 Hello and welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our program, Mechanics Institute Online, for our event with Professor Eddie Glaud for his new book, Begin Again. James Baldwin's America and its urgent lessons for our own. And Eddie Glaud will be in conversation with writer, Jules Gomez. I'm Laura Sheppard, Director of Events at Mechanics Institute. And tonight, we're very pleased to co-sponsor our event with the Museum of the African Diaspora. Now, for those of you who are new to Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature a general interest library, our international chess club, and ongoing author and literary programs, and, of course, our Friday Night Cinema Lip Film series. Please visit our website. And also, the library is now open five days a week. So please check our website for the hours and please come down and visit us in person. But first, I'd like to welcome Museum of the African Diaspora's Director of Public Programs, Elizabeth Gessel, to say a few words about MOAD and about their upcoming events. Elizabeth. Good evening, everyone. Thank you, Laura. And I'm so honored to partner with Mechanics Institute on this event this evening. I'm the Director of Public Programs at Museum of the African Diaspora here in San Francisco. MOAD is a contemporary art museum and our exhibitions and programming inspire learning through the global lens of the African Diaspora. We are currently still close to the public, but we will be reopening in October with five very exciting new exhibitions anchored by two of the first museum solo shows for the Ghanaian artist Amako Boafo and the Molly-Born Johannesburg-based artist Billy Zengewa. So we're very excited about reopening with these stunning exhibitions in October. In the meantime, we're continuing our virtual programs. You can see artist talks, conversations with filmmakers and authors, join an open mic night, or engage in a lively discussion with MOAD docents about a body of work. You can find out more about our reopening and our current programming at moadsf.org. And I hope to see you all there. Great. And thank you, Elizabeth. And when you do visit Mechanics Institute, MOAD is just two blocks away. So please come visit both of us. Also, please put your questions in the chat later on, and we'll be engaging you, the audience. If you'd also like to purchase, begin again. We encourage you to purchase a book at alexanderbook.com or an independent bookstore near you. We are so delighted and honored to have Eddie Cloud with us today. His new book is a reflection of Baldwin's experiences and writings, and today we'll be also focusing on his writings during the 60s and 70s, which offer hope and guidance for racial equity and social justice today, mixing biography, uncovered interviews, history, memoir, and analysis of our current moment. Begin again is Cloud's endeavor following Baldwin to bear witness to the difficult truth of race in America that we face now. I'd like to introduce our guest. Eddie S. Cloud is the James S. McDowell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University, where he is also the chair of the Center for African-American Studies and the chair of the Department of African-American Studies. And in addition to begin again, he's the author of Democracy in Black, How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. And Jules Gomez, our Bay Area playwright, novelist, poet, and cultural worker is the author of eight books, including the first black lesbian vampire novel called The Gilda Stories. Her trilogy of plays about African-American artists in the first half of the 20th century include Waiting for Giovanni, Leaving the Blues, and Unpacking in P-town, which was commissioned by the New Conservatory Theater Center in San Francisco, where she is playwright and resident. So please welcome Eddie Goud and Jules Gomez. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm very excited, Eddie, and I'm going to just jump right in. And as you know, with any good interview, you can answer anything you want, even if you don't like my question. So there are so many ways to go at this, particularly given the fact that we're coming out of, hopefully, a pandemic where people have been shut into their homes and doing a lot of thinking and some contributing, I hope, financially to some of the movements, and that we've had this summer last year and longer than a summer of Black Lives Matter protests. So this book is, and this discussion coming, I think, a really important time. I'm going to quote you, where you say, it has never been America's way to confront trauma directly, largely because the lie does not allow for it. And nearly every turn, the country minimizes the trauma. And I think we see that even more right now. And can you talk about that explicit confrontation of the need for it? And how does that relate to what's been happening in the last year? Well, first, let me just say I'm so honored to be in conversation with you. I'm excited. I look forward to the dialogue. I want to thank Laura and Elizabeth and Pat, all the invisible labor that's making this possible. So thank you. Yes, there is this kind of resistance to confronting the horrors that make our lives possible. The broken glass, the shards that lie beneath our feet, as it were. And I would suspect that it's part of, or I would venture to say that it's tied to the country's perpetual adolescence. We want to maintain our innocence. So there's a refusal to look at what we've done to make our lives possible. And we see that in this current moment, at the very moment in which we felt as if we were on the cusp of grappling with police violence, of dealing with the overreach of the carceral state and what it has meant for communities of color across this country, we immediately saw a reassertion of the law. You think about Joe Biden, President Biden's speech to the joint session, and Tim Scott's response. One of the first things he says is America is not racist. And then Kamala Harris, the vice president, comes behind him and says, America isn't racist, but we have to deal with our past. And the thing is, we can quibble about whether or not the claim is true, but the real question is, why did they assert it now? And it has everything to do with that kind of refusal, Joe, to confront what we've done. And it's evidence of our ongoing immaturity as a nation that makes