Yeah.

Welcome to the Aaron Harber show.

This is part two of our special three part series with Professor Eddie Glaude.

Professor thank you so much for joining.

Good to.

Be back.

I've admired your work.

I'm.

I'm so honored to have you on the show.

You know, in our first segment, we discuss a wide range of issues, and a lot of them touched on race, but, I didn't get a chance to ask you.

What is the state of race in America today?

You have 30s.

Well, it's it's, we're in one of those moments again where, you know, the ghosts of the past haunt.

You know, whenever we find ourselves in a moment where the nation is trying to grapple with the contradiction at its heart, we make some progress.

And I'm thinking about this in the context of George Floyd's murder.

We were all locked into locke in our homes because of Covid.

We all saw it.

Most of us did.

And then we saw massive demonstrations.

And there was the most interracial protest in my lifetime that I witnessed, and numbers of people risking their lives because Covid was still killing us.

And then we saw corporations, we saw the country, we saw everyone saying, we finally have to have this racial reckoning.

And then what happened?

We had the back, the backlash, the betrayal, as it were.

The assault on CRT, the assault critical race theory, the assault on diversity, equity and inclusion.

The, the, you know, the the assault on what?

We, you know, on wha we teach our kids and the like.

Right.

The overreach.

And so we lurch back, right?

And Ralph Ellison had published this wonderful piece in a special issue of time magazine in 1970, and it's entitled, What would America Look Like Without Blacks?

And what he says is that whenever the country becomes exhausted with the issue of race, whenever it thinks it's done enough, it reaches for secession.

It reaches for an effort to move black people out of sight, out of vision, so that it could reassert, right, a certain kind of coherence which is rooted in a certai understanding of white identity.

So here we are in a moment where we thought we were grappling with right legacies of discrimination, legacies of of racism.

And now we're we find ourselves in a moment where we want to put all of that aside.

We want to put all of that out of view.

And, you know, we see the assault on affirmative action.

We see I mean, it's across the board.

And, you know, as I think about it, parents, I think about it particularly around the issue of history.

I worry deeply, and let me tell you why.

Because Richard Slotkin says that we're in we're in a second redemption.

Well, he says, let me put it differently.

We're in a second lost cause.

And what was distinctive about the first one is that the battle was waged on on the battlefield of history.

Once radical reconstruction ended symbolically at 1876, it ended much earlier.

But once it ended, there was a there was a concerted effort to change what we taught.

The Dunning School out of Columbia began to write the first books on reconstruction, William Dunning and political scientist and the like.

Right.

And what what would happen is that a generation of young children were taught the Lost Cause.

And you know what happened?

They grew up and became the adults in Mississippi, in Alabama, in Georgia.

They grew up, and they carried forth the bitterness and the hatred and the grievance that they were socialized into.

So I worry about what's happening in our classrooms.

Not so much about what what black kids are being taught.

I worry about what those white kids are being taught.

So, speaking of what people are taught.

Yeah.

One of the things that fascinates me is, and I hope I'm wrong, but I feel there's a there has been a lack of coherence in presenting our history and elements of our history related to race and and what I look for is because I think it would help Americans, especially us white Americans, have a better understanding of the huge economic differences in terms of social strata and racial strata by simply looking at our history.

But in a combined manner, I know there.

Has anyone ever looked at all or at least a significant number of the factors that have resulted in where we are today, where we have this extraordinary gap between black family wealth that in an average of, whatever, $44,000 white famil wealth, it closer to $300,000.

Certainly studies have been done of specific issues, but has anyone tied them together and and as a result done the analysis analysis to show this is the outcome.

This is what has happened when you look at housing, when you look at discrimination in granting mortgages to black people, which still exists today.

Studies are done today where you have, you know, a black applicant and a white applicant with identical credentials.

You know what happens.

It's it's not equality.

Redlining, the history of redlining, where there were certain areas where black families could not get mortgages even if they financially qualified, restricted deeds.

Most Americans today, professor, do not even realize that there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of deeds, property deeds tha specifically say, black people.

Of course, they don't say Negroes cannot buy this property, cannot live in this home.

And although that's no against the law and its meaning less in that sense historically people need to know those were how millions of deeds were written.

Education.

The discrepancy in educatio and the financial implications of those discrepancy k-through-12 higher education where blacks weren't even admitted.

I mean, we talk about the our university, Princeton, and certainly there was discrimination historically for a couple hundred years.

Health care.

Health care delivery.

Medical research.

The fact that it's it was white males who dominated the studies that were the participants in study food availability, food deserts, transportation, how communities were divided, infrastructure, employment discrimination, the criminal justice system, voting rights, political participation restrictions, and then the personal discrimination.

So yes, studies have been done on the impact, but has anyone tie that all together to say this?

This is our history and this i why we are where we are today.

I think there have been efforts to offer, this general account right from John Hope Franklin, from slavery to freedom to to Robin Kelly in his work, out of UCLA.

You know, so there's been academic work in this regard.

But just think about this instead of going through the particular titles that come to mind, but just think about wha the 1619 project was all about.

We got caught up, with Nikole Hannah-Jones introduction, which claims that slaver was critical to the, you know, Constitution and my own colleagues on its own lens.

And others critiqued her.

But we did look at we didn't say much abou what else followed in the book.

And what we saw was essays on housing, essays on segregation, essays on education in every area.

Now, what is revealed here is that the country doesn't look like it looks by accident.

I say this when travel the country all the time.

Mississippi doesn't look the wa Mississippi looks by accident.

As policy, policy, we act as if we didn't have a dual housing market, a dual labor market, segregated schools.

We ac as if we didn't have redlining.

We act as if we didn't have.

Right.

Discrimination in the distribution of loans.

We act as if, you know, we the boy is the first graduate of Harvard University, right?

Loses his son to scarlet fever because of the hospital in Atlanta.

Wouldn't take him.

We act as if this stuff isn't real, right?

And then we said that we're going to come.

We're going to find ourselve in a more racially just society by accident, when in fact, we're going to have to be as deliberate in our effort to dismantle it as we were in our effort to create.

But without understanding all of those components, so many, if not a I would argue a vast majority of Americans think we are in a racially just society.

The majority of Americans, I would argue, certainly white Americans, believe that we are not.

That's a willful.

This is not a racist.

We are not a racist.

Willful ignorance.

Willful ignorance, to use a philosophical for its willful ignorance.

Dubois writes.

Dusk of Dawn, an autobiography of a race concept.

And before this moment, Dubois, who's the founde of of American sociology, writes the first American sociological treatise, The Philadelphia Negro, brings the methods of German qualitative and quantitative to bear in the study of thi black community in Philadelphia, wrote a dissertation entitled The Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade at Harvard History, bringing these same techniques from from the German.

He thinks that racism is, is is is the result of the lack of knowledge.

Initially when these you, he says as he makes his way to Atlanta University, the most educated black man in the world can't teach at Harvard.

Yale can't teach at Penn.

He's a lecture while he's doing the syllabus, the Philadelphia Negro study.

But he's at the Atlanta University in Atlanta, and he engages in the Atlanta Studies.

And the idea here is he's going to describe the complexity of black life, from the black church to the black family.

He's going to do all because a Americans, white Americans simply don't know.

And if they find out if they have the relevant information in their hands as rational actors, they will leave racism behind.

Okay, you're destroying my argument, I know that.

We know what happened.

Go ahead.

He's walking down the.

He's walking down the street and he sees Sam, holds his knuckles in a display case in a storefront.

And same holds with friend who was lynched.

And he says this is not about racism.

This is not about a lack of information.

Something much deeper is going on here.

And from that moment on, he says, I'm going to leave behind the notion of science, and I'm going to go propaganda.

And so then he becomes the editor of The Crisis.

He's doing a whole range of things.

Right.

