 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Global Perspectives on Race, Justice and Equity. I'm Abi Williams, Director of the Institute for Global Leadership and Professor of the Practice of International Politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. I'm delighted to welcome our guests for this conversation, Professor Eddie S. Globe Jr. This is Professor James S. MacDonald, Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton. He's the author of numerous acclaimed books, including Democracy in Black, How Race Steal and Slaves the American Soul. His most recent book is Begin Again, James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. The text has written that this book is undoubtedly the best treatment we have of Baldwin's genius and relevance. And John Meacham calls it searing, provocative and ultimately hopeful. He's also a columnist for Time Magazine and a frequent commentator on MSNBC and Meet the Press. Eddie, thank you very much for joining us this afternoon. It's my pleasure. Thank you for the invitation. I guess we'll discuss James Baldwin and your new book, but I want to start by asking you about the value gap. You've written powerfully about the value gap, this belief that in America, white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others. This belief has distorted the American character and American democracy. How is the white gap reflected in present-day America? We'll see it very clearly with the disparate impact of COVID-19. Who's bearing the burden of a healthcare system that reflected in clear ways what the value gap tries to single out and that is the different valuation of human beings in the country. So the value gap is this belief that white people matter more than others and that belief then shapes our social, political and economic arrangements. So under present conditions, we see it not only in terms of COVID-19, who's black and brown, poor or disproportionately dying from the virus, who's not getting access to the vaccine. We also see it in relation to policing in the country, who can expect, you know, safe and secure communities and who shouldn't. And just compare, for example, for the Williams, the way in which, even as the Capitol Police were being overrun, but just compare the response to that particular mob and the response to peaceful protesters this past summer around black lives matter. And you get a sense in a very concrete way of how that different valuation evidences itself and how communities are police. Some communities are not afraid of the police. And some communities have every reason to be skeptical of them, if that makes sense. Absolutely. Yes, the disparate response to the black lives matter protests and then the response to the armed rioters on Capitol Hill on the 6th of January was quite striking. And you've talked about how this value gap is manifested in different ways. I'm wondering what your thought is about how the value gap is perpetuated in social networks because we know the social networks are very important, you know, our families, our neighborhoods, the schools we go to, the universities we go to. So how do social networks perpetuate this value gap? Absolutely. And so one, one of the reasons why I introduced the language, right, I was trying to find a different way to talk about white supremacy right to really think about it in terms of its, its, its practice what does it, what does it do what is it, what is the nature of its work. And another feature of my, my, my effort is, was to kind of say okay, it's easy to kind of think about the value gap or white supremacy in relation to loud racists, people who are declaring very clearly that, that they believe that the white people are superior to others. But the value gap is something very different, right, it is a way to which society is organized and the way we're habituated to live that valuation. So America is a hyper segregated society. Our social networks are reflect that segregation right I mean, I tell what I'm talking around the country. I usually say to folks just think about the last wedding you went to, to get a sense about how diverse your networks are. Right, you give you a very clear sense, right, if I think about the last wedding I went to it was all black, maybe two white people. And so part of what we know is that our social networks are typically 7080% homogenous right, and, and those networks differ in terms of their robustness their power. My social networks may not be as robust and strong as my colleagues social network, primarily because of differential differential backgrounds right in the interesting sorts of ways, and how opportunity passes along these robust networks in different ways. So it's not explicit racism that's doing the work. It's really how the value gap evidences itself in the way we live, and the way we live shapes, who we interact with. Right, who are part of our intimate spaces, and then how opportunity gets passed along those networks as it were. You said that America is a still a very segregated societies reflected in our, you know, social gatherings. And of course it's also reflected in our institutions. You of course are a professor you've been a professor at Princeton for, for many years you've taught at other institutions. How was the value gap reflected in academia in your experience. Let's, let's give it let's make it concrete because there are some obvious examples but let's make it concrete so when I was. We're trying to build