Quotes from Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

James Baldwin's words haunt: "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." Are we a nation of monsters?

But, in the end, we have to allow this "innocent" idea of white America to die. It is irredeemable, but that does not mean we are too.

quotation from Maya Angelou emblazoned across the side of the building: "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.

We have to become better people by fundamentally transforming the conditions of our living together. This will require setting aside our comforting illusions.

To make that decision, we will have to avoid the trap of placing the burden of our national sins on the shoulders of Donald Trump. We need to look inward. Trump is us. Or better, Trump is you.

The task at hand is not about securing the goodness of the American Idea or about perfecting the union. It is about according dignity and standing to all Americans no matter the color of their skin.

How, what, and who we celebrate reflects what and who we value, and how we celebrate our past reflects ultimately who we take ourselves to be today.

In the end, Americans will have to decide whether or not this country will remain racist. To make that decision, we will have to avoid the trap of placing the burden of our national sins on the shoulders of Donald Trump. We need to look inward. Trump is us. Or better, Trump is you.

We must remove our mask to call attention to white advantage. That may help us understand one another a bit better. It may bridge divides, disrupt assumptions and stereotypes that block empathy and get in the way of serious efforts to achieve our country. As it stands, we don't really talk frankly about race. And too many people are too damn scared to say so.

Thus, white fear can be understood as something anticipatory, a fear just waiting to be expressed. It isn't based in any actual threat of harm. Instead, the idea of black violence or crime does all the work. The mere possibility of danger is enough to motivate us to act as if we are in immediate danger.

Hope is invented every day.

Most white Americans today tend to see poverty in individual instead of systemic terms, having much to do with our national commitment to individualism. But African Americans know that whatever the system is, it is rigged in the favor of white people. It's not just about

I would like us to do something unprecedented,' Baldwin wrote in 1967, 'to create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy.

John Dewey, the American philosopher, understood this: The very idea of democracy, the meaning of democracy, must be continually explored afresh; it has to be constantly discovered and rediscovered, remade and reorganized; while the political and economic and social institutions in which it is embodied have to be remade and reorganized to meet the changes that are going on in the development of new needs on the part of human beings and new resources for satisfying these needs.

What we put in and leave out of our stories tells us something about who we are.

shows how what I call the value gap (the belief that white people are valued more than others) and racial habits (the things we do, without thinking, that sustain the value gap) undergird racial inequality, and how white and black fears block the way to racial justice in this country.

Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.

As white America chose itself over a truly just and multiracial society,

This sincerity covers, and pardons all, [and] is the very substance of the American panic.

The white southerner had to lie continuously to himself in order to justify his world. Lie that the black people around him were inferior. Lie about what he was doing under the cover of night. Lie that he was Christian.

Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy of justice.

We have to muster the moral strength to reimagine America....The moral stamina to fight this fight requires that we cultivate our own elsewhere, because the one 'who finds no way to rest cannot long survive the battle....' We have to find and rest in a community of love....In our time, with so much hatred and venom in our politics and our culture, we must actively cultivate communities of love that allow us to imagine different ways of being together.

It is up to white people to release themselves from their own captivity.