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- This is One-On-One.

- I'm an equal American just like you are.

- The way we change Presidents in this country is by voting.

- A quartet is already a jawn, it'’s just The New Jawn.

- January 6th was not some sort of violent, crazy outlier.

- I don't care how good you are or how good you think you are, there is always something to learn.

- I mean what other country sends comedians over to embedded military to make them feel better.

- People call me 'cause they feel nobody's paying attention.

-_ It'’s not all about memorizing and getting information, it'’s what you do with that information.

- (slowly) Start talking right now.

- That's a good question, high five.

(upbeat music) - Hi everyone, I'm Steve Adubato.

We are honored to be joined by Dr. Eddie Glaude, who is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, author of an extraordinary book, it is called, "Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and it's Urgent Lessons for our Own".

Good to see you, professor.

- Good to see you, glad to be with you.

- This book, compelling and important for so many reasons, but for those who don't understand, know who James Baldwin was and why he matters so much now more than ever, please share.

- Oh, it's so hard to kind of encapsulate who he is, who he was.

He's one of America's towering writers, one of its best essayists.

He's an inheritor of I think the legacy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, born in Harlem in August of 1924, dies in December of '87.

He was born in the ghetto of Harlem, you know and decides to leave the country in 1948 to create himself, to engage in this act of self-creation, to become a writer.

And he gives us work that ranges from "Go Tell It on the Mountain", his first novel to "Notes of a Native Son", all the way to his last book, "The Evidence of Things Not Seen", which is a short book of essay, a small book of essays, not even a book of essays, an essay about the Atlanta child murders.

And so in many ways, Steve, he's perhaps one of the most insightful critics of the American Project that we've ever produced.

- You are a respected historian, you appreciate and understand American culture, the history of racism better than most.

Why did you choose to write about Baldwin in the way you have, which is again, more important now than ever before?

- You know, he's been haunting me since graduate school.

- Yeah, you said that in a book.

I'm sorry for interrupting, "haunting" you.

- Yeah I mean, he demands in some ways a kind of confrontation with the self, a kind of grappling with your own interior mess as a precondition to say anything about the world.

And so here I am, this vulnerable Mississippi boy who has deep daddy issues encountering this figure on the page who is relentlessly honest about his own issues with his stepfather, about his own sexuality, about his own rage and anger, about his desire to love.

And so reading Baldwin demanded something of me, as I write in the book, a kind of maturity that I wasn't ready to concede.

I wasn't ready to deal with me even though I wanted to say everything about the world.

And so he's been everywhere in my work.

From the day I started teaching at Bowdoin, I was teaching him.

And so finally I decided, particularly during Black Lives Matter, Steve, that I decided 'cause everybody was quoting him out of context even, and the quotes were beautiful, but I said, you know, I have to bring him on stage now.

He has to come from the background of my work to the foreground.

And so it was on a certain level, it was my attempt to deal with my own madness, with my own anger and rage.

And I knew he had resources because he was constantly dealing with his own, yeah.

- The title, "Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own".

First the title, then I have a couple of other follow-ups about quote "the lie" and some other things that you write about, please.

- Yeah "Begin Again" comes from, it's probably one of the few references to his fiction.

It comes from his last novel, "Just Above My Head".

And it's this moment in the novel where, you know, the promise of the sixties has collapsed, you know and everybody's scattered.

You know, Baldwin says "Responsibility isn't lost, it's abdicated.

And if one refuses abdication, then one begins again."

And it's an echo of the Book of Revelations, right, to do one's first works over.

So it requires a kind of clear reflection, introspection that reorients you to the task at hand.

So that's why I decided "Begin Again".

In the face of our current days and all the contradictions that seem to swallow the country whole, we need to figure out how we can muster the courage to begin again and that's why the book is named that, yeah, titled like that.

- The lie, what is the lie?

- Oh, we like to tell ourselves that we're the shining city on the hill, that we're an example of democracy achieved.

But as Baldwin put it in an essay I think he wrote it in 1964, entitled "The White Problem".

You know, the people who founded the country knew that these people that they call chattel were men and women, but they had to say that they weren't men and women so that no crime would've been committed.

And then Baldwin said, "that lie is at the heart of our troubles".

So we like to tell ourselves this idea that we are an example of democracy achieved in order to in some ways insulate us from our evils.

