Quotes from Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

White liberals weren't loud racists. They were simply racial philanthropists who, after a good deed, return to their suburban homes with their white picket fences or to their apartments in segregated cities with their consciences content. Baldwin was not shy about calling this out.

Baldwin penned a powerful open letter to Angela Davis, later published in The New York Review of Books. He famously wrote: "We must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

thirty years after Baldwin's death we are still wrestling with the fact that so many Americans continue to hold the view that ours is a white nation.

never lose sight, as we finger the pain and disillusionment of our after times, of the possibility of a New Jerusalem.

Color," as he wrote in 1963, "is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.

King told the audience that night, "was that black people have been kept in oppression and deprivation by a poisonous fog of lies that depicted them as inferior, born deficient, and deservedly doomed to servitude to the grave." He went on to say that "so long as the lie was believed the brutality and criminality of conduct toward the Negro was easy for the conscience to bear.

If what I have called the "value gap" is the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by which the value gap is maintained. These are the narrative assumptions that support the everyday order of American life, which means we breathe them like air. We count them as truths. We absorb them into our character.

In every generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving this particular world, some way to make the child who will be despised not despise himself. I don't know what "the Negro Problem" means to white people, but this is what it means to Negroes.

But, if I am not the nigger, and if it's true that your invention reveals you, then who is the nigger? I am not the victim here….So I give you your problem back. You're the nigger, baby, it isn't me.

Just twelve years after the last major legislation of the Great Society—the Fair Housing Act of 1968—aimed, however clumsily, at addressing inequalities produced by generations of racist policies, the country elected a president whose charge was to dismantle it all.

The United States has always been shadowed by practices that contradict our most cherished principles. The genocide of native peoples, slavery, racial apartheid, Japanese internment camps, and the subordination of women reveal that our basic creed that "all men are created equal" was a lie, at least in practice.

Trump cannot be cordoned off into a corner with evil, racist demagogues. We make him wholly bad in order to protect our innocence. He is made to bear the burdens of all our sins, when he is in fact a clear reflection of who we actually are.

slavery would make us—and the idea—completely irredeemable. How can the shining city on the hill be capable of such evil? We would rather find comfort and safety in the lie than try to resolve this question. 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.

The despair among the loveless is that they must narcoticize themselves before they can touch any human being at all. They, then, fatally, touch the wrong person, not merely because they have gone blind, or have lost the sense of touch, but because they no longer have any way of knowing that any loveless touch is a violation, whether one is touching a woman or a man.

Instead of confronting what we have done to bring us to such a moment, we forget, or as Baldwin put it, retreat into a "weird nostalgia," a longing for a time that never was. What was needed, he believed, was an unflinching confrontation with the ruins. That included confronting the ongoing terror and brutality of white supremacy.

For Baldwin, even in his later work, the category of race all too often pulls us out of the places where the hard work of self-examination happens. It can easily become an illusion of safety, because so many questions are settled beforehand by the assumptions and stereotypes that come with our understanding of race.

To live and move about the world without questioning how the world has shaped and is shaping you is, in a way, to betray the gift of life itself, Baldwin argued.

American idea is indeed in trouble. It should be. We have told ourselves a story that secures our virtue and protects us from our vices. But today we confront the ugliness of who we are—our darker angels reign.

In the face of such evil, the federal government continued to slow-walk substantive reform, and white people continued to be white people.

landing at Montgomery's airport and feeling the intense hatred in the eyes of three white men

quoting Baldwin: "Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy of justice.

On one level, it is the interregnum surrounded by the ghosts of the dying moment, and on another, the moment that is desperately trying to be born with a lie wrapped around its neck.

Color does not say, once and for all, who we are and who we will forever be, nor does it accord anyone a different moral standing because they happen to be one color as opposed to another.

When residents erupted in Baltimore, Maryland, after the murder of Freddie Gray, one activist was seen outside the Western District police station with a sign quoting Baldwin: "Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy of justice.