African American studies at Princeton. We had to figure out how to partner with other departments, right, because they did not give us soul hiring power so we had to engage in joint appointments. And the most difficult time we had was joint appointments with the social sciences. Political science, sociology, econ, and the reason we had difficulty is because they would argue. The pipeline was just not robust wasn't wasn't substantive enough when it came to highly qualified scholars of color, working in and around this subject matter, or scholars period working around this subject matter. And what we found is that that claim isn't necessarily true. What we found instead is that this was this was actually a conclusion that that was drawn basically from taste. Now let me explain what I mean. Most of the social science departments at Princeton, political science let's be very specific for political science department at present is very quantitatively oriented. It's numbers oriented. The data is very clear that most women and people scholars of color who get their PhDs in the social sciences tend to gravitate to the qualitative subjects. So it wasn't about there were more talented PhDs in their field. It's just what they took to be substantive work that led to them looking for only a certain kind of scholar. And so we ended up having to hire on our own right in certain ways. And so the value gap evidences itself and very clear ways in what is in some ways considered valued scholarship and what what serious scholarship and the sorts of judgments that follow about who is actually engaged in serious scholarship and the assumptions behind who's capable of engaging in serious scholarship. Here I am at the top of my career. I've been the president of the American Academy of Religion. And now the question. Oh, he just writes public stuff. Right, seven books under, you know, yeah. Right, because there are a whole host of assumptions about the quality of work that flow from persons who are interested in subject matters like myself. So, how do we go about changing those assumptions within the Academy, boldly calling them out when we see them in operation. Right to say, that's not true. Yeah, oh, the applicant pool is too small know it isn't. What you're looking for is to narrow might be the better way to approach this. Right. And so I think it's important for us in these moments. Those of us who, who have some kind of standing in these institutions, right to really say out loud. What what is operative in these moments I keep saying to Princeton over and over again. Right. If you're going to do this. Be serious about it. If you're not stop. Just be who you are. But if you're going to be serious about diversifying your fact, then be serious about it. But don't waste my time, or waste yours. Right. When we know deep down deep down in the way in which they're proceeding or the way in which the business is being imagined that they're not committed to fundamentally try fundamental transformation. And we can see this by just simply charting, whether at Fletcher or where Princeton charting right who they've hired over the last two decades. And, and charting their diversity numbers in relation to those those 20 years, and the data is very clear about who's serious and who's not. That's sort of very interesting. The, the, you are a more house on this thing you are more house man a proud more house man. You are Princeton PhD and as I said you, you're a Princeton professor. There are lessons that institutions like Princeton and Tufts and Fletcher which you mentioned can learn from the experiences of colleges like more house. You know it's a basic insight. Create the conditions under which students and faculty can be their full cells. That's that's the key. My experience at more house as a young man I was 16 when I started was that it gave me the space to imagine myself in the most expansive of terms. I never felt like an affirmative action baby more house. I didn't have to concern myself with the white gaze. I was engaged in the arduous work of self creation as every college student ought to be. It doesn't mean to create an environment. Right, where all of your members, all of your family can be the their full selves. I don't have to wear the mask as a as a faculty member. Give you a story really quick. When Cornell West retired from Princeton. I wanted to figure out how could I celebrate this man who was so important in my own life as a graduate student and that. So I said he loves music music is at the heart of his life right. And so I said I'm going to throw a concert for Cornell, and we're going to put on this huge huge concert we're going to invite the community to come in and we were in McCarter theater, and it was just beautiful right and so we had, we had, you know jazz musicians, a famous jazz musician we had a loop a fiasco we had gospel music we had classical music. It was just amazing performance and then we surprised Cornell at the end. Terrence Blanchard was the jazz musician Bootsy Collins came Harry Belafonte came. And at the end, it was George Clinton in the Funkadelic All Stars. And what was so beautiful about the moment is that we were unashamedly ourselves. Cornell jumps on stage and dances, sings the lyrics. And he says, Dr West we go turn Princeton out. Right and it was so consistent with who he is that he could leave Princeton on his own terms. I use that as an example. It's an exaggerated example. But what would it mean for