Right, we have to protect our innocence, a kind of willful ignorance?

And so we tell ourselves, we manufacture these lies about our goodness so that we don't have to confront who we actually are.

- I've been wanting to have this conversation with you for a long time, and one of the reasons is the following, it would be hard, anyone would be hard-pressed to challenge the lie, the lie is what it is, but the struggle I have and I wanna engage you in this conversation is that a significant number of my contemporaries, I was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey, Amiri Baraka, Ras Baraka, the mayor's dad and I have history growing up in Newark and race relations were what they were in the sixties and seventies growing up.

Why is it relevant?

Many of my contemporaries who happen to be white disproportionately Italian American, the way I see it, feel a tremendous degree of resentment, you can call it white resentment, call it what you will, trust me, there's a question here.

So as we're talking about the lie, the lie we've been telling ourselves for a long time, what do you think Baldwin would say and what do you say to those white Americans who have now come to the conclusion, many of whom voted for Trump, "Listen, enough is enough, when is enough enough?

What is this conversation about reparations?

I can't get my own kid into college and I'm struggling to pay my bills.

What about me?"

And we've gone "too far", whatever that means.

What do you say to folks who are frustrated who happen to be white and say, "Come on."?

- Yeah, Steve, that's such a, thank you for that question.

- I had to ask it 'cause it's been on my mind for a long time.

- No, but thank you for asking it, you know?

You know, Baldwin had a moment where he said explicitly that he loathed the question, "What else does the Negro want?"

And typically that question is asked at the moment in which the betrayal, the backlash is about to happen.

We've gone too far in trying to remedy the effects, the lingering consequences of America's law.

And Baldwin says, "the question itself reveals that the person asking it doesn't see me as a human being like he sees himself.

Because if he viewed me as a human being like him, he would know exactly what I want, the exact thing that he wants or she wants, right, that I'm not a ward of the state, that we're not objects of charity or philanthropy, right?

That racial justice goes beyond white Americans doing something for black folk.

To get to the heart of a just society means that you know, the circumstances of ones living, one's color, one's neighborhood, who one loves, doesn't determine the outcomes of your dreams, doesn't determine the content of how you imagine the good life.

So the first thing I would say to those who feel a sense of resentment, right, is why?

They have us believing, and I don't wanna preach here, but they have us believing- - Go ahead.

- They have us believing that there's only so much pie to go around, that the background conditions of our being together is that of scarcity.

And so white brothers and sisters who are busting their asses to make ends meet and send their children to school are saying big governments putting their thumbs on the scale and giving resources to these folk who aren't working, who are lazy, that's the story we tell ourselves in order to absolve ourselves of any guilt.

But the conditions of scarcity, that's a lie too because there are a specific segment of the society that's hoarding most of the goods and leaving the scraps for us to fight over.

And so part of what we have to do I think is tell a story about the truth of the matter of how we have arrived here and to say that your struggles to put food on the table, to keep a roof over your house, over your kids' head, to send your children to college in an affordable way, right, that those struggles are not reducible, right, to lazy black and brown folk who wanna take advantage of your hard work.

That's not what's going on.

- Is that a lie, too?

- Yes.

When we look at, Steve, when we look at the top 1% or the top one 10th of a percent owning more wealth than the bottom 90%, what kind of society is that?

I mean, part of what we have to wrap our minds around, it's not so much, how can I put this in, I'm gonna put it a different way, I don't wanna hold my friends who happen to be white responsible for the persistence of racial inequality, but I wanna hold them responsible for understanding why racial inequality persists.

And that's the difficulty because the responsibility of understanding why is often read as blaming me for doing it even though you are benefiting in so many ways.

Go ahead Steve, I'm sorry.

- No, no, don't apologize.

So if the struggle, I wanna be, this is where as a journalist, you have to try to find a line between talking about the book and Baldwin and your perspective on this, which is so important and not personalizing it too much, but I find it difficult to talk to some of my friends who happen to be white who feel this resentment and anger because they've convinced themselves that it wasn't them, it wasn't their parents, it wasn't even their grandparents, it was somebody before them.

And so the argument that they'll make is, "It wasn't me."

And you say what to them?

- Of course it wasn't you.

- But what?

- But you benefit from the world in which they created.

