Professor Glaude, welcome to The Daily Social Distancing Show.
(chuckles) It's my pleasure. It's my pleasure.
First of all, can I just say how impressed I am
that you-you're at home but you're rocking that suit
like you are in a studio somewhere.
It's really impressive.
You know, if you asked me to stand up,
it'll be a different question.
-But I appreci-- I appreciate that. -(laughing)
I appreciate it.
People always ask me about the books that are behind me here.
And yours has been here
almost from the very beginning, I think.
You write about race and you write about America's stories
and the stories it tells itself about race.
James Born-- Baldwin
is notorious for being a writer
who wrote and spoke his mind
and, in many ways, taps-taps into the consciousness
of what it means to be black in America.
Your new book delves into his life.
But it's part biography, part analyzing, you know, his writing
and how it applies to-to what we're going through today.
In-in all the time since those books have been written,
has anything changed?
Well, you know, Baldwin has this wonderful line,
"America's always changing but America never changes."
There's this sense that the country is dynamic,
but there's this ongoing through line.
And this through line is the value gap,
the value gap that I mention in Democracy in Black,
and that is this belief
that white people matter more than others.
And that belief evidences itself, Trevor,
in our habits and our dispositions and our practices.
And then we tell a whole host of lies to protect those beliefs.
Right? And so, even as we change--
you know, having Barack Obama as the president
is not the same as being in Jim Crow,
which is not the same as being enslaved--
but the through line
is white people are valued more than others.
And so that's-that's what, um, Baldwin understood.
Um, and I think he's our most insightful writer
about democracy and race in this country.
And I think that's why, uh, his work
is, like, ever-- an evergreen.
But what I do in this book is I focus on the latter work,
the later writings,
-and that's what's unsettling a lot of people. -Mm-hmm.
This is stuff that was written, so it was out there.
But-but it really seems to unsettle people
when you delve into Baldwin's work
and almost delve into what it means.
Why do you think it's so unsettling?
The later Baldwin is a Baldwin that's trying to come to terms
with America's betrayal.
Most folks say he's bitter, he's angry,
his rage has overwhelmed his art.
But Baldwin is trying to come to terms with the fact
that the country has assassinated
Martin Luther King Jr.
He's collapsed. In 1969, he tries to commit suicide.
Um, failed relationship.
The country, uh, is-is on the road
to not only electing Richard Nixon-- it, you know--
but it's on the road to electing Ronald Reagan.
And for many people, they don't understand,
Ronald Reagan was as notorious as George Wallace
-for black folk in this country. -Hmm.
Um, and so I was-- I was interested in Baldwin,
who was trying to make sense of our trauma,
our pain, our wound,
trying to pick up the pieces in the face of America's betrayal.
And here we are in our moment,
after Barack Obama's presidency,
af-- and then the vitriol of the-- of the Tea Party.
Voter suppression and voter I.D. laws.
And then we vomited up Donald Trump.
And I was trying to deal with my own despair and disillusionment.
And so I turned to him in that moment.
Was there even a glimpse of hope in Baldwin's work?
Was there something you looked at, where you said,
"Wow. Okay, at least that's changed"
or "That's gotten better" or "This is one part of life
"for a black person in America
that has maybe not held up in the texts"?
Or is it just pretty much prophetic
and also, at the same time, relevant?
Yeah, I found hope. You know, I had to--
'Cause one of the things I was trying to do is to figure out
how to-- how did he manage his rage and his faith in us.
Right? How could he be angry and still have--
hold on to the belief
that we could still build a new Jerusalem?
And there's this wonderful line he dropped in 1970, man.
He said, "Hope is invented every day."
And, you know, that idea of hope being invented every day
in the context of one having to battle for one's life,
having to struggle just to find the space to smile,
the space to just simply imagine that tomorrow could be better,
you have to invent hope in that context.
And that becomes the precondition
for you to join the battle again.
Even when he embraced
the-the anger and rage of-of Black Power,
he never gave up the question that--
or the-the claim that it was a moral issue at its heart.
And so, at the end of the day,
he wants to insist that we be true to ourselves,
that we tell the truth about what we've done
so that we can free ourselves
into imagining being together differently.