sense. Yes, there is that feeling in this country of innocence as if the country was born innocent leak. And all of the things that happen from the moment the colonists stepped on these shores with the attempt to erase Native American presence physically and spiritually, and the way the indentured quality of the arrival of Asian-Americans here to be used and then disappeared. So that quality of innocence is so flagrantly wrong. You know, wrong. It's hard to believe that white America maintains that sense of innocence. And for me, what's extremely exciting about Baldwin's writing when you look at the fiction or the essays is that he maintained a level of hope, even seeing the lie, understanding the lie. Do you think James Baldwin's spiritual underpinnings were one of the things that helped him maintain a sense of hope for this? I'm not sure. You know, there's that moment in 1970. He had just tried to commit suicide in 69 after King's murder and another failed relationship, feeling loveless. In some ways, he fell to pieces. And in 1970, he's an Istanbul and Ebony reporter interviewing, and he asks him a question about hope. And Baldwin gives him this big-toothed smile, and he says, hope is invented every day. And if you have to invent hope every day, that means you're having to hold off despair every day. You're having to keep despair at arms length every day. So I think his sense of hope is indebted to his religious formation, but it's also a blue-soaked hope. It's that formulation that I love coming out of Du Bois' souls of black folk in the elegy, or what wasn't an elegy, to his son, where he says, a hope not hopeless, but unhopeful, a hope not hopeless, but unhopeful. And that's that blue-soaked hope. So oftentimes, Americans want to read hopefulness as optimism, as if this is pan gloss in Voltaire's Candide. No, this isn't the best of all possible worlds, baby. No, no, no. This is BB King's, Nobody Loves Me But My Mother, She Could Be Jobbed In Two. Yes. Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. I wonder sometimes about Baldwin's ability to leave the US, to go to France and to other countries, and really find himself, find the US within himself. Can you talk a little bit about that? I don't think of it as a running away from the US, but somehow giving himself a perspective. What do you think? I think it's absolutely critical. When you read the introduction to Nobody Knows My Name, 61, I think. There's this line. You always have my Baldwin right next to me. There's this line. He says, in America, the color of my skin had stood between myself and me. In Europe, the barrier was down. Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. It turned out that the question of who I was was not solved because I had removed myself from the social forces which menaced me. Anyway, these forces had become interior, and I had dragged them across the ocean with me. The question of who I was had at last become a personal question, and the answer was to be found in me. And so this is that passage in Nobody Knows My Name which shows that Baldwin is grappling with the question of identity, self-identity, and self-creation outside of the context of the daily cuts of white supremacy in the United States. But he's still grappling with what has been deposited in his gut, the sense that he's ugly, the sense that he's not lovable, the sense that he's less valued, and he's trying to in some ways vomit that all up and the distance without having the temptation of trying to kill somebody. Because Baldwin said he had to leave the US because either he was going to kill somebody or somebody was going to kill him. So he gave him the space to do the work to actually engage in this arduous task of self-creation. That distance was necessary, but it wasn't an exile. I keep saying this. Yes, I agree. He's still reflecting on the country, still thinking about the country. He just needed the space to do so. Yes. And I think he also, and I'd appreciate your thoughts on it, when he was writing Giovanni's Room, many people said, well, he wrote this book and it's a gay book and it's all about white people. And in a way, for me, Giovanni's Room was another attempt to find the distance to talk about a lot of things. I mean, I think it's actual and metaphorical. He's talking about poverty. He's talking about nationalism and colonialism in Giovanni's Room, wrapped up in this story of a love affair that's also a betrayal. And I think those are all metaphors for the US and their colonialism. Absolutely. It's a love story and it's hard, but it's a love story that's all because Baldwin is constantly trying to keep track of two things at once, it seems to me. He wants to be able to describe at a certain level of detail with the eye of the artist and the material conditions of our living. But he also wants to give attention to with detail of the complex interiority of our living. So this is at the heart of the beef with Richard Wright, which leads Ralph Ellis and Albert Murray to misidentify Baldwin as an ally, because he's saying to Richard Wright, we're not reducible to our material conditions, Richard, because if we're all bigger, then I can't account for you. And so Giovanni's Room becomes this kind of extraordinary exploration of the complexities, the perils of love and feeling loveless within the context of a world that is deeply layered. And what's so fascinating for me is that it's the second novel. I mean, could you imagine writing Giovanni's Room in the 1950s, early 1950s? I mean, when I interviewed Angela Davis about Jimmy, because I saw this video footage of him speaking at Berkeley and Angela Davis was looking like a little, she had the look of the smitten child. She looked upon Jimmy, right? And she said, in so many ways, he was out there all by himself. And Giovanni's Room, for me, is just this exquisite example of his courage and the magnitude of his intellectual vision, of his imagination. Oh, yeah. I mean, I first read Baldwin when I was probably about 14. And I fell in love with his ability to use language. That was the first thing. And I knew that I was too young to really understand everything and that I would need to come back to his writing when I was more mature as a reader and as a person. But I felt like I had been, something had been injected into my heart and my mind just by reading him, even if I didn't understand it as a teenager. So I feel grateful that I knew I needed to come back. And that's what I did. And later came back to read Giovanni's Room in another country and then was more flabbergasted than ever when I actually was like, oh my god, how did he do that? Yeah. I wonder what you think Spurred Baldwin to leave France and come back to the US. I know in your book you talk about it being the return was not really spurred by this desegregation of Charlotte High School. But what do you think it really was? I think he wanted to come home and see the people he loved. He wanted to eat some fried chicken, to hear the sounds of Harlem. When he writes about what allowed him to finish, go tell it on the mountain, listening to those Bessie Smith records, finding the kind of cultural anchor that allowed him to hear the rhythm of speech, the cultural kind of reservoir that made him who he was, who he is. But again, though, when he comes home, he's radically transformed. He's not the Jimmy that left. So there is this kind of misfittedness that always kind of characterizes Baldwin's position, vis-a-vis American letters, vis-a-vis African American letters, and the like. But I think there is the politics of the moment. There's the movement that is taking off. But I think there is also these deeply held connections. He's got to come back and he's got to see that David has grown up. He wants to see his model. He wants to hold the people that he helped raise. And that's important. That's really important. Yeah, I agree. And when you talk about the aftertimes, when he comes back and the movement is in a different place, is it moving, is it not moving, what is his role in it, what do you think that sense of that aftertimes being the splintering after disruption of old ways and making of new community? What do you think James Baldwin felt was his part in it? The new activists who are kind of contentious with each other, what do you think he thought of his role in? He's always bearing witness. I opened chapter one with the story of him in this apartment with the SNCC students from Howard, with Michael Thelwell and Stokely Carmichael and Muriel Tillingast. Jimmy needed his drink, so they had to get some bootleg liquor. And they're chopping it up until the sun comes up. And he says to them, if you promise me that you won't believe what the world says about you, I promise that I will never betray you. I will never betray you. That I, Jimmy Baldwin, will never betray you. And Stokely Carmichael Kwame Therese said he never did. And Baldwin saw in the eyes of these young folk in 1963 that they had experienced raw terror in the South. And many people tend to think of Black power as wholly separate from the civil rights movement, not understanding that many of the proponents of Black power were actually proponents of nonviolence. Stokely Carmichael said he only broke nonviolent discipline once. And that's in the march against fear when the police attacked Dr. King. So Baldwin is trying to give an account that these young people who were screaming at the top of their lungs, Black power, who were demanding a radical transformation, these were America's children. And that they could not be tossed aside. And so I think what he was trying to do is to give an account, to give an account of what happened, where America couldn't absorb our struggles into its triumphant story that secured its innocence, but to tell the truth about what happened. That's why No Name in the Street is such an important book to me. Because No Name in the Street Jewel is the spine of Begin Again. And it's the first book he writes after King's assassination. Yes, yes. And he calls it this mighty motherfucker. Because he's trying, it almost killed it, because he's trying to give this account. And part of what he's trying to do is tell a story of wound, of trauma, of fragmented memory, of betrayal. Of betrayal. He's trying to pick up the pieces. And so the answer to your question in a direct way, he's trying to bear witness in such a way that we could gather ourselves up in the face of the country's betrayal and raise our babies, right? Because he knows he sees Reagan on the horizon in 63. Yeah. He sees it, he sees it. He sees what's ahead of these young people when he's talking to them in that apartment in 1963, you know? In the sense of trauma and that you say trauma, witness and trauma are inextricably linked. And you talk about a bit about what happened with the brother, Ben, of one of the three workers who were killed. And I wish you'd talk a little bit about that, because to me, it is a good example of how trauma enters the system, the human system, and it goes down through generations. I hadn't known about what happened with Ben and I feel like it's a good thing to do. What happened with Ben and I felt I wanted to know more so that we understand why we today are still suffering from the middle passage, in a way. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's, you know, I remember watching eyes on the prize and I remember the footage around the death of Shauna Goodman and Shane. And I remember the footage of the funeral and the interview with the young Ben Cheney who looked up to his brother, James, right? And I want to do what he, I want to step into his shoes. He was, and the grief and how his mother had to pull him close in tour. And this baby grows up and finds himself connected with the Black Liberation Army. It's supposed to be transporting some things, taking some people on a ride and that ends up a part of a murder spree with the ex-Vietnam vet and winds up doing time. But prior to that moment, he was so angry. The parents, the Cheneys had to leave Mississippi because they were under threat. Then they threw him into, he was the first recipient of the Goodman scholarship, threw him into this private school with all his white kids. Right? So he's alienated. He's angry, he's wounded and he ends up doing time. And so there's this interview and I heard it through the grapevine where Baldwin is interviewing Dave Dennis. And Dennis talks about Ben and it broke my heart. He was like, these are the children this country has produced. And the irony, he comes home out of prison. He gets his sentences commuted. He comes home only to see that white folks then shot up his brother's grave, his tombstone. The generations of it are horrifying. It just keeps rolling over and over from the big lie to the murders and the killings and the victimization of black people and poor people and brown people. How do we fix ourselves? James Baldwin asked at one point. And I think that's gonna be the question we as activists and thinkers face in these coming years. How do we fix ourselves? Yeah. So anyway, I did wanna address some of the critique of Baldwin's later work. Yeah. And I appreciate what you say about it that the criticism failed to take seriously the continuity of themes running through Baldwin's body of work. Why do you think critics felt Baldwin had become a caricature of himself? You know, ironically, I think a lot of it, well, a couple of things. One, I think Joseph Campbell's biography of Baldwin which says that Jimmy's voice broke in 1963. I think that's just wrong. Just it doesn't make any sense to me. And it became a kind of standard periodization of his work. Like, you know, after the fire next time, he becomes polemical, his anger overwhelms, he's turned his back on literature and the like, he's become too enamored with celebrities. He's not, right? So I think on the one hand, I think there's this kind of that biography sets the tone in interesting sorts of ways of how he's periodized. I think another thing is that the politics changed. So Jimmy, so I think it says more about the critics than about the work. No naming the street for me is a marvel at the level of form as well as substance. What he's trying to, at the level of form, he's trying to write trauma. So the book folds back on itself. He's Toni Morrison's beloved. And what she's doing with memory, to my mind, is indebted to this book. Angela Davis says, she thinks it's the first book in carceral studies. What he's doing with Toni Maynard and the Safe Streets Act of 1968. But at this point, you know, people are rejecting Black Power, at least the Petty Buja Z, rejecting Black Power. And by the time we get to the 1980s, this is the age of Cosby. And Jimmy is still coming hard. So they think he's an old man gone bad in the teeth because they're wearing expensive sweaters now. Yeah. You see, so I think it has something to do with the shift in the times and Baldwin's insistence on bearing witness. So for example, the last book, The Evidence of Things Not Same. He's talking about that when a child works. Yeah. And what happens when white supremacy still obtains and Black folk hold the reins of power? What does it mean that the city too busy to hate is now run by Black people and Black babies are being murdered and these folk aren't responding. It's almost a foreshadow jewel. Of Barack Obama's face, the Black mayor's face, the Black sharer's face, and the riot and the burning of Baltimore. All of that happening at once, Baldwin was trying to get us to think about it in the evidence of things that, oh, these folk didn't want to hear this. Yeah. Go on, go back to Saint Paul de Valls. Yeah. So I think it has something to do with the politics of the time. And I think it has something to do with the early critical assessments of this work. You liken Baldwin's later writing to a cold-framed composition pursuance. I wish you'd talked just a little bit more about that. And I see now I have to find the piece of music and play it. I'm like, hey, just... Yeah. So Love Supreme is one of my favorite Coltrane albums. And my first book, Exodus, is actually was structured, at least in my head, based on pursuance. Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da. So that's, and what Coltrane does is a series of choral combination so that by the time you get to the end of that track, it's almost, you almost can't recognize it. It's almost sheets of sound, right? But there's a through line. So there's a part of what I was trying to say is that if you pay attention, if you, what you think is screaming and rage, there is, right, this continuity that there's this theme that is being played that is at the heart of the reflection. So even when it seems at its most discordant, right? It is still the central beauty in the Aristotelian sense, in the ancient sense. It is still the beautiful formulation that defines Baldwin's corpus. So what I was trying to do is to get people to move from the sound of notes of native son, right? In order to understand the sound of no name and devil finds work and evidence of things not seen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll all be downloading some Coltrane tonight. You know, at one point, early on, Huey P. Newton said in the Black Panther Party newspaper that the party is going to have to learn to align itself with other movements, the gay movement, women's movement to create kind of coalitions in order to be successful. And he did that at a very early time and people really ignored him. It was really, really sad. And I think, I wonder how much of subsequent black radicals a dislike or distrust of Baldwin can be attributed to their feelings about homosexuality or their identity with hypermasculinity, you know, which is all of course in response to how black men and black women were sexualized by the dominant culture. So I'm not saying hypersexuality as a curse word as much as understanding it's a response to something. But I wonder about that homosexuality was so frightening to a lot of us in the black community. It made for distrust of Baldwin. Yeah, I think so. I mean, this is one of the failures I think of the book because I couldn't quite figure out how to do this, how to write about sexuality and Baldwin in a way that would fit with what I was trying to do at the level of form with biography, literary, because the attempts that I did, it just, it became too academic. But let me just, so that's just me just saying that it's one of the failings of the book. But Baldwin was misfitted because he was queering everything that he was, every time he entered into a space, he queered. Yeah. And I use that in a technical sense, right? So Eldridge Cleaver didn't know what the hell to do with Jimmie. Mm-mm. And Jimmie was hurt. I mean, he was hurt by what Eldridge Cleaver said about it. And the irony though, is that when Eldridge Cleaver was in exile, if you look at the panther papers of all the people who were donating money for his exile, Baldwin's name was at the top of the list every single time, every single time. But King's movement, King was unsettled by Baldwin's presence. Remember, Baldwin is out. Yeah. I mean, he's