So part of the point I'm making here is tha I think you're absolutely right, in the sense that we need to understand how deliberate policy decisions produced inequality.

But this is not about some inherent lack on the part of my family that we didn't have wealth to pass down.

Right.

There's a reason why we did.

Because in some ways, if you go back several generations, we were the damn wealth.

You know, when you think about it.

Right?

And so that much is true.

We have to tell the story.

We have to tell the story in its fullness.

But we also have to understan that even if we tell that story, something else is at work.

What?

That something else is right.

It takes us into the depths of human, of the mystery of what it means to be a human being in this place.

Well, I'm I'm for at least starting that journey.

Okay, that was good.

But but, you know, I'll concede that it may not be the end, all.

Right, but you see what I mean, though, I think I think what you're saying, though, is really important, to offer a different kind of account.

Right.

The wealth gap is what it is.

Not because black folk don' save, right or don't work hard.

Yeah.

It's because we didn't have access to to to the housing market at the very moment in which.

Right.

The New Deal is passing passed legislation that that helps create the most amazing middle class in the world.

Black folk are locked out of its benefits.

We can't even get the G.I.

benefits.

And we're risking our lives for the country.

And so how do American white Americans generate wealth outside of inheritance through their homes?

We can't buy them.

And then when we buy, we're in redlined district where those homes are devalued.

This isn't by accident.

It isn't because of some laziness or inability on the part of black folk to, to to to be ambitious or.

No no no no no no no no no.

That's that excuse is is an attempt to assuage your conscience, to evade confronting what we said we needed to confront in the first segment.

Right.

And I think, you know, I'm thinking about Emerson now.

Why would I jump to Emerson?

Who knows?

But, you know, Emerson has that perfectionist move, right?

That perfectionist moves that in order to reach for higher forms of excellence, we have to leave older selves behind.

But in order to leave an older self behind, you have to confront it.

You have to tell the truth about who you are.

If I tell myself repeated lies about who I am, I'm permanently docked in the station, right?

Permanently.

So in order for us to be released into a new future, we have to tell ourselves.

Tell ourselves the truth about who we are.

Looking to that future?

Yeah.

What do we have to do to achieve racial equality and, in terms of what we just discussed, what really intrigues me also is the world view when it comes to why would from just a financial perspective, why would one group want to suppress another?

And I think part of it may be that there' this view that the pie is fixed, the pie is limited, and if we have our piece and we can get someone else's peace, if we can make others make our piece bigger of that pie.

I mean, racism certainly contributes to all of that historically, but if we have a vie that we can make the pie bigger and black people can be successful and have housing and have more, and that actually benefits white people because the pie is bigger.

And even if our percentage of the pie stays the same, we have more pie.

I agree.

I agree with that.

You know I say it all the time when I'm traveling around the country, right?

They want us to believ that this, that scarce resources is the justification for the world as it is.

It's a zer sum game.

It's a zero sum game.

And that's a lie.

So we ca always make a bigger damn pie.

So what do we need to do?

I.

Think we need to to understand.

Heather McGhee wrote a wonderful book around the zero zero sum game notion.

Right.

And she used the example of pools, public pools.

And the backdrop of course, is Eastern European immigration to the country.

And public policy planners civic planners are worried about what's happening to the country because you have these people speaking different languages in their own spaces, right?

And their own communities, their own silos.

And so what they wanted to do was create a public space where fol would come out of those silos, wouldn't speak there, but in the pool they would they would generate some form of civic identity that beyond their own individual ethnic identities.

And so you had this massive effort.

You remember those huge public pools that would be in cities like Chicago or in Jackso or in Montgomery, Mississippi.

Right.

And then while that's happening, black people are drowning because we don't have access to public pools.

We're having to learn how to swim in creeks and rivers.

So you go back a couple of generations in the black South, for example.

Older blac people don't know how to swim.

And if you go to Hbcu's, historically black colleges and universities, in the old days, they use to have a swimming requirement in order to graduate precisel to try to address this reality.