And as a artist and a poet,
he tried to make that as clear as possible
and as powerful and provocative as possible.
Let me ask you about this.
One thing I pick up in Baldwin's writing is
he-he oftentimes feels almost guilty
that he's living in France for a certain amount of time,
where-where he's away
from the strife of his fellow black American.
And-and he acknowledges that he's living a better life
as a black American in France.
What's interesting is I remember black Americans
who would come to South Africa
and, although apartheid was happening,
they would comment on how they weren't subjected
to the same racist laws as black South Africans were.
And it's a really interesting dynamic, where it feels like,
if black people go to a country
where they don't have a history in that country,
the people in that country seem to get along with them easier
or-or in a different way.
Do you think part of it goes back to what Baldwin was saying
about-about the guilt and the burden of that guilt,
is that when people don't have to deal with the history
of what peoples have done to other peoples,
they can then engage in a forward-looking discussion?
You know, I think Baldwin always grappled
with survival's-- survivor's guilt.
Right? He watched Medgar get murdered.
He watched Malcolm get murdered and Malcolm get murdered
and Sammy Younge and Jimmie Lee Jackson.
And he saw so many of his young friends
from Howard and Fisk, uh, their eyes darken.
So he-he wanted to write about all of those who did not survive
and those who survived but who were broken.
Um, but he needed the space.
You know, when I-- when I was in Heidelberg,
I didn't-- You know, the--
I was in Heidelberg for an hour,
and I saw police--
four white police officers with their knees
in the back of a black man
who was screaming at the top of his lungs, "Help."
I wasn't in Heidelberg for an hour.
But the thing is that I didn't have to comment on it.
I didn't have to account for it.
Right? In some ways, I could go back to my flat and breathe.
It was like a moment, when I was away, out of the country,
I could exhale. You know?
Because I wasn't their black problem.
You know, I was the Amer-- walking around
-with my American passport, you know? -Right, right.
And then when I was at the Uni--
I gave lectures at the University of the North.
When I was there, I wasn't there.
You know what I mean?
I-I looked like folk,
but it wasn't-- I wasn't--
how can I put it?-- I wasn't their Negroes.
-Hmm. -Get the poi-- And so you get this space to breathe.
And so Baldwin would leave the country
in order to think more carefully about it.
Because when you're here,
you have to navigate so much of this nonsense.
-Right. -And he left America in 1948
because he said, "If I don't get out of this country,
I'm either gonna kill somebody or I'm gonna be killed."
So, right here on Route 1,
right here in Princeton, New Jersey, in Lawrenceville,
a waitress refused to serve him
and he hurled a glass at her head
and broke-- shattered the glass behind her
and then had to run for his life.
He knew the rage and anger was consuming him.
He was becoming his stepfather.
So when he chose Paris,
he had the space to actually create himself,
to will himself into being a writer.
Sometimes that's all we need,
is the space to breathe so that we can be, man.
What is the one thing you hope that they will get from this?
Or if somebody says to you, "Professor, I--
why would I want to read this book?"
what is the one thing you hope to give them
in this new analysis of Baldwin's life?
Yeah, I mean, at the heart of it is the through line,
that we have to tell the truth and stand--
be courageous enough to tell the truth.
And once we tell the truth about what we've done and who we are,
then we can free ourselves into imagining
a different world and imagining ourselves differently.
We're shackled by categories.
We're shackled by our lives.
We're trapped in this fantasy.
You know, America thinks of itself
as the-- as Never Never Land.
It's always-- You know, we're full
of Lost Boys and Lost Girls.
We don't want to be responsible
and held accountable for anything.
So we have to tell the truth.
And here we are in a moment of moral reckoning,
where the country can be o-otherwise.
But every single time we try to give birth to a new nation,
the umbilical cord of white supremacy
is wrapped around its neck.
So we have to tell truth.
We have to be truthful.
And be really responsible midwives.
So that we can give birth finally to a new country
that is a genuinely multiracial democracy.
Our history says we're not gonna do very well,
but I have faith because wherever human beings are,
again, we have a chance.
There is always hope.
Professor Claude, thank you so much for joining us on the show.
Thank you, Doc, I appreciate you.