not closeted like Bayard Rustin. He's out. Right. And that's been out. And folk are unsettled by this. But I think not only is this sexuality unsettling King, it's his class position as well. Because King is Atlanta bourgeois. Yeah. Yeah. And those of us who know what that means, we know that's a particular kind of black bourgeoisie. Baldwin is not from Sugar Hill. He's from the bottom. Right. King is reserved. He doesn't want anyone to know that he's smoking cigarettes. He's a politics of respectability. Baldwin is prone to the dramatic and may at any moment cuss anybody out at a time. So I think there is a sense in which not only is his sexuality unsettling, his class position. Class issue is always overlooked when we're talking about this stuff. You know, it unsettles as well, you see. So yeah, he's misfitted. He's misfitted. And I think it's part of the source of the power of his prophetic witness. He always stands at an angle. These of the moment. Yeah. At a point, Baldwin says, color is not a human or a personal reality. It is a political reality. And you quote that in your book, do you think that this is too advanced a concept to speculate about in 1963 that other activists really, they're not able to quite grasp the significance and the truth of that statement. Yeah, you know, I think so. You know, he's so ahead of his time. Right? I can see Baldwin using they, you know, his pronouns being very particular because he's already there. You know, he's already there. There's a sense in which Baldwin is trying to, is warning us not to spring the trap of categorization. To understand that the political reality of white supremacy necessitates that we organize along the lines of race. So if someone says, excuse my language, you are an N-word. And the moment you say, I'm an N-word, the moment they call you the N-word, you say, no, I'm not. The no, I'm not means that you're already in the circuitry. And then you go, no, I'm not, I'm this. And then you go, no, I'm not, I'm this. The moment you go, I am, you negate the negation. And then you go constructive. If you draw in those categories, you could so easily become trapped in. Yeah. Baldwin understood that for people who have been beaten down by the concept of color, it makes sense that we would grab hold of it and reinvest it with meaning that black would become beautiful. But then Baldwin said, but we cannot get caught up in this mystical black bullshit. The mystical. Because then you're trapped. Right. And this is 1940, this is 1948 in an essay, Everybody's Protest Now, In Notes of a Native Son. Now as then, we find ourselves bound first without, then with then by the nature of our categorization. And escape is not affected through a bitter railing against this trap. It is though this very striving or the only motion needed to spring the trap upon us. We take our shape. It is true within and against that cage of regality bequeath us at our birth. And yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed. Yes. Now what happens is that Ellison and Murray, they misread it, right? Because they think here he's offering us a sense of a kind of American individuality. Baldwin, there's still a politics here that they don't quite get yet, that they don't quite see. But that's another story. That's another book. I mean, I think as someone who writes speculative fiction, when I read a lot of things that Baldwin says, he is so far ahead of his time, it makes you want to place him in somewhere, there's Afrofuturism, because his preachments, if I've just made up a word, speak to a time in which you cannot be bound by the dominant culture's reality. You must not be bound by the dominant culture's reality. And he was saying that decades before. Absolutely. I think also there's something about the way Baldwin always turned to love, always wanted us to have, has love as a touchstone that really freaks people out. They think, is he a hippie? Where is he going with that? And I think it is still one of the most profound ideas that we could take in. The idea that love must underpin everything we do, or we fail. And not just simply a narrow love for our own people, but a love of the planet, the earth, the spirit, I think is very, very important coming. Yeah, yeah. You know, Baldwin's notion of love is not just simply a goth, they're like kings. It's Felia, it's Eros. You know, that moment in the fire next time when he says the relatively few blacks, relatively few whites, and then people tend to run past this formulation. He says, who like lovers? What does he mean by that? Right, like lovers, whatever I teach this to my students, I say, well, what does that mean? And it's that moment, imagine you're standing, you know, nude in front of your lover and she or he can see all of your blemishes, all your faults. So there's a vulnerability, a risk involved in giving oneself over or in no name in the street, he says, you get a sense of what love means when you have another human being on topic, you know, this sort of thing, right? So there's their love for Baldwin requires a kind, not losing of oneself, but an opening of oneself to another, right? Yeah, yeah. And that for him is the most powerful force, right, on the planet. And not many of us are willing to do that, he says. Not many of us are willing to even talk about it really. Exactly. The idea of being witness, bearing witness, I think is such a powerful one as well. And when I think about the young woman, Darnella Frazier, who took that video of George Floyd's murder, you know, and we make fun of teenagers always having their phones and, you know, taking pictures, I just think of her as someone who intrinsically, inherently, maybe not even consciously knew she had to bear witness to this murder and that by doing so, she helped a nation bear witness to what was going on in our country and helped to open up a whole idea about social change, you know, that we've been avoiding, you know, as Baldwin said, it's not a Negro problem, it's a white problem. And I think her, Darnella Frazier's bearing witness, we pointed us into that understanding. This is a white problem that we have to address. How do you, how do you think about our addressing it? It's so huge, the magnitude of the lies, the history. What are some of the things you think about and you think about how, I know that's a big question. I know that's a big question, but as a writer, think