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

“King George, we will not be your negroes that at the very moment in which freedom is being voiced in the country, it is predicated upon an intimate understanding of unfreedom, you see. And so that lie, and Frederick Douglass talks about it, Martin King talks about it. Before King, Du Bois talked about it, Ida B. Wells tried to expose it in the red record. Anna Julia, the lie has been at the heart of America's self-conception. And we see the reassertion of that lie. We'll get to this in real time right now with the debates around critical race theory, the debates around 1619 project, a refusal to look the facts of who we are squarely in the face, just as the British Empire and its children.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so there's this sense in which America, and if those of us who've read our Foucault and the Madness and Civilization or the History of Madness, we know that there's an understanding of madness before it's understood in a clinical sense of being at least one version of a kind of living in an illusion, right, that illusion that keeps us away at arm's distance from the reality of who we are. And, you know, there's a sense in which Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill explored the need, the dangers, the damage of that illusion and the madness that follows from it. So America is constantly trying to avoid looking itself squarely in the face, that slavery, its brutality, its cruelty, right? What it has said and what it has done vis- ⁇-vis these black folk is actually constitutive of who the nation is. I use this kind of apocryphal story, but I use this story all the time of John Adams telling”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the lie is this story that Americans tell themselves that we are, in fact, the shining city on the hill, an example of democracy achieved, the Redeemer nation, and we put forward those descriptions over and against the reality of who we are. Baldwin put it this way in an essay entitled The White Problem, I think written in 1964, where he says the people who founded the nation founded what would become America had a problem. They took themselves to be in effect to be Christian, to be founding this thing, but they had to come to terms with the chattel, these human beings that they held as property. And the way they came to terms with it, Baldwin suggests, is that they had to say that these human beings were not in fact men and women. And then he says, and I'm quoting him here, that lie is the basis of our present trouble.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it very well may be during his administration, right? I mean, Tanahisa Coates writes that Obama as the first black last black president, however he describes it. And then we get Trumpism. And the late Joan Diddian talks about American politics as being prone to melodrama, where we look for these villainous personalities and we think if we only banish the villain, we will be just fine. But Trump was and remains a symptom of a much more deeper and critical illness, it seems to me, or rot, to use a different kind of image. And so the election of Trump signaled once again, right, the secession of any possibility that this place was in the process of thinking of itself otherwise.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he saw what was on the horizon in his book, the book that's at the core of Begin Again is no name in the street, published in nineteen seventy two, he sees what the country is doing. And he's trying his best as a witness, as a poet in the Emersonian sense, to bear witness to what is happening. So that's why I call him a critic of the aftertimes. And I think we are too in a certain sort of way. The promise, the possibility that was the election of Barack Obama, has collapsed right in front of us. And in fact, the promise of Black Lives Matter has collapsed right in front of us. So we're living. Today in the United States, and I suspect around the Western world, even as Russia threatens Ukraine and threatens the West, we're living in a moment of betrayal, it seems to me.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I get the phrase from Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas when Whitman is writing in the aftermath of the carnage of the American Civil War. He's witnessing the Gilded Age take shape, greed, overrunning values, right? Democracy seeming to be beholden to selfishness in the like. So there's a world that has collapsed or is collapsing and a world that is trying to come into being. And so the aftertimes is that moment, that interregnum, that moment betwixt and between when something is dying and something is trying to be born. And Baldwin was a writer in his after times, the moment in which the promises of the civil rights movement of the mid twentieth century, the hopes of the Black Power Movement were being dashed as Ronald Reagan was ascending from the governor's house in California.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went back to my flat and I wrote what became in effect the introduction to the book. I knew I had a hook, that I wasn't going to write about Jimmy. I was going to write with him because he lived through a moment of betrayal and I was living through a moment of betrayal. So I wanted to return to what he calls his ruins to find resources, to mind his work, his writing, his speeches, to find resources to speak to our own moment. And so I always tell myself, I joke, I ran from the chaos of Trumpism until the disaster that was Jimmy's life. And it was a fascinating journey, which I barely survived.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was in Heidelberg as I write in the book, and I saw the police off. I wasn't in Heidelberg, the Alstadtford hour. And I saw police with a black man on the ground screaming at the top of his lungs. Knew I had to write about it. The one thing I knew I didn't have to do was to go on television and talk about it.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question. I mean, in so many ways, it's very Baldwin's papers are embargoed for the next 30 years, for most of them are. So we're not going to get that definitive biography until those papers are available to us. So initially I wanted to write an intellectual biography where I would just go through my favorite nonfiction and kind of engage with those works. And the archive just wasn't giving me much. I was going to repeat some things. I wasn't saying much that would be new. And then there was all of this stuff happening in the context of the US and Black Lives Matter. There was Ferguson. There was Baltimore. All of this, Trayvon, all of this stuff was happening. And I knew I needed to say something about the moment. And it wasn't until I was in Heidelberg. You know, I had signed the contract for the book. I knew I had to write something. Everybody was saying, where is it? I didn't know where it was.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How I encountered pragmatism, how I thought about the American experiment and how I think about the question of race and democracy in some ways”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He also helped me understand, I think, the American contradiction, the madness that's at the heart, the center of this fragile experiment, as it were. It took me a while to turn to him, though, because I knew what he was going to demand of me. So I didn't start reading Baltwin until late. I didn't read him very much in college. I tried to avoid him in graduate school because I didn't want to deal with what he caused. He caused among my colleagues red cheeks, flushed faces. And I didn't want to have to manage that. And the last thing is I didn't want to have to deal with what he was going to ask of me. And so I didn't start reading him intensely until I became a professor at Bowdoin College in Maine. And there everything just exploded. He became a central muse for how I”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it's such a difficult question. Well, first of all, let me just thank Hannah and all of the folks behind the scenes who are making this event possible. We have to give a shout out to the Invisible Labor that makes these virtual events happen. So I want to thank Intelligent Squared and all the folks who've worked hard to allow us to have this conversation. Baldwin, why? In some ways, he gave me a language to make sense of myself The rage that threatened to overwhelm.”
2023-10-27 · Intelligence Squared · James Baldwin: A Man For Our Times with Eddie Glaude · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT