Quotes from Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

In so many ways, these last two sentences

We lie and cover up our sins and mute the traumas they cause. We dissociate the trauma from our national self-understanding and locate it, if at all, in the ungrateful cries of grievance and victimization among those who experienced the pain and loss.

All the while, 40 percent of America delighted in Trump's presidency. They had told themselves the lie that black and brown people threatened their way of life, and now they were poised to make America white again.

The white southerner had to lie continuously to himself in order to justify his world.

It makes for a galvanizing moment, with Baldwin moved to leave Paris by the cruelty visited on a child.

rejected the life everyone expected of him. "My luck was running out," he said in a 1984 interview for The Paris Review. "I was going to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain." David

And, in the end, we must resist Ibsen's ghosts, the 'old ideas and beliefs' that cage us in categories and assumptions about who we are and what we are capable of and blind us to the beauty of others, never forgetting that categorization refers only to the different conditions under which we live; it doesn't capture the essence of who we are.

Reagan had argued that Americans could escape poor living conditions if they so chose. All they needed to do was to "vote with their feet." They could just move along. Those who remained, he seemed to suggest, did so because they wanted to or were too lazy to aspire to something more. This was the lie.

Nell Painter spoke to the heart of the matter. "It's all about the questions we ask," she said. "The questions have changed. I mean, the questions always change. That's why we keep writing history.

tell my students at Princeton that it was just down the street, at a restaurant on Route 1, that Baldwin hurled a glass at a waitress and shattered a mirror after he was refused service and ended up having to run for his life.

Baldwin put it this way in No Name in the Street: "One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions of people, this history…has been nothing but an intolerable yoke, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave.

In his early years, he had invested so much energy, in his writings and in his speeches, to warning white America of the costs to themselves and to the country of their commitment to the myths and legends of America. As

White people deserved whatever happened to them, he said. The problem is that we don't deserve any of it.

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

Power mattered. But in the end, for Jimmy, what kind of human beings we aspired to be mattered more. And I am convinced he was absolutely right, especially for our after times.

To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior agreement and collaboration with the authors of one's degradation," he wrote.

Donald Trump's presidency unleashed forces howling beneath our politics since the tumult of the 1960s. For decades, politicians stoked and exploited white resentment.

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.

That shift—the shift in his "we"—matters in how we read his engagement with Black Power and his later work.

I think that much of this criticism fails to take seriously the continuity of themes running through Baldwin's body of work: that he continued to examine questions of American identity and history, railed against the traps of categories that narrowed our frames of reference, insisted that we reject the comfort and illusion of safety that the country's myths offered, and struggled mightily with the delicate balance between his advocacy and his art.

As with Dr. King, and Cleaver was explicit about his discomfort, Baldwin's queerness unsettled him.

To be sure, Cleaver's idea of himself as a virile black man was central to his politics.

Gratitude is expected. Having secured our innocence, we feel no guilt in enjoying what we have earned by our own merit, in defending our right to educate our children in the best schools and in demanding that we be judged by our ability alone. To maintain this illusion, Trump has to be seen as singular, aberrant. Otherwise, he reveals something terrible about us. But not to see yourself in Trump is to continue to lie.