about it just as a writer. You as a writer, me as a writer, how do we as writers think about addressing the, you know, there's this line in Baldwin's essay, wrote in 1962, you know, as much truth as one conveys, that the writer, the novelist, the artist, he says, must tell the truth and then a little bit more. So part of what we have to do as poets in the Emersonian sense of what the poet is, right? Is that we have to offer languages, offer ways of seeing that break loose, that break, that enable people to imagine beyond the opacity of now, to see the world differently, right? So in your speculative fiction, you know, it's like, I just finished reading Parable of the Sore, and I was rereading Parable of the Sore, and I was thinking about Parable of the Sore alongside of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The Road, yeah. And thinking about how differently they end. Yes. Both end with death, but there's a burial, there's a communal burial. There's a way in which a certain way of telling the story, a certain way of how we're going to commune with our dead, how we're going to carry our dead forward, that closure, and what happens, how individualized Cormac McCarthy's is in interesting sorts of ways, right? So part of what we have to do as artists, as writers, is to really, I think, offer up ways of imagining the world differently. Yes. As Shelley says, imagine, you know, the imagination is the source of the good. Yes. Yes. I love that. I love that. Well, I know that you have used said in your book that, and I hesitate to say this name out loud, but so I won't, the former president, number 45, is not exceptional, but is rather a part of a long line of continuing the lie. Are there ways institutionally that we might be able to keep history in front of us? And as a teacher, yes, you would, yeah. Yeah, I think so, you know, and I see Lori just showed up, could be kind of let us know. I think so, and that's why I kind of ended with my trip to the Legacy Museum and the Lynching Memorial, right? There is something very different about what Brian Stevenson is trying to do. It's not about, you know, this triumphalous narrative that actually defines, you know, self, the tourist industry of civil rights, of the civil rights movement. It stands, you know, in a different relationship. When you go to Montgomery, it doesn't fit with the civil rights narrative in an easy way because it is trying to get us to confront our dead, right? That the Lynching Memorial isn't about triumph, it's about the horrors, what we're capable of and what does it mean to remember that? And that is public history, right? That is institutionalized and it matters that it's in Montgomery, right? It matters that it's there. And as Brian Stevenson says, which I love, he says, truth and reconciliation is sequential. First, you have to tell the truth in order for us to reconcile. And reconciliation becomes the condition for repair. So there we go. I love that. And I think about what we're trying to do as writers is to make the country live up to the promise of America. You know, it's not like I'm gonna be the patriotic American, I'm true to the promise of what was America. And the final words from Baldwin are the ones that I have put up over my desk and it's simply that we refuse to spare. Yeah. And reading your book has certainly helped me think about how we refuse to spare so much. I really appreciate your writing the book and being with us here to talk about that. Thank you so much. Thank you, I'm so blessed. Thank you so much for taking the time. Such a wonderful conversation. Thank you. Oh, thank you, Jewel. And thank you, Professor Eddie Glau. This has been such an inspiring conversation. And now we'd like to just open it up to our Q and A with our audience. Pam, would you like to read off some of the questions? Your, one of the first questions that came up is from Susan Lippmann. Given the racist history of the United States, how would you describe the racial history of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries? Where does this leave us in the 21st century? Oh. In 25 words or less. Listen. Our inheritance is in part this idea that white people matter more than others. This idea that, of what I call the value gap, this belief that because of the color of one's skin, one ought to be valued more than others. That has not been uprooted. It defined our founding. It was at the heart of the Civil War. It was at the heart of the betrayal of the radical reconstruction. And it was at the heart of Make America Great Again. We're still battling with those demons. Or better put, those ghosts still have the country by the throat, it seems to me. Okay, well, the next question is from Regina B. You spoke of raw terror, blacks were subjected to in the 60s. It seems that black people are experiencing raw terror today, realized by a plethora of voter suppression legislation along with a lack of law enforcement reforms and a growing un-sheltered population. Professor Glaude, I'm looking for hope. Where is it hiding? Hope is invented every day. Yeah. As Baldwin said, human beings are at once disasters and miracle. We have to protect ourselves from the disasters that we are. But if we show up, there's at least a chance for a miracle. So hope is found in our capacity to be otherwise. In other words, you are the hope you've been looking for to echo Miss Ella Baker. You are the hope you've been looking for. And so that doesn't mean that it's not blue soap. It doesn't mean that the times aren't dark. But I stand in a tradition where darkness that never has the last word. It never has the last word. So where do we find hope? Right here. It's in each of us. We can be transformative agents if we just decide to be so. And I like to think of darkness as fertility. Dark soil is a place where things grow. And when things are dark and fearsome, in that darkness, we cannot see what is behind those shadows, but behind them is always something that's growing and fertile that will feed us. And we make that change if we just will keep going and not be totally afraid of that darkness. Indeed. My favorite reggae band is Midnight. And it's the dawn of a new day. It's the darkest hour, but it's the dawn of a new day. Exactly. Exactly. Susan Lippmann has another question. What role does capitalism play in the continued discrimination against blacks? Oh, except the heart of it. Racial capitalism, right? There's a sense in which modern capitalism takes shape in the context of the transatlantic slave trade, which has everything to do with a set of presuppositions about the disposability of people, of human beings and the justifications, right? Around that disposability, right? So Baldwin says in 1964, in an essay entitled The White Problem, he said, the Christians who founded the nation had a fatal flaw. They sought to build the democracy, but they had these chattels and they had to justify the role that this chattel played in their lives. And so what they said in order to justify the role these chattels played in their lives is that these men and women were not human beings. Because if they were not human beings, then there was no crime that had been committed. And Baldwin says, that lie is the basis of our present trouble. So they're intimately connected. Or as the late Stuart Hall would put it, race is the modality through which class is experienced in the United States. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Does that make sense, Joel? Absolutely, absolutely. It's, you know, if we're gonna be the coin of the realm, if people are gonna be the coin of the realm, then we have to break down that realm so those coins cannot be used. Yeah. I believe in what Dr. King talked about as a revolution of value. We have to disrupt the value gap. That is, we have to change our view of black people. The only way we can change our view of black people is we have to change our view of white people. The idea that somebody, because of the color of their skin ought to be valued more than ideas irredeemable. We need to throw it away. And we also need to change what we value. What we value, right? And hopefully that will happen in our lifetime, but we'll see. Michael Striano asks, if Baldwin rejected the ethos of violence in an attempt to understand what was underneath it and extrapolated those ideas to predict future political and racial tensions, do you think he would be surprised by where we've ended up in 2021 and the events of the past five to 10 years? I've always hesitant to try to anticipate Baldwin's words or his reactions. As a reader of Baldwin, I could say, right, that as Joel noted in our conversation, he was profanity. We're still grappling with the very thing he was trying to explicate, to understand, to give an account of. So that's my short answer to that very nuanced question. And I will, I have to say this, Michael Striano, who asked that question is a wonderful actor in New York who played the spirit of Giovanni in my play. Oh, that's wonderful. So all during rehearsals and the run of the play, he and I had fantastic Baldwin conversations. And so I really appreciate him being here and he's still got some great questions coming. He's still, that was wonderful. He was a magnificent in the play. Thank you, Michael. Well, there's a question. Actually, it's kind of the two people that asked basically the same question, Barbara Swan and Michelle, can you speak about the writers that Baldwin read and admired? And Michelle asks, which writers influenced James Baldwin? Oh, his library is expansive. Obviously, there's Henry James. In my recent interview with the New York Times, I don't, I can't, I don't have Baldwin's love of Henry James. I prefer his brother, Willie. So there's Henry James, there's Marcel, there's Proust. Proust is important. Of course, there's the King James Bible. There's the way in which he's engaging the classic American writers as well. You know, Baldwin, Baldwin's library isn't, I haven't people haven't, I haven't had a chance to get my hands on it in a way, but there's also evidence of his engagement with Whitman, his engagement with Emerson. So, you know, he is reading all of the classics and they show up. Jules, you want to try to answer some of that as well or no? I, you know, I think, of course, he was good friends with Lorraine Hansberry. Of course, yeah, they're partners. It really influenced him in his playwriting. And I think he was also interested in, I mean, of course, he read all of his contemporaries. So he could keep up with their critiques of him. But he was amazingly well read for someone who was writing so much himself, which I find amazing and fabulous. It's very, it's very, it's a very stern discipline reading because the illusions are clear. I mean, I found, he's reading Whitman very closely at the McDowell, at McDowell. And when you read no name, you see explicit allusions to Whitman, oh, pioneers shows up and that sort of thing, right? So he's, it's, one of my dreams is to get a hold of his library. I don't know where it is to see what he's annotated, yeah. Yeah. Tammy Jacquet has asked, do you think the future will change? And I think maybe as it, maybe the, what will change in the future? What, what can change? It all depends on us. That's, that's, so it can change. Nothing is fixed, except the fact that we're going to take one last breath. Yeah. So what the future holds depends upon what we do. It's in our hands. It's Tony Morrison said in a Nobel lecture. It's in our, it's in our hands. Yeah. So, but you know, the question is whether or not America will double down on its ugly. Whether we will finally choose to be a multiracial democracy. That's the choice that's in front of us right now. I have another question from Michael Striano. The conversation for reparations has been restarted in the past couple of years. I support reparations, but with such deep hurt that has been inflicted in so many ways, is there a way to allocate your reparations to really make a difference and to make any progress to remedy some of those wounds? Absolutely. Remember what Brian Stevenson said. Truth and reconciliation is sequential. First, you got to tell the truth in order for there to be reconciliation. And reconciliation becomes the basis for repair. What does it mean to tell the truth? Well, if we tell the truth, then we know that racial inequality in the United States is not something that just happened. The wealth gap is the result of banking policy. The result of FHA loans. So at the very moment in which the vaunted American middle class came into existence through New Deal policies, Black folk were locked out, specifically agricultural industries, domestically, weren't covered. We know that residential segregation, school segregation, redlining, forms