And you would be taught how to swim.

Right?

How to swim.

Cornel West tells the fundamental story that he passed his swimming exam at Harvard by having a friend that, you know, swim for it.

Oh, an and he and he broke the record and Cornell can't swim, so it's like a rock.

He has a funny moment.

He's not built like a swimmer.

No, no, no, no.

So what's fascinating, though, is that once black peopl during the civil rights movement begin to clamor for access to those pools, what happens?

They shut them down.

So here you have a public good.

And the decision is that if you want access to it, no one will have access to it.

And what happens in response?

That's because we don't want black people and women in the same water that we are swimming.

Cornel West writes the story of him in Sacramento as a young kid jumping in the pool.

Everybody jumps out.

They begin to drain the pool while he's in it.

Right.

Then what happens as a result of that?

We get private swimming clubs.

So class begins to differentiate.

Certainly poor people, poor white people can't get access to pools because they don't get can't affor to join the private swim club.

So what is this?

This shows you something that's not quite rational.

I would rather deprive myself of a good.

Then share it with you.

So we have to see that the insidious logic of this is of the zero sum game.

And what has happened to th public sphere is interconnected.

If we're going to integrate schools, we're going to pull our kids out and we're going to start sex schools, and they're going to demand that our money follows.

If you want to integrate parks, we're going to build gated communities.

We're going to deman that our tax dollars follow us.

So what we defund, we abdicate.

We move into spaces and we leave these once vibrant urban spaces to decay.

And we're doing that still today.

So how do we address it?

First, we have to tell the truth.

Tell the truth in love, right.

So that we can confront our decision making, right?

So that we can confront our decision maker.

So part of what we have to do is to say, what is a notion of the good that you and I share?

You said, how do we make America more racially?

Just how do we address it?

Easy.

Not so easy, but easy.

You believe that?

What I want for me and my children is not being radically different.

And what you want for you and for your children.

Jame Baldwin had loved this question.

What else does the Negro want?

He hated it because the question revealed that you didn't think of us as a human being, just like you, because if you did, you would know that I want exactly what you want.

Now we have a shared sense of the good.

Oh, and I do know this.

I do know this.

And I'll point it right here.

America became a superpower because Europe was in tatters.

It was eating its entrails, had no competition.

The US could separate and segment its workforce because it had no competition in this landscape.

If the US thinks that it could leave and put aside all of its talent to leave women on the side and black people and brown people and not utilize all of this genius that makes up this place, it will lose.

It will lose.

So we have to get rid of the zero sum game stuff that you.

Talked a little bit about your father?

Yeah.

My man.

Yeah.

I'd like to hear more about him, but I've like to hear more about your personal experience and how it's led you to where you are today and who you are today.

I wasn't expecting that question.

I should have, but I wasn't expecting.

And that's also asking a lot of you, I know.

No, no, I think it's really important for public people to be vulnerable.

Right.

I think because, you know, heroes and prophets distort democratic life.

And part of how they distorted is that they become larger than life and we give up ourselves to them.

So I think being vulnerable is important, right?

So I have a very vexe I had a very vexed relationship with my father.

He scared the living daylights out of me.

So, working class guy, leaves home early to join the Navy.

Served in Vietnam.

He basically grew up with his kids.

My mother and my father had children.

Very early.

Four of us.

I'm the baby.

They were 21 when I came into the world.

My father was not a loving man.

He is.

He is now.

He's a teddy bear.

But he wasn't a loving man.

He didn't know how.

He told me later in life.

And I'll tell you a story.

I'm down the street playing hopscotch with this gorgeous.

I'm in elementary school, but she was so gorgeous.

And I'm playing hopscotch, and I'm playing hopscotch with it becaus I want her to be my girlfriend.

And I'm making I'm making mistakes on purpose.

I'm stepping on every line I'm falling on.

I think because I want I want her to show me how to play hopscotch over and over again.

