Last week, the Prog had the honor of speaking with Eddie Glaude, Jr., the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the Chair of the Department. Most recently, Prof. Glaude was the author of Begin Again, a reading of James Baldwin’s life and work that Imani Perry, the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, called “an unparalleled masterpiece of social criticism.” The transcript of our interview is below, edited for length and clarity.
Marc Schorin: What really struck me was something that you cite in In a Shade of Blue, … the oath that slaves were made to take in South Carolina before being baptized:
“You declare in the presence of God and before this congregation that you do not ask for the holy baptism out of any design to free yourself from duty and obedience that you owe to your master while you live, but merely for the good of your soul, and to partake of the graces and blessings promised to members of the Church of Jesus Christ.”
I think the phrase “Merely for the good of your soul,” is so revealing, and namely of the way that Black interiority here is belittled, and it’s specifically for the purpose of maintaining the master status. And throughout your work… there is just sort of a consistency and a talking about interiority, specifically the interiority of Black people, that’s sort of peace disturbing. So when you talk about “post-soul… politics,” the term is apt, I feel, because while it refers on the one hand to politics post the era of soul, i.e. the ’60s, … it also refers on the other hand to politics has lost sight of the soul, which is of course in Christian terms, but you attach to the soul the ideas of love and courage and the ability to, in Baldwin’s words, “invent hope every day.” And you see this as done on an individual level by finding and surrounding oneself with love and inoculating oneself against hate, or more accurately against what Cornel West identified as the paralyzing force of nihilism… So… in what ways is that inoculation an intellectual act or vocation, and in what ways is it not?
Eddie Glaude: Well, I think at its heart is an existential move. It’s about how does one live in the midst of the absurd. And so to call our attention to that moment in South Carolina is not only to call attention to what is being asked of the enslaved in that moment, but it also reveals the depth of the absurdity of the gesture itself. That is, Christianity is distorted and disfigured by the idols of race in this moment. So that one’s stated or voiced commitment to God is overdetermined by one’s status as a means to someone else’s ends, as chattel, as it were. So, I think at its heart is an existential move. How do we imagine living a life under captive conditions? How do we imagine ourselves beyond our current reality? And I suspect, in my own work, I’m not only looking at the resources that we find within ourselves, that kind of interior question that you rightly note, but I’m also thinking about the environments that impinge upon us in very specific ways…
MS: … [W]e can talk about the absurd because you point that out as the tragic element of Dewey’s work, that West doesn’t quite think of or see, perhaps… It just struck me because it [a sense of tragedy] feels so lacking, especially in American politics and intellectualism. It’s not to say that we’re necessarily optimistic, but that it’s just the strikingly different from the works of Emerson or even… [in] Dewey… He has it, it’s in there, but it’s not his focus per se. Is that a correct reading of what you were saying about him?
EG: Right, I think there’s something about the nature of contingency in Dewey that holds off a kind of naive optimism about… outcomes. It all depends on intelligent action in some ways, because he doesn’t have recourse to God talk or metaphysical talk in a thick sense of what we might mean by that word or phrase. A lot hangs on the way in which he understands intelligence… But I think with regards to Black folk in the United States and around the globe, Black people in the United States, our tradition is defined by this ongoing encounter with an environment that is impinging upon us in very, very concrete and oftentimes tragic ways. So there is a blues that shapes the sound that comes out of that experience, right? … So it’s like me reading Baldwin, thinking that Baldwin is a figure who takes the issues that animated Emerson and brings them across the tracks. So what does the notion of perfectionism look like on the other side of town? In the slave quarters? It’s gonna look and sound differently, and I spent my intellectual career trying to mime that difference, trying to figure out how to describe it, and what lessons to glean from it, and… how might both offer us resources to think more deeply about democracy itself.
MS: …We can go ahead to Baldwin, who’s very important to me… I appreciate the idea of Baldwin maintaining his moral vision and clarity [that is present in Begin Again] against a typical understanding of his final years. And you mentioned, for instance, Hilton Als as… claiming the more typical, “Well, he got bitter at the end of his life,” or whatever it is… [W]hy are people scared of that version of Baldwin and claim he was bitter, yeah?
EG: Well, I think it’s because Baldwin is calling attention to the country’s betrayal. I mean, Baldwin dies in December of 1987. And once Reagan is elected in 1980, the ’80s, this decadent decade… This decade… where a particular economic philosophy takes hold, where notions of the public good are eviscerated. Baldwin is still offering a prophetic critique in a moment when people like me are gaining access to American upper middle class life. And so there’s a shift happening in the material conditions of a particular class of Black folk, and… at the same time, you’re beginning to hear a discourse around the Black underclass and the like, and Baldwin is still sounding notes that he was sounding in the 1960s, and still grappling with themes that he had been grappling with since the ’50s, and of course, in the ’70s, to kind of jump around my decades.
So I think there is a sense in which his voice is so unsettling, and that it’s so… He’s so misfitted for the times, that there is a sense in which he must have lost a step. So there’s a rejection of how he is positioning himself in that period. There’s a rejection of his politics in the context of that period, and there’s a shift in the aesthetic landscape, in interesting sorts of ways, as people turn their backs on the Black Arts Movement and the like. So I think they’re wrong in their judgement, many of his critics, of the later Baldwin. And I think, in this moment, in this renaissance around Baldwin’s work, we see… so much more sophisticated treatment of his later novels. People are really doing some really interesting work with his later non-fiction, that the standard story of “early Baldwin-late Baldwin” no longer really holds, at least in the scholarly world, but it still has certain kinds of currency brought more broadly with people who know of Jimmy’s work.
MS: And speaking of aesthetics… [Y]ou start this conversation in In A Shade of Blue, you bring it up again in Begin Again, that people were off put by… Baldwin’s aesthetic innovations, that were in part informed by trauma, [as] you read it. And then you’ve already spoken about Beloved being… so stylistically fractured because [Morrison]’s discussing this enormous trauma, and blues as being a part of that, as being a fractured sound… [I]t’s going back to what you were saying about it being an existential [question]…
EG: Yeah, and No Name in the Street, published in 1972, is really Baldwin’s first book after the assassination of Dr. King, and it’s a book that tries to account for what happened, not so much about the murder of Dr. King, but what had happened in this period of struggle. So the history of the Black freedom struggle in the mid-20th century is compressed, and Baldwin is trying to tell a story about what happened to these people, to these impossible, improbable aristocrats, as he described them in The Fire Next Time. And to do so, to recount, to remember, in the midst of trauma and wound is difficult. And this is why I say the book is almost structured like traumatic memory. It fractures. It falls back on itself. It moves from past to present, from present to past. He mis-remembers. And so, it is, I think, a tour de force at the level of form of what he’s trying to do there. And I do think that Morrison, the way in which she deals with memory in Beloved, echoes what he’s trying to do, what he did in No Name in the Street. So this idea of foregrounding trauma and wound as a ground for one’s political orientation or stance… It puts in front of us, and we can’t avoid looking at it—vulnerability, pain. It puts aside the heroic narrative that we’re so enamored with today. It’s the latest version of the cowboy movie, our Marvel films. We want superheroes just like folks wanted cowboys. And Baldwin’s work, and particularly in the latter part, [insists] on this vulnerable person who’s wounded, and whose pain, whose suffering becomes the bridge to other people, if that makes sense. “’Cause our suffering is our bridge,” he says. It’s a very powerful formulation to my mind.
MS: …We’re talking about him as a prophetic figure in that time, tragically and literally. His understanding of the American… well, what you call the lie in Democracy in Black [editor’s note: this was a mistake, he discussed “the lie” in Begin Again]. …And you write about this, that he never betrays his promise to Kwame Ture and those other students.
EG: Yeah, that’s an extraordinary moment. I came across that anecdote in… Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture’s autobiography that he wrote with Michael Thelwell. And Michael Thelwell was an important figure in Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, who went on to become a writer and a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And I remember going up to interview Michael Thelwell for the book, and talking with him about this moment. And Baldwin came to the Howard’s campus for that event, really held the audience captive, and then went to an apartment with these students, many of whom were members of the Non-violent Action Group, NAG, who were so important for Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee generally. And they chopped it up for the entire night until the sun came up. And then that last line, “If you promise your elder, me your elder, that you will never believe what the world says about you, I will promise you I will never betray you.” And I just remember reading in Kwame Ture’s autobiography where he said, “And he never did. He never betrayed us.” And that’s really important, because when Black power hit and… many of the folks who were in the mainstream of Black civil rights organizations who turned their backs on Black power, Baldwin never did. He constantly sought to translate, to make real the suffering, to bear witness, even when he thought they were engaged in what he called “that mystical black bullshit.”