all of us to be able to be fully ourselves in the places that we work and inhabit. And what night it sort of turn our attention to, you know, outside the Academy and academia and to a moment in American history 2008, when we witnessed the election of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the country. It was a historic event. And at that time there was a lot of talk and a lot of hope for America about America that the country perhaps was moving to a post racial period. And then we had 2016. And we saw the reassertion of the white gap. What happened. Well, almost in some ways that the demographic shifts in the country exploded over the eight years of Obama being an office. So there was a sense in which 2008 through the country into a kind of panic. Madison Avenue had already begun to pivot to this browning of America we saw it in all sorts of advertisements. We were experiencing it in popular culture. Right racially ambiguous children on Cheerios commercials same sex relationships, selling furniture, and the like. And then a black family in the White House and folk in rural Indiana and Wyoming and North Dakota and and and the black belt of the south and somewhere they didn't know what the hell to do. And then over the course of the eight years of Obama being an office, those demographic shifts continue to evidence themselves across the body politic and across culture. So I think in some ways, you know, even with Bill Bennett saying no more excuses, you know, we've now put race behind us in 2008, we saw almost immediately the response. And the immediate response of course was the gutting of the Voting Rights Act with the Shelby decision. Then we saw a spate of voter ID laws what we're witnessing now, we saw then. So we saw voter ID laws in Texas and North Carolina and Wisconsin. So we saw a lot of voter suppression practice tactics, evident, you know, which showed up in, in the midterms. Right. And then we got the vitriol of the tea party, which people were saying was really about economic anxiety. But the data, my colleague John societies and others, the data has shown that that economic anxiety was actually been driven by racial anxiety. In interesting sorts of ways. And so the tea party opens up the space for the kind of political articulation of white grievance in a different sort of way and in a different registry. And we already see we saw the effects bainter canter loses bainter leaves as as, as, as, as, as Speaker of the House, or we begin to see the election of tea party candidates. And that, in effect, it metastasizes and overwhelms the Republican Party. And then Donald Trump green screens it. He jumps in front of it just as Barack Obama jumped in front of the anti Iraq movement, the anti war movement. And just as he grew, he, that movement then green screened him and made him into right, a kind of progressive savior, the tea party found theirs, and they green screen they didn't have to green screen. Donald Trump, Donald Trump knew exactly what he was doing and such so that by 2016 boom. It's a full blown, not backlash but betrayal. Yeah. I don't talk about betrayal, but you've also talked about other betrayals in American history. I think that was the third betrayal you've talked about the betrayal at the time of the Civil War, and reconstruction, and that there was a bit trail. The civil rights movement in the mid 20th century, and you've said that America is the idea of America itself is in deep trouble. Is it in more trouble now than at the time of the Civil War and reconstruction, and at the time of the civil rights movement in the mid 50s and 60s. The Civil War is a different is a difficult question because the, the very Republic was at state radical reconstruction though is a bit different in the sense that the nation is young. It's trying to imagine itself a new radical reconstruction is really fascinating because it's it's it's really an earnest attempt to do our first works over. What happens to that right. The redemption, the lost cause wins in effect, but I think it's relative youth. The, the, the young, the fact that the country is young matters in both moments. Right, or so or I could put it differently that's, you know it's young in the context of radical reconstruction, and its economy is still growing. The context of the mid 20th century right America has immersed in a post World War two world, right, as a superpower so it's it's so the trend line of the country and the first two instance. This way, the trend line of the country in this instance isn't that. It is not existing this conflict this, this reckoning is not happening in a moment where Europe is trying to pick itself up after the after the devastation of World War two. This is the moment where decolonization has happened in these new brown country black and brown countries are trying to figure out what independence actually looks like it's happening in a very different global landscape, it seems to me. So, it's. The short answer, I think, I think we're in a moment now where there's no the guarantee of use or the guarantee of economic power. Right. That's not the backdrop. The backdrop is the client is the clincher. It seems to me. So, if we make a bad choice this time. I don't know what the consequences will be. It's really high. And this brings me to James Baldwin and said I like to us to talk about James Baldwin and your really brilliant book begin again. James Baldwin America and its urgent lessons for our own. Could you