamiris, Trayon Martin, Brianaga, Ayanajan, you know, Ayana Jones, Brianna. Do you see what I mean? Yeah. Those”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to my mind, Clintonism is the response to the age of Reagan. It bears the imprimatur of Reagan's assumptions, and if we are in a moment where the age of Reagan is dead or dying, then that means not only the Republican Party that is a reflection of that ideology is dying. It also means that the Democratic Party that came into being to respond to it is dying as well. It's like trying to deal with Tony Blair's labor party. It's a creature of Thatcherism. And if you don't understand it as such.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't feel necessarily betrayed by his presidency. I felt disappointed by it. The moment that Mitch McConnell said that he wanted to make him a one term president, the moment in which the Republicans reveal themselves for who they are, I was like, well, go be. Stop tinkering around the edges. And when he refused to do so, Then it let me know that this is who he is. We need to understand the limitations of a certain kind of representational politics. Just because you have black and brown faces in high places, it doesn't mean that these people hold a certain kind of politics that's consistent with the least of these. And so, to my mind it became clear that And I know I get in trouble for saying this. But Barack Obama is just simply a black version of Clintonism.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To give attention to the interior life of black folk while paying attention to the material conditions of black life. For him it wasn't an either or. He was trying to deal with the complexity of who we are as human beings in light of the material conditions that impacted and constrained our lives. Ellison wasn't so much interested in the latter, it seems to me, by the end of his career. He's this is a crude rendering, but it's more aestheticizing an aestheticized approach. And he's also, he becomes a patriot in his defense of the Vietnam War. And by that time, you know, Baldwin doesn't want much to do with it. That's a long winded. I got a lot more to say about that one.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Came a little bit earlier, right? So I got to make this answer a little bit more succinct. So I think they emerge at a moment of extraordinary ferment where the emergent is about to use Raymond Williams' language, is about to make itself known in interesting sorts of ways. They're different in the sense that Baldwin Ellison and Ellison are initially thought of as allies in relation to Richard Wright. That Wright's kind of social realist know limits of the work of the black artist. And Baldwin and Ellison are very critical of Wright's social realism. But then Baldwin gets accused in his later career by Ellison of succumbing to what they criticize Wright for. But Baldwin was trying to do something simultaneously.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Represents this moment where African Americans are beginning to give voice to a self-conception, a form of politics and a form of identity that will shape the Black Freedom struggle of the mid-20th century. And oftentimes we think about this as just simply the result of World War II and veterans returning home. No, no, no, no. This is actually the culmination of what we saw at the turn of the century when black folk are building independent schools, engaging in a variety of renaissance, not only just in Harlem, but in Pittsburgh, across the country. What we see are these young people who were educated in these schools suddenly becoming adults. And they're changing the landscape. Modernist masterpiece, which is invisible man.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think Ellison's in the manuscript being consumed by a fire Had profound psychological impact for Ellison. And remember, we were looking for the second novel, but Ellison wrote two amazing books of essays, Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory that were just astonishing. So, I think Wasn't so much his failure. He wrote it, he actually wrote the novel. It was just burned in a fire. And that had an impact. Let's say I think the 50s.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As a resource to imagine a politics that reflects what they were doing and who they are, so I think it's a combination A Baldwin's right, he was right, obviously. And B, that young folk who are out there argue arguing. It makes sense that we see not only a resurgence of Jimmy, but also a resurgence of Audrey Lord and others as resources by politics in this moment.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think, you know, like I said earlier, I think we've caught up with him. I think he's in the US context. He is the most insightful critic we've ever produced with regards to race and democracy. To my mind, he's the inheritor of Emerson in this regard. Ralph Waldo Emerson in this regard. And so there is this kind of sense in which he understood and wrote clearly about the contradictions that rest at the heart of this experiment. And then secondly, I think One of the interesting things about Black Lives Matter is that it was explicitly queer, you know, transgender women or at the front of the movement. They were guiding it. They were behind it. They were the thinkers. And Baldwin makes sense that they would reach for him.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, then your efforts are doomed. By definition, it seems to me. So those two moments, what do we have to learn? It requires a certain kind of emotional maturity to confront the truth of who you are. who we are. And I think that deep exploration, to use Baldoma's language of doing one's first works over coming from the book of Revelations, to go back and to understand the choices made so that you can release yourself into a different way of being in the world. Otherwise, if you refuse, otherwise the ghost still hard, they have you by the throat. Seems to me.