And suddenly I hear my dad scream from down the street, bring your asshole.

And I come home and my uncle is sitting on the couch and he's staring at me.

I couldn't have been.

I was in the fifth grade.

I think.

And he says, what are you?

Excuse my language.

What are you, a fag or something?

And my uncl is sitting there looking at me as if they had been through a similar ritual.

And so here I was, barely, you know, I wasn't 30, 12.

Or 10 or 11 or so, but yeah.

In my father's house, you know, with a question of my manhood and.

I found myself as a result of that broken, not just that moment, but this relationship.

I didn't know what it meant.

He deposited fear in my gut, and I kept trying to prove to myself that I wasn't a coward, to prove to him that if you can, you ca stare at me when you're angry.

But I'm not going to cry this time, even though I cried every single time.

Right.

And but at the same time that he was doing this, doing that, he was he was putting inside, depositing in me, things that I cherish.

I'm in the fourth grade, and Miss Davis, I'm always on of two black kids in the class.

Three black kids in the class.

And Miss Davis was being particularly mean to me, and I jump up.

I don't know where this came from.

And I said, you a racist?

And I walk out of the room.

Wow.

I'm that's I'm terrified that my dad is just going to destroy me.

Right.

And he comes home after I've been suspended and he comes home.

And he said, what did she say?

And he has this.

I can give you the glare because I look just like.

What does she say?

And he's about this close to me.

And I said, I told him what she said.

He said, if anybody ever says anything like that to you, you do the same thing, you understand?

And then he walks away.

Well.

He walks away.

So no one needs to love you but you.

You get it.

If you survive me, you can survive the world.

I'm not here to be your friend.

Do you get it?

Walk away.

And so whenever I find myself in these public spaces.

Speaking truth to power, in love.

Right.

Whenever.

When I was at Morehouse and I was student body president, like you were at Princeton, and I was coming up to demand the resignation of the vice president, a student affairs.

And we're doing all of this stuff.

And I'm sitting there and I was about to walk up on stage and I realized I don't have a diploma because I left high school early, and my high schoo had registered me as a dropout.

And I said if they kicked me out of school, I don't have a high schoo degree, what am I going to do?

As I'm pausing to go up the stairs, I'll join the Air Force and walk up the stairs.

Cultivate the habits of courage or cowardice.

So even as he scared me to death, he was giving me a moral and ethical center.

And now, to this day that he gives me a call.

This is what you should say on all MSNBC.

Morning, Joe.

Let me tell you what you should tell these people.

I love.

It, I.

Love it.

So there's a journey.

There's a journey.

But, it was a vexed one.

That's a long winded answer, but no.

That that is great.

Where do you grow up?

I grew up on the coast of Mississippi.

It's a small town called Moss Point.

It's river city.

It's beautiful.

It has bayous that run through the city.

Cedar trees and magnolia trees that bloom.

Named after the moss that hangs from gorgeous oak trees.

Has a distinct smell from th paper mill and the porgy plant.

Is your dad still there?

Yeah, my dad in.

My mom's still there.

You know, I came full circle not too long ago.

He was sick.

Had kidney stones that went septic, and he almost died.

And.

And we came home, and the strongest man we knew, the strongest man I've ever, ever know.

Was it as weak point I had to shave it.

Yeah.

Journeys.

And I think part of what's important for us to become the kinds of human beings we need, we to reach for higher forms of excellence is is to deal with those wounds.

Right.

Sometimes we think brokenness is the problem, when in fact the aspiration for wholeness is the problem.

We have to find the beauty in the brokenness, because once it's cracked, it's not going to be fixed.

Just put gold in Satsuki pottery in Japan, right?

I really appreciate your willingness to share your personal story.

Thank you for asking for that.

Thank you professor.

Appreciate.

All right.

That was the end of part two of our three part series with Eddie.

You can watch part three and part one as well.

Make sure you catch all three segments.

I'm Aaron Harbor.

Thanks for watching.

We'll see you next time.

Next.