explain to our virtual audience why you wanted to write about James Baldwin. Jimmy. I was in despair and disillusioned. I found myself saying, they've done it again. They've done it again. Right. I never thought and it and I and I write this in the book in my mea culpa I never thought the country would elect someone so obviously unqualified to be the president of the United States. And I was worried about all of those young activists to at risk everything in Ferguson and then Baltimore and around the country with black lives matter many of whom in Ferguson were dying. They were committing suicide and I was worried about about them. And so I wanted to write. I needed to write something to an about and for the moment. And I knew Jimmy had experienced something similar. You have to figure out what, what are these people to echo Tony Morrison, if they would kill King. If they would murder Dr King, who, what are these people to echo stampede, you know. And Baldwin collapses in 69 tries to commit suicide. And then he has to figure out how to pick up the pieces and, and he does by publishing no name in the street in 1972 and that book is in the spine of begin again. So I returned after teaching from teaching Baldwin for close to 30 years in my despair in my disillusion in my desire to get to the page. And I knew he had resources for me. So I just dived into what he would call the ruins. And there I found my book. You said it's interesting that you, you reached out to Baldwin started writing despair pain and disillusionment. And it's interesting that you started writing the book outside the United States. And you were lecturing at Heidelberg University in Germany when you started writing the book. Why was it important to be outside of America to start writing about Baldwin and race and trauma in America. Well I knew, and even before I went to Heidelberg I knew I needed to start writing outside of the country because Baldwin said repeatedly that, you know you had to get some kind of distance from this month, this behemoth. You had to find some kind of quiet space where you weren't navigating, you know, the fact of American racism day in and day out as a way to think about it. Right. So I knew that so initially I was in St. Thomas I'd rented a flat. Right. In St. Thomas and I saw this. I had a beautiful view of the Caribbean sea, and then Hurricane Maria blew me back. I was too comfortable. And so I found myself in Heidelberg. And what I knew was that, unlike Baldwin. Well, that's not true. I found myself having to comment on America every day as a pundit. Right. I was overwhelmed by the immediacy of having to talk about this place. Right. Every second of the day. Think about it and then talk about it. And so the quiet of Heidelberg was absolutely perfect because you know my German is horrible. You know, I could read some of it on the page, but I couldn't I couldn't speak it. So, the fact that I didn't have the language. When I was outside of the American studies and you know center. The fact that I was, I was silent and I had to pay attention to my thoughts and to the world around you. And so the quiet of not having to comment on America in real time, gave me the space to actually think about the place. And so it was there that I conceived of the structure of the book. And so I had to write about it, but I, you know, I hadn't put pinned to page. And I had signed this contract. And so here I am in Heidelberg, and I had that experience I write about in the introduction. And I go right back to my apartment and I just start writing. And most of the introduction was written in that moment. As you say, in the introduction, Eddie, you cross the Atlantic you in Heidelberg, and within a couple of hours on arrival. You see German police hitting a black man hitting into the pavement. How did that make you feel. And how did that square up with being a way and not having to comment on racial abuse by the police. I mean it was this blood curdling screen. Like I'm going to the offshot the old city to get my train pass. And I hear this blood curdling cry. And then I follow the eyes and I'm literally I write this I follow the eyes of the people and there's this black man. Ass out pants down to his ankles. I mean his knees. For relief. And I just, you know, I just curse, you know, just dropped an F ball. And then the young graduate student who was with me was from America, just turned redfix and felt the need to apologize. What is that. I guess his apology beckoned for me a kind of forgiveness of him or something. So I didn't respond. You know, but the one thing that I, and I took a small pleasure in was that I didn't have to go on television and talk about. I went home and thought about it. Right, and trying to clarify it in my head. And, you know, this is something that we talked about briefly, the value gap is not America, it is America's original sin. But it's not our possession alone. It's actually an inheritance. You know, in some ways. Yes. And I think, and this was one of the reasons why, when we were thinking of starting this conversation series, we call it global perspectives on race justice and equity because racial discrimination, systemic racism, it's a global. It's a global problem. So that's interesting. I want to now talk about the lie because it's central to your book. And in begin again, you're right. Let me read it from from the book. Baldwin's understanding of the American condition. Cohered around a set of practices that taken together constitute something I will refer to throughout this book as the lie. What is the lie. And what is the purpose of the lie. Why is this this story or set of stories we tell ourselves about who we are about who we imagine ourselves to be Baldwin uses I quote this, I think on page nine in the book I quote this passage from an essay wrote in 1964 title the white problem Baldwin says and I'm paraphrasing here these Christians who decided to found this country. Right. They had a fatal flaw. They had these chattel in their lives that played this role in what they were trying to do in building this democracy. And they had to tell themselves that these people that were chattel these men and women were not human beings because if they weren't human beings then no crime would have been committed. And then here's Baldwin's line that lie is the basis of our present trouble. The idea of, of whiteness that warrants a certain understanding of those who are not white, right, of the way in which we think about black folks capacities their talents their role their place, what's really it all is really a reflection of who white folk pick themselves to be in some ways right. And so the lie or the stories we tell to protect our perceived innocence in relation to those sorts of operations. Right, to protect the idea of democracy itself right. And, in effect, the lie obscures the way the value gap, organize American life, because the value gap is the through line of American history. And then we tell ourselves the story that we're the shining city on the hill that we're an example of democracy achieve that we are the redeemer nation as a way to actually keep us from actually dealing with the history that that is that is that is inside us that is us. Yeah, I think that's a way to put it. The lie has both personal and societal consequences. So I wonder whether you could reflect on the impact of the lie on those who tell the lie, and the impact of the lie on those about whom the lie is told. Yeah, you know, that's such a great question. We have to figure out how to live our lives in the midst of this, this place these people who refuse to see themselves for who they really are. Well, you know, it's survival depends upon. Right. So we have to bear the burden of, you know, this refusal to tell the truth about what one has done and what one continues to do. As Baldwin would say we know more about white America than they would ever know about us, because we have to, in order to survive. But Baldwin would also say right that the lie that leads to the dehumanization of others actually dehumanizes those who actually believe it distorts and disfigures their character. And see this is really important in democracy and black. I talk about the value gap and I talk about racial habits, because I'm not really I'm not really interested in keeping track of loud races that's too melodramatic. I want us to see how we're habituated to live the value gap. And I use habits because habits tie us back to Aristotle about because her habits are key to character formation, who we take ourselves to be as persons right. And so I'm arguing that racial habits that the lie that we'd lies we tell habituate us to live, according to this valuation at the heart of the country, distorts and disfigures our character we can't become the kinds of people are conception of democracy requires. We will throw democracy away in the name of it. I mean we just saw it. Just January 6. We even see it now and we saw it on the Senate floor we see it across the country with all of these voter voter ID laws and the like motor restrictions that are being placed, but being put in place by Republican run state legislatures and the like. So. So the point is that to answer the question directly, the lie distorts and disfigures the person who cleans to it. We don't because we don't really want to encounter. I'll be the fear and panic at the root, the terror at the root that we will finally be revealed for who we actually are. The perfect example of this is in the first, and that you know when the fourth of July was first, but it was just beginning to be celebrated as a national holiday in New York and black people actually showed up, they would be physically attacked. And the reason why is they embody the contradiction of the celebration. You had to remove it from site. Because we're being revealed at that moment right who we actually are. You say that the holding on to the lie is because we do not want to actually confront who we really are. But oftentimes in the country and I'm thinking particularly after the assault on the Capitol on the 6th of January. You would hear this persistent refrain in America from different quarters. This is not who we are. How do you respond when you hear that phrase this is not who we are. Well, you know there's the dramatic eye roll. There's a moment on deadline White House on MSNBC with Nicole Wallace, right after the El Paso massacre. A colleague on set, who was from El Paso, who was barely holding himself together with every answer. And I just became enraged and I, and I, this is us. Right. So, part of when I hear that the claim that this is not us. You know, I said, you're lying. Stop it. This is us. I even said this in response to a question about Joe Biden president Biden. When he says that this is not us. I said he's lying. I understand the aspirational claim, but he's lying. This is exactly who we are. And I think for me to say that it's people are lying is to actually say something technical. Right, it's not just, you know, a colloquialism right is to say, at the moment in which you declare that this is not us, you're reasserting the lie as I understand it, in order to protect the infrastructure of the value to protect the way the society has been organized. And so we need to call it for what it is. So usually I say you're lying. And then then the eye roll, or something else might come. Well, if there is the lie, there must be the truth. And like Baldwin, you're right that we have to bear witness to it all and tell the story of how we got here. And to use Baldwin bear witness. Oh, my goodness. In his nonfiction, it was just a relentless exploration, not just simply of the political realities of the country but Baldwin. Remember Baldwin is engaged in this, this fascinating literary aesthetic project. He's the native son in everybody approach everybody's protest novel and many thousands gone he engages Richard writes native son and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's cabin. And what he loads is this kind of sentimentality sentimentalism around race. You know in some ways Baldwin grabs Emerson by the cuff of the collar snatches him across the proverbial railroad tracks. So Emersonian themes are played in a, in a blues register involved with his corpus. So what he's saying in this moment is this sentimentalism results in the quote unquote realist novel doesn't give access to the interiority of black life. We're just a tangled web of social statistics. We're either victims or wards. He uses language victims or wards of the state, the complex interiority of black life is lost in that kind of rendering. But he still wants to give attention to the material conditions of black life after all he started as he was as a youth he was a member of the social young socialist party. It's not just a track of the material conditions of black life, but also give voice to the depth of our interior lives. And so his witness is always about those twin pillars if that makes sense. How do I tell the story about what America is doing has done how it evidence itself in the organization of this place. How do I keep track of what the effects are on human beings, the people who have to live in this mess in this madness. Right. And so you can hear the existential notes, you can tell he's reading Camus you can tell he's reading Sartre, but you also know he's reading Proust, he's reading Henry James, you know, so all of this bibliography is at work here. So, what is he doing, he's telling the truth as he sees it, and trying to give light as the artist to the complexity of human being who has to navigate and negotiate. Right, and trying to find an aesthetic. He has a level in terms of his fiction, and a form of reportage, a form of writing nonfiction. That also captures that depth that's why he's one of the greatest essays we've ever produced, because he inhabits the form so brilliantly if that makes sense. Absolutely, like Baldwin, you say we have to tell a different story, right, we have to tell the truth about who we are. And you say by an honest encounter with our past that challenges the repetition of myths and legends in the guise of nostalgia. For simpler times. The truth within ourselves is difficult. It's even harder to face the truth as a country. Do you, do you think America has the courage to tell a different story. Our history would suggest no. Not at all. But that's why we need poets. We need the sonority and sense of the world. So we need those, those poets who, who will reveal our contradictions who will chant our songs and, and offer us a unique vision of who we can be, you know, and I don't mean poets in a strict sense I mean poets in this broader sense that goes back to the romantic tradition and can take us even to the prophetic to the profits more. You know the short answers to the question is that, no, as long as long as we are perpetual adolescents, hell no. You know, Baldwin, and, and, and I, and I'm writing with him not about him I'm writing with him in this moment, right, we both are saying that the country refuses to grow up. It wants to be forever lost boys and lost girls. And what's so distinctive about never never land is that no one wants to be responsible for anything no one wants to be held to account for anything. So what to face the ugliness of who we are as individuals requires a certain level of maturity. Right. I remember we were about to have our first my first and only child our first and only child Langston. I knew that I had been raised in a very complicated space and I said well if I'm going to be a different kind of dad than what my dad was to me. I'm going to have to confront what that had what my childhood meant for me how it set the pathway for me to become the adult if I'm going to parent different. And I failed miserably at it. And I found myself in these moments reproducing all of the trauma that I experienced as a child with my own child. And then there were moments where I broke I broke the, you know, the chain as it were. But it requires a certain kind of maturity, not that we all have it, but we should all strive for it. Baldwin said that one of the most frustrating things about being black in America was having to to convince white people that the experiences of black Americans are real. Do you think that the killing of George Floyd and the black lives the explosion of the black lives matter movement has that made this easier