MS: …It also counters this very typical narrative of what Black power is in relationship to, for instance, Martin Luther King, Jr. Or any number of groups…
EG: Yeah. That’s such an important point, because by paying attention to the late Jimmy, what we do is we see the continuities. We always talk about disruptions, but we see the continuities. The way we typically tell the story of the Black freedom struggle of the mid-20th century, is we talk about black power and the civil rights movement as if they were these distinctive things. As if they were completely made up of wholly different characters, not understanding that many of the people, the majority of the people who were proponents of black power, were actually participants in the civil rights movement.
They had risked their lives. They had committed themselves to nonviolent discipline. Stokely Carmichael was one of the most skilled organizers in SNCC. Said he said he never broke nonviolent discipline except for one time, and that’s when the police attacked Dr. King. And so what Baldwin wants to do is to say, Look, these are our children. You can’t tell me that you’ve been dragging your feet in terms of transforming this society, addressing the brutality of Jim Crow, the pervasiveness of white supremacy throughout the country. And now you’re shocked and… clutching your pearls, that these young folk are angry and calling for Black power, no no no no no. So, what he insists upon is the through line between Black power and the civil rights movement, that these children are, in fact, our own, and we need to understand and understand that their anger is in fact justified…
MS: …I think that that point about understanding also ties back to what you’re saying about trauma, needing to witness that and say there’s this kind of common understanding in each other’s suffering. I’m thinking about how… you were writing about your father, and Baldwin’s writing about his father [in “Notes of a Native Son”], and he’s demanding that we turn into ourselves and… Yeah, I’m telling you, I cried reading that at just so many different points because of how he demands this introspection that I also found in every one of those essays…
EG: …Baldwin takes seriously the Socratic dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living. And he holds the view, at least I attribute this to him, that the messiness of the world is actually a reflection of the messiness of our interior lives. And so, in order to say anything about the world, in order to be honest about the way the world is, one must first be honest about who one is, what has made you who you are. And it was one of the most difficult aspects about writing the book, actually, because here I am wanting to think about the politics of the moment, and Baldwin has me thinking about the fact that I’m a vulnerable little boy whose father deposited fear in his gut. So, it was this… challenge to run from the chaos of Trump, of Trumpism, into the storms of Baldwin’s life, because there’s this demand. He’s an exacting companion, actually. There’s this ongoing demand for this honest confrontation with all your wounds, your pain and your lies and traumas. And it supposedly, and it actually does, guide your pen. It guides your eyes and the like. So, but then, there’s so much there. But I think this claim that the messiness of who we are is reflected in the messiness of our arrangements, lets us know what are the stakes. That, he says, as he puts it, the trouble is deeper than we think because the trouble is in us. I love that formula.
MS: And that is… so important for the moment, right now also, ’cause the ugliness that we’re seeing is so… systemic. [And] when we talk about it being systemic, we lose sight of the fact that it’s personal. It’s individual. These are people who are damaged, and not trying to put Trump on the couch or anything, but…
EG: Well, Trump is just a deep manifestation of us. So we need to put ourselves on the couch.
MS: Yeah… it’s such an important takeaway from this, because I think there’s just this ongoing obsession with Trump and his individual quirks and possible diagnoses or whatever, and it’s just so besides the point, when it’s us and there’s a solution… There’s this claim that… Trump… [is] just like this one extreme person, and we had yet, at the time [Democracy in Black] was published… to understand the true depth, the true subconscious, the true Freudian connection that is being made between fascism and our regular daily lives.
EG: Yeah. The banality of evil, Hannah Arendt comes to mind, yes. But yeah, one of the things I wanted to try to do is to insist that we not obsess or exceptionalize Donald Trump. Because on a certain level, what it results in is this false idea that all we need to do is get rid of him and then salvation is had. If we get rid of Donald Trump, the nation will be better. And that’s just another game, another illusion of safety and comfort. And we hear it in the trope of normalcy and civility and the like. All of those are words that hearken for a time when all of the ugliness of our society was not in the open for all to see. So part of what I’m insisting on is, this is what I’m writing about and what I’ve been writing about over the course of my intellectual career, this isn’t about producing a manual of how to be an anti-racist, this is not what I’m up to… Baldwin’s shorthand for this stuff is, We gotta choose life, and that means we gotta choose the messiness of who we are. We gotta choose the funkiness of who we are. We have to figure out how to be together differently if we’re gonna finally end this thing, end this mess, it seems to me. And it’s gonna require honest commentary, straight no chaser. We gotta be brutally honest as we confront “our ghastly failures,” as he put it.
MS: …And again, talking about people being fractured and hurt and needing to sit with that. Not being able to have these how-to manuals or treating reading lists like a kind of check list, And Once I Read These Books, I Will Stop Being Racist…
EG: Exactly, and to figure out that… I have this thing, man, about the aspiration for wholeness… How debilitating this perfectionist impulse can be, and that what we need to do is not try to aspire to wholeness, but to find beauty in our brokenness. And the image that comes to mind, I’ve written about this in An Uncommon Faith, is the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui, his Broken Pots series… He comes from an amazing cracked pottery cultural group, and these pots were built for particular functions and purposes, and he takes these shattered pots and he makes something beautiful of them. Or you think about that form of Japanese pottery, I think it’s Kintsugi… [There’s] the crack, and then you fill it with gold, and then the broken pot is actually worth more than the original one. So what does it mean to not aspire for wholeness, but to understand, but to make one’s brokenness the source of beauty? That’s a different way of living, a different way of being in the world. And it seems to me that Baldwin, as fraught, as volatile as he was, that’s what he exemplified to me.
MS: I think that’s also important, to have this kind of exemplary figure, because it’s really hard to do that. And when the psyche is so scarred collectively and individually, to then turn around and tear yourself up… It can come across as a sort of Sisyphean task when we don’t have these kinds of figures in our culture.
EG: …But the issue [is], it may very well be Sisyphean, and that requires us to shift our focus from the end to the process, that the idea is not achieving X, but rather finding meaning in the actual struggle itself. That the fight itself becomes the source of meaning, because there’s no guarantee of the outcomes. And given our history, more than likely, the country will fail in transforming itself again, but we gotta keep fighting.
MS: I think that’s so important. And especially from a Marxist perspective, right? Where it’s all about struggle… What we need to learn as a movement, I think, is about handling that struggle, dealing with it and doing it…
EG: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
MS: …And you cite Adorno’s belief that dwelling is impossible, because the knowledge that comfort… that is, ignorance comes at the price of others’ suffering is too great to bear. So [we] must find a dwelling of some kind. And it’s also [about]… the question that Baldwin was posed in The Fire Next Time, “Who’s little boy are you?” He says, “Yours!” But we have to constantly interrogate that. And you also point out [at] one point, Fannie Lou Hamer, we’re all “sick and tired of being sick and tired”…
EG: Yeah, that “Elsewhere” chapter was so important for me to write. I remember my editor saying, “Why don’t we go interview activists and get them to give us some insight?” And I was like, “We’re always interviewing activists, asking them to tell us something about what they’re up to and what we need to do… I want this chapter to be something different.” And there’s this moment in Sedat Pakay’s extraordinary short film “From Another Place”, and there’s this image of Jimmy looking out in Taksim Square, and he turns around, he hears something, and he has his brow furrowed as if something is disturbing him, and then suddenly he breaks out into this exquisitely beautiful smile. It’s just absolute joy. And I’m thinking in this moment he had a community. In one of his most vulnerable moments he had a community that loved him, that, as I write, allowed him space to laugh full belly laughs, to rage, but to really find the requisite distance and space to breathe again, to echo my colleague Imani Perry’s work… to breathe again so that he can get up and fight again. So we all need to find our elsewheres. It doesn’t necessarily have to be out of the country or some place on the edge of the West and the East as Istanbul is. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that, but how do we cultivate the requisite distance from the arrangements of power so that we could say something reasonable about them, and so that we could hold ourselves together, so such that we can say something reasonable about them? But anyway.
MS: …And you talk about that hurt a lot also. You talk about his [Baldwin’s] suicide attempts and his utter despair… and in Democracy in Black, you also talk about the activists who say, “Activism saved my life”… ’cause the despair is so real. That breathing is for real… Do you envision that to be a collective effort, or is that a thing that individuals do, or maybe both?
EG: It’s both, and I think… one of the beautiful things about Black Lives Matter and all of its iterations is this language that never goes away, and it’s a language of self-care. People are always talking about having to tend to themselves, to replenish, and doing so in community, in the various ways in which they do. So I think that’s really important, because people will take and take and take and take, and then cast you aside. You’ve given everything, and you look up, you’ve lived your life in pursuit of this end, and there’s nothing around you, no one around you. You could look at some of the old activists and you can see the consequence of that kind of choice. So it’s a wonderful thing to hear young activists talk about self-care in this moment, but despair is debilitating. It is the temptation that can, as Du Bois talked about, [with] Alexander Crummell in Souls of Black Folk, it’s a temptation that could lead one to resign oneself to one’s fate. It requires a lot to pick one’s self, to pick yourself up when the country has, at least in this instance, profoundly disappointed you again and again and again. How does one get up? And for me, at least this is what I was thinking about as I wrote the book, at least, at a moment, is going back to how we began our conversation; so even when the clergyman asked the enslaved, as she was being baptized, did she do this only for her soul, not for the sake of freedom, [she] would go back to her quarters and look into the eyes of someone, who may, at any moment, be stolen away from her, but yet see a glimmer of love. She could see, just for a moment, the innocence of her children as they ran around. Even though at any time the brutality of slavery could rear its head, but in those fleeting moments, those fugitive moments of love, are found the resources to hold despair off, just for a moment. So that’s why it’s so important to think about those communities of love, the people who we fight with, the people we struggle with, the folks who share our lived space. You know what I mean? ‘Cause we go down with them.
MS: …[A] collective space is also [literal], we talk about Princeton campus, and there’s statues [of] slave owners… [T]he collective space… sees its Black students, faculty and staff as being sort of… Collateral is not the right word, but…
EG: Incidental.
MS: Yeah.
EG: Yeah, yeah. Princeton. Oh my God.
[laughter]
EG: In these moments, it can become so cliche, yes, Princeton. And only thing we have left to say, “Thank god for Dartmouth.” Or something.
MS: There will always be an Other.
[laughter]
EG: But even in this space, right, where you have folk clamoring and lying about, they have no space to give voice to their conservative views, and we know how we’re suffocating under a certain kind of environment, that’s defined by a certain kind of conservatism. Even in that space, we can find folk who we’re willing to go down with. You could put it in a Christian terms, wherever there are two or more, there’s the dwelling that God is evidenced, is made manifest. So it just seems to me that we’re gonna be fighting these institutions, these arrangements. We just gotta make sure that we’re tending to ourselves, not in the narcissistic way, but to take seriously Jimmy’s insistence that the examined life is worth more than anything we can imagine, which means we have to tend to ourselves.
MS: We have to do that examining. [laughter]
EG: Oh absolutely, absolutely.
MS: And [I’m] thinking also about the other two temptations Du Bois identified as hate and doubt… And how those are equally debilitating, ’cause you know… Everybody knows you give your whole life for the most modest crumbs from the table of power, and even those are… given so grudgingly and condescendingly…
EG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Baldwin will insist that hate corrodes the soul, it disfigures us, and can make us monstrous… Hate means you’re captured, you’re stuck. It’s like the moment someone grabs your hand, or grabs your shoulder—they’re stuck. So hatred is precisely being caught in a way that will block the path to becoming someone different. Doubt is as debilitating, if not more so, than despair. “I doubt that these people will ever change”… Doubt can lead to resignation to one’s faith. Both despair and doubt can generate a kind of melancholia that could send one to the corner of one’s room. And this is always the challenge. It seems as if, given the history of the country, that there’s always this struggle with madness. How in the hell do we do this? How do we keep fighting for more just America when people are so tethered to their shibboleths, when they are so committed to this way of life, and then we’re constantly facing the bribe to join them. Yeah man, those three temptations.
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