of policing. We have produced the society that we have built deliberate. It is our country is what we have made. So once we concede that, we have to be just as deliberate in dismantling it as we were in creating it. That's the move we have to make. And if we make that move, then we won't be lifting all boats. We will be trying specifically to remedy, right? The ways in which racial inequality saturate our society. And it's gonna be a long haul because we're gonna have to rebuild the country. Rebuild. Because the built environment reflects racial inequality. Our zoning laws, our neighborhoods, we're gonna have to build the country differently. And that's gonna go happen. It's gonna take, in order for that to happen, it's gonna be well beyond our lifetimes. Yes, I agree. I mean, it's like trying to patch a leak in the roof without going down to the studs and seeing where the problems are. And I think that's, it'll be generations from now, but I think it's worth the effort. Absolutely. So there's a question, another question from Regina B. Will you comment on the controversy surrounding critical race theory and is it included in your curriculum at Princeton? So critical race theory as an intellectual project is typically located in law schools. It is tied to critical legal studies. What we have to be clear is that the current debate around critical race theory is a red herring that has been created by the right wing, Cabal, trying to distract us from the all-out assault on voting that's happening in the country. So they are not interested in whether or not they actually are right about critical race theory. They're just using it as, excuse me, as a broad branding of everything they don't like. Sorry. So the shorthand is that I don't want to argue with the folks about whether or not they're right about critical race theory. I wanna understand what the hell they're doing. And what they're doing is they're playing on fears. So the demographic shifts are leading people to believe that they're gonna be displaced. Now they're telling people that they're gonna be made out to be monsters, excuse me. Sounds like a hay fever cough to me. Some water, maybe some water went down the wrong way. Yeah, yeah. I would agree with Eddie that there's a, it's like a magician's trick. Distract you with one thing, one issue. And you really don't talk about what the real core issues are. And if we think about voting rights and if we think about redlining and incarceration from the whole, from school to prison pipeline, then we understand what is critical is getting to the basic point of having a multi-racial country, a multi ethnic country. And that this argument about critical race theory is simply a distraction from all of those issues. That we as non-academics, we just read the headlines and we get distracted by that caution that we're supposed to take around intellectual ideas like that, so. Oh my goodness. Welcome back, sorry. Let's see you back, sir. Well, I was really amazed that in Evanston, Illinois, the city of Evanston is going to be giving reparations from their community that was just announced about two days ago. And I'm not sure which channel I saw this on. Maybe it was on Amantpur, but I was really amazed and so pleased to see this. And who knows if this can be a modeling for really understanding the past and bringing the past into the present and also that it ties in with the responsibility of capitalism in promoting racism from the very beginning. So that was just something that's come up in the news that's been quite popular. And also, Eddie, I wanted to ask you about, since you were involved in the Academy of Religious Scholars, if you have continued connection with that organization, we just saw one of the heads of the Baptist Church resigned because of all of the racism and rhetoric that's going on. And I'm wondering if there's, if you see any support through the faith community to make changes in this country from the grassroots? Well, absolutely. When you think of what Bishop Barber is doing with the Four Peoples Campaign, it is a mobilization of progressive Christians in response to evangelical support of Trumpism. So, absolutely, absolutely. I apologize, something. Okay. Hey, there's one more question. And it is, hold on, it is from Princeton. You know the current state condition of James Baldwin's home in France. Is Baldwin honored and loved in France? Baldwin is loved and honored in France, but his home is being turned into luxury apartments. Right, capitalism. With a little plaque. And his study is supposed to be salvaged, but it's luxury departments with the panoramic view. That's what I saw. Yeah. We're gonna start writing letters. It's too late. It's already too late. And people did try, but it was already too late. I think the greatest tribute that we can give to James Baldwin is one that Eddie Glaude has contributed to, which is writing about his work, his ideas, and letting each subsequent generation know how significant he and his ideas are to our survival as a people and as a nation. Indy, thank you so much, Jewel. Appreciate it. Thank you, this is really- I wanna thank both of you, Jewel and Eddie, for the most inspiring and incredibly powerful conversation tonight. I'm just totally overwhelmed and pleased. And we'll continue reading James Baldwin's work and reading your work, Eddie, and your work, Jewel, in all of its forms and continue to look inside, to make the changes that we need to make and to be active, to be activists and voices for racial justice and social justice in this country. And I hope that everyone here tonight has been inspired to do the same. And we look forward to more conversations. As we go, come back to the library, Mechanics Institute is open. Come back to our programs when we start up live in the fall. Be safe, be healthy, and we'll say a good night and be well. Thank you. Stay safe, everybody. Thank you, Jewel. Thank you very much. Thank you, Laura. Thank you to Moed and to Elizabeth Gessel for hosting with us once again. Thank you. Thank you, Jewel, for such an amazing conversation. I'm so inspired. Take care. Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and close the doors. It was great. I think it's really wonderful conversation. I hope everybody will watch our, we will have a recording of this posted on our YouTube account. Fabulous. Thank you. Bye. Bye-bye.