What do I mean by that?

So you didn't hold slaves, but the wealth that was accumulated as a result of slavery that made the country possible, that the system of hierarchy, of value, of which persons, who were valued more than others, right, that system, you benefited.

How is it that, you know, Italian immigrants, for example could make their way to the United States and in those early days, right, be subjected to all sorts of discriminatory practice because- - P.S., hold on a second, we just did a special on Sacco and Vanzetti, it speaks for itself, you understand, professor.

So go ahead, keep talking.

I heard it from my grandparents and my parents, so go ahead.

- Absolutely.

And think about the moments in which you experienced that kind of discriminatory behavior, the derogatory language, the changings of names, the ways in which- - To be more "Americanized".

- Which means to become white.

- Really white, white, I'm sorry, go ahead.

- No, go ahead.

No, the same, think about Boston, think about the Irish, right?

And so the sliding scale, what happens is that one's proximity to blackness determines one's access to capital.

And so there's always this effort to move away from it even though we could talk about neighborhoods, you know, neighborhoods in Newark that are like Pelham sets, right, written upon, those neighborhoods that were once integrated, even Harlem.

- That's right.

- That were once in integrated, right?

And when we think about the current debates around immigration right now, Steve, those same, that rhetoric that's applied to Mexicans and others from the global south were applied to Eastern Europeans, the swarthy looking folk from Southern Italy.

- Swarthy.

- Yeah, you get it?

So the interesting thing that we're talking about here, it wasn't you, but how you inhabit the discourse of race.

So give you a quick formulation from Baldwin.

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

Which one are you?

- I'm one of the "good ones".

- But you see what I'm saying though, right?

- I do.

So hold on, I'm sorry, that was so unfair of me, but back to Baldwin.

This is ironic because we're also doing a special with Tamara Payne who helped her dad, the great late Les Payne write about Malcolm X.

Can I do this as quickly as possible?

- Sure.

- James Baldwin's relationship with and fill in the blank, Malcolm X?

- Thought he was wrong in certain places but also understood his anger as righteous indignation.

If Baldwin was the poet, Malcolm was the firebrand preacher.

They were intimately connected, absolutely.

- James Baldwin and Dr. King.

- Understood how important King was to the nation, supported him and the student movement in every way he could imagine, but there were these deep class divisions between the two.

King's from bourgeois black Atlanta, Baldwin's from the gully of Harlem.

- 1987 when Baldwin passes, in the book, in some ways you described Baldwin, I'm gonna give you my own spin on this, he had almost given up, given up that we could be the country we said we were and that the lie would continue.

Was he that pessimistic at the end?

- You know, cancer was eating him up.

And in his last interview with Quincy Troupe in November of 1987, he says, you know, at the end of his life, he felt like a broken motor saying the same thing over and over and over again.

And he said, "I know I was right, I was right, I don't care what anyone tells me, I was right, that all of this slaughter, they had to justify the slaughter.

And the only way to justify the slaughter is that they had to be white."

And so in that moment, right, he's speaking a kind of steering truth.

But I don't ever think, even in his deep, even in those I don't wanna say pessimistic, but even in those moments, he still held out the belief that we could be otherwise, I think he did.

- You know, you write about Baldwin's writing, meaning what his writing meant to him.

"It was a moral responsibility."

Talk about that.

- It's what any poet has to do, the writer's responsibility, the poet in the broadest sense.

You know, Plato in his "Republic", Steve, in order for the republic to work, he has to banish the poets.

Why?

Because the poets give us language to understand ourselves, to imagine the world differently.

And so one of the insidious features of our current moment is that we can't imagine any alternative.

It's easier for us to imagine, and here I'm quoting Fredric Jameson, "it's easier for us to imagine the end of the world as opposed to the end of capitalism or the end of America as it currently is."

And so the poet has to be brutally honest.

She has to take the moral responsibility to offer us languages, vocabularies, to imagine ourselves differently, to imagine our being together differently.

- Hmm.

Can I do this?

Affirmative action as we are speaking, and this program will repeat, professor, for the next few months, and the Supreme Court, US Supreme Court, may have made some decisions around affirmative action, particularly around college admissions and whether race is in fact a factor that can be considered, assuming for a moment, professor, that the Supreme Court strikes down some significant aspects of affirmative action, what do you believe that will mean for race relations in our country?

- Oh my goodness.

We're going backwards, it's part of the betrayal that we talk about, right?

And we already know what can happen, we saw it in California, right?

And we saw what happened to UCLA and Berkeley and what happened to UC Riverside where certain students were channeled to one part of the UC system and other students were at the at the top end of the system.

So we know what's gonna happen.

And then you combine that decision when it comes with the assault on DEI that we see say in Florida and around the country, Christopher Rufo, the mastermind behind critical race theory from the Manhattan Institute said "Now the issue is diversity, equity and inclusion in higher ed."

So you have the assault from the admissions level and then the assault within these institutions.

Not only will it impact who has access to this capital, 'cause remember it's social capital, people are not arguing about who gets into Mercer County Community College.

They're arguing about who's getting in Rutgers, who's getting into Princeton, who's getting into Yale, who's getting into Harvard, that's where the argument is because that's where the social capital is gained and life can be transformed.

- What would Baldwin say about Trump and MAGA?

- That we vomited him up.

That this is just inevitable.

- Would Baldwin, sorry for interrupting, professor, would James Baldwin argue that Donald Trump and the Make Great America Great movement and everything that that appears to say and mean was inevitable, is inevitable?

- I don't know if he would've said it was inevitable, but he would certainly say, I don't want to try to put words in his mouth 'cause he wrote a lot of words that are his own, but, you know, mark Twain is repeatedly, is supposedly to have said that "history might not repeat, but it damn sure rhymes".

Make America Great Again isn't even Donald Trump's phrase, it comes from Reagan, right?

And so this is repetition.

See, this is the thing that makes us mad, it's the maddening feature of America, it happens over and over, wash, rinse and repeat.

My daddy had to raise me in this stuff, I've had to raise my son in this stuff, and he has to raise his kids when he has them in this stuff.

It's over and over again.

So it's not that it's inevitable, it's just us.

- Is make America great again a euphemism for make America white again?

- Yes.

Or make America the place where everyone knows their place.

- I got a couple minutes, we have a couple minutes left.

- Sure, doc.

- And again, I want to thank you for joining us.

The book is, "Begin Again".

It is an extraordinary New York Times bestseller, "James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own".

Professor, let me ask you this, any reason as we end this program for us to or what is the reason for us to be hopeful and optimistic, please?

- This conversation.

What you just asked me over the course of our conversation is the source of hope.

We have to understand, and excuse my language, we have to understand that human beings are at once SOB's and miracles and we have to double down on the fact that we can be miraculous.

So my hope is in our ability to be otherwise.

Right, even though we're capable of profound evil, human beings are capable of extraordinary good, and it's doubling down on what we're capable of in terms of the decency and the goodness, that we can actually build a new Jerusalem if we committed, the few of us who are committed to a better world decide to fight.

That's what we have to do.

So I have hope because of us.

You know, DuBois put it this way, I know we only have a quick sec here.

- Got a minute ahead, go ahead.

- He said, he called it "a hope not hopeless, but unhopeful."

- Say that again.

- "A hope not hopeless, but unhopeful."

You know what that is?

That's a blues-soaked hope.

That's a hope that says, there's nothing about my condition right now that suggests that I could be other than a slave, but I'm gonna sing a song and imagine my world beyond this current moment.

It seems as if there's nothing imaginable beyond now, but because of the conversation we just had and because of the work we can do on the ground with each other, oh, you got to have faith in the possible, otherwise we would drink too much Irish whiskey.

- Professor Eddie Glaude is a professor of African American studies at Princeton University and the author of "Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own".

I'm gonna say this and it hopefully it will not sound too maudlin, this conversation for me is the reason why I feel blessed to be able to do this, to talk to people like you.

Thank you, professor.

- Thank you, Steve.

Appreciate you, man.

- I'm Steve Adubato.

Thank you, professor, we'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato has been a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by RWJBarnabas Health.

Let'’s be healthy together.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

Wells Fargo.

PSE&G, The New Jersey Education Association.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Prudential Financial.

Newark Board of Education.

And by The Adler Aphasia Center.

Promotional support provided by NJ.Com.

And by BestofNJ.com.

- [Narrator] To watch more One on One with Steve Adubato find us online and follow us on Social media.

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