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then the second move is actually a reflection of the first. And that is reparations, reconciliation, truth, truth and reconciliation. All of this is sequential to use Brian Stevenson's words. First you gotta tell yourself the truth. Which sets the stage for reconciliation, which puts in place the conditions for repair If you refuse to tell yourself the truth, then you're permanently docked in the station. And I've been grappling with this in my new book. What does it mean to impress, embrace a kind of perfectionist impulse, a kind of assumption that one is on the way to a higher self or more perfect union? But yet committed to the madness of a lie. It's like saying that it's a lie that's at the heart of a marriage, a relationship, and you're trying to fix it, but you refuse to confront the lie that's at the center of it all.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, I think that at the heart of Baldwin's corpus is at least two things, right? Our two things, right? One is what I call his inversion. And that is the problem isn't us. It never has been And he said this in London to students. You know, I've never thought of myself as the N-word. Question is why do you need the N word in the first place? Until you figure that out, until you confront it, whether it's in the context of the British Caribbean, whether it's in the context of the subcontinent of India, the legacies of empire are rooted in a certain conception of who White Britons take themselves to be. The same thing is in the context of the US, right? So that inversion is to say that the problem isn't here. Never has been.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's an insistence on clinging to the myth of that this in the US context at least is and must remain a white nation. and willing to throw the entire experiment away. On behalf of the So in that sense, what I call for at the end of begin again still holds, still obtains.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More to social services, less to carcerality. Now we have the same rhetoric that was at the heart of calls for law and order in the eighties. Circulating as and even the president of the United States in his state of the Union, claiming for more money for the police when in twenty twenty twenty one police killed more people in twenty twenty one than they did in twenty twenty in the United States You think about that in the context of the debate over immigration in Britain. How does Windrush work in this moment? How is it feeding into a certain conception or idea of what Britishness entails, who actually falls under the Union Jack? What is being articulated in these moments? For Baldwin and for me, it's a refusal to grow the hell up.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You still see right, and you hear parliamentarians in Spain differentiating refugees from Syria, from refugees from the Ukraine. We see the coverage in the United States where Ukraine represents freedom. And you say, well, what about those people who stood in line for eight, nine, twelve hours to vote? What do they represent, right? There is a sense in which in this moment where the pandemic has ravaged and raged in communities of color decimating communities of color in the United States. When the police have responded in the US to defunding claims, and defunding claims were all about distribution, budgeting, redistributing money in terms more to education.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the midst of this, Russia has been at the center of a certain kind of global white nationalism for the longest. You know, it has been a part of this, at least in the US, the object of a certain kind of desire of white nationalist organizations. And we know in Ukraine that there is, Ukraine is the kind of global hub of neo-Nazism, an interesting sorts of ways. And so when Orb ⁇ n comes out to defend Ukraine against Russia, you get confused. What are these elements doing? Who's battling what? And then you see what's happening to black students and brown students on the borders. In the midst of the cruelty and barbarity of war, race still working itself out.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know that's such a prescient analysis because when the UK edition was coming out, they wanted to do should we write something different? I was like, I don't think so. I don't know, you know. What we see is, you know, there's something going on in the world right now with Ukraine and Russia. I haven't said this publicly before, but it feels as if there's a battle to reconsolidate global whiteness.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be a mouthpiece for those who are actually engaged in behavior that run contrary to your commitments, to your values. So how do you acquire the requisite distance from the operations of power? Well, you identify with the least of these and apprentice yourself to organizations that are doing work on behalf of the least of these, and then they can replenish you as you see the operations of power in their ugliest form, you see. So first we've got to be loved and loved Intensely and intentionally. And then we have to fight, fight, right, with people who are like-minded and like-hearted. And that will give us the space to replenish because it's a long distance run. Because if you think you sprint now here, you won't last long in this fight.