or more difficult. I think the case, the case. I'm not sure yet. You know, I'm not sure yet because at the heart of the heart of this is not is not evidence or no evidence. That's not the issue. The heart of this is not, you know, reasoned argument. You know, it's like Du Bois is seeing Sam hoses knuckles in the storefront window of a business and seeing those knuckles on display says this is not about a lack of knowledge this is something else. And so it's from that moment Du Bois says well I, it's, I have to change my, my scholarly agenda, because he was in the Atlanta, he was Atlanta University trying to produce all of this work, because he thought racism at the heart of it was ignorance that these people just didn't know who black folks were right and those knuckles said to him showed revealed that that's not the case at all. I mean, it is the case that you can't deny the fact that shaven had his knee on George Floyd's neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds. You can't deny that the officers killed Mike Brown because he was walking in the street. Or Ayanna Jones or Sandra Bland or Trayvon Martin or Adrian Hill or Casey Goodson or Walter Wallace. I'm on our barrier we shot Brooks. I can keep going on and on and on right. So the video footage isn't necessarily doesn't necessarily close the case on this, because at the heart of it, to admit what we see is to admit guilt. You don't believe we, the refusal to believe what that what is happening to black America is real is rooted in a refusal to conceive one's complicity in it all. That's all. So, the case is still out. One of the chapters of your book which is which I really enjoyed is elsewhere. It elsewhere. And you write. It is that physical or metaphorical place that affords the space to breathe to refuse adjustment and accommodation to the demands of society and to live apart, if just for a time from the deadly assumptions to smother, use elsewhere, not exile. How did elsewhere influence Baldin's understanding of America and his social criticism of America. I mean it's at the heart of it, you know, he was he called himself a transatlantic commuter. You know, he wasn't in exile because he was always thinking about this place. He loved his family in particular lived here. He found he had a home eventually in St. Paul the Vance. But you know even even as a transatlantic commuter whether he's in London or whether he's in Paris or whether he's in an Istanbul or whether he's in a kibbutz in Israel or whatever Baldwin is always thinking from that space about this place. Right. But he needed the distance he needed the distance personally, so that he can get his work done. He also needed the distance intellectually, because his temperament was such that the racism of America overwhelmed. You know, it overwhelmed him. But you know I almost didn't write that chapter. I was supposed to go to Istanbul and I was going to follow trace Baldwin steps in Istanbul. And the chapter was going to be a very different sort of chapter and, and I remember friends and are you mad. I remember Juan's Istanbul as a critic of Trump. You might not make it back. You know, and this is about before Khashoggi right so everyone is saying, have you and then the State Department issues it's it's warning and the like. So I come back in my editor's like, Well, why don't you just interview some activist about Baldwin I said no we're always extracting something from them. Can I write something for them. So, I wanted to, to, to, to, to commend Baldwin elsewhere to them. And it is a reflection on how Baldwin utilize critical distance. And behind my engagement with Baldwin. And it may be some of interest to some folks is a close reading without mentioning it of the debate between Edward Said and Michael waltz about the role of the social critic and their relationship to the and their relationship to power. You said you didn't came close to not writing that particular chapter. And so I'm just curious, whenever one is the process of producing a book there are elements which are left out other elements that you left out of the book. Yeah, one that I regret more than anything but I couldn't figure it out. Is it is the role of his sexuality. What he's writing about the relationship between race sex and power is is really interesting. Because what he does on the page is very different than how he functions, how he, how he talks in his public. Well, not very different there. He, he tries to inhabit a certain kind of patriarchal register at times. There are moments like, I was going to do a close reading of the debate between him and Audrey Lord, where Audrey Lord basically hands Baldwin is behind. But I couldn't fit it narratively. I was going to do a close reading of the exchange between him and Nick Giovanni which was so liberating for me, writing the book, but I couldn't fit it at the, you know in terms of the narrative because I was working so hard on form. Because the book was constantly folding back on itself, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. And so it ended up on the cutting floor. Yeah. I think you, I think you have another book brother Eddie. Look now to, to, to the future and the book is called begin again, and in order to begin again to have a new America, or as you put it a new Jerusalem. We need both empathy and imagination. We need to be able to put ourselves in the shoes of other people. And particularly other people who are different from us. Do we have a crisis of imagination, and a crisis of empathy, which is making this difficult. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think, you know, to describe the country as mean spirit, isn't to kind of stay at the surface is actually to get to this point. You know, Shelly tells us that imagination is, is the source of the good right. And, and if there's a crisis of the imagination. Then it means there's a crisis of the good. It seems to me, and you know Ralph Ralph Waldo Emerson says, God speaks to us through our imaginations. And I whenever I tell my students that which I love. I said well if that's true then what is the devil do it. Right. So the crisis of the imagination is in some ways a moral crisis right this is a sense of a kind of classification of the heart. And this inability to, you know, you literally have someone right now in the Senate, demanding that they read a 680 page 80 plus page bill, which will hold up checks. For people who are suffering for no reason, no, no reason, no action of their own will hold up funding for vaccinations will hold up funding to re retrofit schools will hold up for, I mean we can hold up funding for municipalities that are struggling to pay, you know frontline workers in the left. But what it is a crisis of imagination that speaks to the hardening of the heart is that that that that's at the root of this of this current crisis. Yeah. Yeah, if we can't figure this one out, because I think the imagination is one of the key battlegrounds. Because they don't even want us to imagine the possibility of a different way of being together. If you can't even fix yourself to do that. Oh, it's the battle's loss. I think it is central it's central to thinking and you about institutions thinking and you about the country. So let's begin to, you know, go back to where we started, and you mentioned your own anguish and propelling you to write this book. You engage deeply with balding Baldwin's work you've thought with him, you're on first name basis with him. Jimmy, you've interrogated serious questions. What impact did right in the book, how on you. Well, I barely survived running. You know, that, you know, there are moments when you read Baldwin, and you, you worry that he's on the verge of being narcissistic. When you read the exchanges between his brother, you, you long to read, or when you read his letters to his brother, you long to hear from his brother. You want to hear the other voice. And again, for honesty, you know, this is what I meant by, by Nikki Giovanni liberating them. There's this exchange between the two of them and she says to Baldwin, after Baldwin was talking about what black men have to endure out in the workplace work workforce and having to wear the mask and the like. And he comes home and then Giovanni says to him lie to me. And Baldwin is confused. She said no lie to me. You want to take all your hanger and hatred out on me, lie to me. I just, you know, I kept saying because there were these moments where he was demanding of me a kind of honesty that would, that would literally, you know, collapse my world. And I, you know, sometimes you got a lot because you love someone, you know. So I was drinking too much Irish whiskey. But you know what I wrote myself into being what I always imagined myself to be. I wrote myself into being an artist. Because he just, he just kept kicking me, insisting that I take risk on the page. But he said, you know, I can, I can hear it in my head. If you're arrogant enough to think that you can write with me, then damn it do so. You know, so what I learned most in short was a kind of self trust on the page. I'd like to ask you, you know, final question. Baldwin said that hope is, is invented every day. And if you have to invent hope every day, in a certain sense, it means that you are struggling with despair every day. What kind of hope did Baldwin have in mind and how do we invent hope in the midst of pain and disillusionment. It's a blue soaked hope. It's a hope that understands that human beings are both miracles and disasters. It's a hope that that presumes that there's no guarantee that the outcome will be what we wish but we have to take out we have to take that step anyway. It's an insight into the human endeavor, right. That as Toni Morrison said in her in a Nobel lecture that at the end of the day it's in our hands. And for Baldwin the hope, and I'll say this really quickly. That hope is tied to that moment in the context of slavery. When there's nothing about the condition of the slave which would lead her to believe that her life could be otherwise. It's the innocence of laughter, the innocent laughter of a child in the flavor, or she sees in the moment in the eyes of someone right before genuine love. And that breaks open the opacity of one's condition. So hope, right, is this this extraordinary caring. You know, it's the it's it's rooted in love it's the wheel in the middle of the wheel that allows us to swing our feet around and plant them on the floor get up, because we're going to get up. And because we got children to take care. We got babies to raise. We got folk to love. Right. We got to figure that out. If that makes sense. It does and it's a wonderful hopeful note to end, and it's been a real pleasure having you on global perspectives and thank you for this really fascinating and illuminating conversation. Thank you for reading the book so closely and for being such a great conversation partner I appreciate you. Thank you.