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who will tell you the truth about yourself, even though you might not want to hear it, but who love you unconditionally? There are moments when Baldwin's in have you ever watched the short film Another Place by Sedek Piquet, there's this moment he's standing on the balcony looking out and he turns around and his brow is furled and then he explodes into this extraordinary smile. And it's just You know, amazing to see. And so who will allow us to cry, to weep, to smile, to belt out uncontrollable laughter? Because that's replenishing. And in the second form, the second way of establishing it elsewhere is to acquire the requisite distance from the operations of power. This is me listening to Walser and Saeed, right? And that is that when you find yourself up close to it, you're constantly grappling with the temptation to take the bribe”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really fascinating for those of you who are interested in that chapter is really an ongoing conversation that I'm having with Edward Said, the late critic, and his work Representations of the Intellectual and the Political Theorists of Michael Walzer and his work on social criticism and intellectuals and social criticism. So I'm trying to figure out how to navigate these two figures, Isaid the Palestinian and Walzer the Jew, who's kind of grappling with this in light of real world political matters. So how do we do it? The one thing we have to do is to To revel in communities of love People who allow us to laugh full belly lives. Shout at the top of our lungs when it seems as if the world has overrun and overwhelmed. People who will steal your spine because your knees have buckled.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“commuter, but he was never in exile, because all of these places were purchased from which to think about the US, without the burden of having to navigate this place or having to explain it to people, or having to, as Adolf Reed once said, to have to interpret the drums to people who don't quite understand them. It's a bit much.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He knew what was happening inside of him. The very anger that he saw in his stepfather, his father, was in him, and that he needed to find a way to render that anger, that rage, and in some ways to temper it with love. And so London, you know, he writes, he finishes, tell me, you know, tell me how long the trains have been gone. And Tedworth Square in London, he finishes his essay on Stokely Carmichael in the same apartment builder, in the same flat, right, on Black Power. He found himself in a kibbutz in Israel, finished parts of Fire Next time there, right? He was in Istanbul a couple of times on a couple of occasions, finished another country there, right? He finished no name in the street there. And of course, he dies in St. Paul DeVance in France, right, where he had the welcome table, as it were, and thinking about these matters. So he's an internationalist, a transistor.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it gave him the distance, the requisite distance. I mean, you could imagine what Baltwin's second book published in, what, 1958 is Giovanni's room. It's just mind-blowing. So he's out in the 1950s. So he's this black, queer man writing about race in the most trenchant way, having to deal with the fact that America is explicitly racist in its organization. Having to deal with the daily cuts, and having also to deal with fame, right? Needing the time to write, but also having to deal with the fact that he's a black queer man in the United States in the 1950s and 60s. So he needs the space and the time to think about the country. He left America in 1948, and he says in the price of the ticket that if I didn't leave the country, Either I would have been killed or somebody would have killed me.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some poor who are putting them into office, you see. And I think what we saw in this moment that elected Trump was the reassertion of the lie, that ours must be a white nation, and then those who seemingly are, how can I put this, given that Gray and Fukiama are talking soon, those who are seemingly liberal, conceding to that assumption in their actions and not their words. That makes sense.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Toxic combination of the loud racist with the moderate white liberal who doesn't want to go too far, And those two combine to arrest change. You see, and so I've always argued that part of the challenge for us is to decenter the cisgendered white working class male. And imagine American politics differently. And every time I say decenter, they think I mean dismiss. There's a difference between decentering and dismissing, you see, because the Democratic Party in the United States, it's like a forlorn lover. They're constantly seeking the adoration, the attention of the so called Reagan Democrat, and they will turn over they will do, they will twist themselves into knots to try to attract the attention of this particular voter, when at the same time it is black voters, brown voters, women, some women, young voters, right?”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not just simply the election of the first black president. That mattered, but that's a reflect. That's a consequence of the demographic shifts that are taking place in the United States. The browning of America is not something that's in the distant future. It's happening right now in places like Texas and Georgia and North Carolina. And we're seeing the mechanisms of government deployed in order to arrest the political implications of those demographic shifts. So when Charlottesville happened in those neo-Nazis were screaming, Jews will not replace us. They were playing on the kind of ambiguity. Jews, you will not replace us. And so there is this sense in which Trumpism is this reassertion of the idea that America must remain white. And then there's always, Christine in the US at least.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, it's the myth. It's the illusion reasserting itself. It's the lie reasserting itself, this idea that America must remain a white nation in the vein of old Europe. Remember, there's a kind of terror and panic at the heart of it all.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Baldwin is thinking about race and democracy in this very intimate and complex way that I think offers these activists languages, resources to imagine black politics differently. That's why he was everywhere. It was almost as if we finally caught up with”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To those, to the least of these, those who are often seen on the margins of black life are now centered in the way in which we conceive of our politics, you see. So Baldwin is asking for a different kind of politics that's not bound up with the masculinist discourse of black preachers that we tend to associate the movement with. And then lastly, I would say. There is this. Insistence. And I mentioned it early, that we grow up. There's a kind of, how can I put this the world as it is. Is a reflection of the messiness of who we are individually. And so if you're going to do anything to try to say anything about the world, first you got to deal with the messiness of who you are.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that question is bound up with character formation, right? So we can't lose sight of the moral question Baldwin was making this point to black power activists who thought that power was the only thing and he was trying, no, no, no, no, who you take yourselves to be matters. As he said in his resignation from the accused of Semitism, anti-Semitism, he said, I want us to do something unprecedented, to create a self without a need for enemies. That formulation is a lesson to be learned. Also, Baldwin's corpus is in effect a kind of queering of black politics, a queering of black politics, not so much in terms of the fact that he's this queer black man, but rather this insistence that we call into question hypermasculinity, that we call into question a certain kind of complicity with the operations of power, that we give voice.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, I think there's this kind of insistence on a certain kind of maturity. Balden wants to insist, and I want to use that verb again, that we not lose sight of the moral component of the argument. Because at the heart of our activism is the question of who do we take ourselves to be?”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the same question that Baldwin was grappling with in the face of the collapse that he experienced. And in some ways, Christina, it's the same question that Douglas, Frederick Douglass, who lived long enough to see Abraham Lincoln sign the Emancipation Proclamation, and the fifteenth Amendment ratified, but lives long enough to see the states of Mississippi and Tennessee pass the first Jim Crow laws. How do you find the resources to continue to struggle for a more just America, for a better America, for different America when it seems as if these folk won't change? They're committed to this thing.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The election of Donald Trump. In a moment when activist in Ferguson are showing up dead. Saying that they're being lent, that they're committing suicide, but they're showing up dead in their car, showing up dead under trees and the like. And I kept saying to myself they've done it again. They're doing it again. How do I find the resources? To speak to the moment and to act”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's the response to the movement? It's the call for law and order which puts in place the elements that would become the carceral state. It's the tax revolt in California which leads to the shredding of the social safety net as white America abdicates, it kind of abandons the public sphere as it's being desegregated and then cries foul because as they abandon it, they don't want their tax money to continue to pay for it, right? And so Baldwin is trying to give an account of what it means to confront the betrayal and to still have to struggle. What does it mean to muster the energy, to push the damn boulder up the hill again? How do we respond to white America doing it again? So here I am. Writing in a moment that young people across the country are putting their lives on the line. And the country's response.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, so you can imagine the title of the book comes from his last novel Just Above My Head, right? And there's this moment in the novel where there's a kind of accounting of what has happened in the context of the 60s revolution. And, you know, some lost their minds, some left the country, some went to jail, some died. But then he says, responsibility is not responsibility is not lost, is abdicated. And if one refuses abdication, then one begins again. So Baldwin is writing in a moment where he sees the collapse of this extraordinary effort at kind of living up to the ideals, the principles of American democracy, or to put it more accurately, of imagining America differently. And he sees the nation literally turn its back. What is the response of America to the assassination of Dr. King? It's to elect Richard Nixon twice.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Refuse to look itself squarely in the face and what it has done and what that doing means for its own self-conception, if that makes sense.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT