Quotes from Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

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

black people are essentially inferior, less human than white people, and therefore deserving of their particular station in American life.

You know, it is for this reason that all this black, white, Armenian, Turkish, Greek, Jewish, etc., etc., etc., never carried any meaning for me. The question is how to fix ourselves. Give birth to ourselves. To make us live free of all these swaddling clothes, free of these habits.

people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn't…anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one's life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn't, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble. American

Baldwin and King, no matter the temperamental distance between them, moved together as they struggled to make real the promise of American democracy. King was the preacher, Baldwin the poet—and, of course, the two are interchangeable.

We have to get the facts right as best as we can. Otherwise, history becomes what Du Bois referred to as "lies agreed upon.

King conveyed the gravity of the moment in 1968 and the necessity for the Poor People's Campaign, he conjured, without a hint of nostalgia, a history of the heroism of everyday people acting against all odds, a history no less full of disappointment and trauma. He

But, like Baldwin, King struggled with America's commitment to the belief that white people mattered more and to the lie that made it palatable: I must honestly confess that I go through moments of disappointment when I have to recognize that there aren't enough white persons in our country who are willing to cherish democratic principles over privilege. But I am grateful to God that some are left.

When a black man, whose destiny and identity have always been controlled by others, decides and states that he will control his own destiny and rejects the identity given to him by others, he is talking revolution." That threat to the social order releases fears that further contaminate our politics.

as a writer, or any kind of artist, was not designed to, you know, to make you special or to even isolate you….What your role was, it seemed to me, was to bear witness. To what life is—does—and to speak for people who cannot speak. That you are simply a kind of conduit.

Tell the story. Make it real for those who refuse to believe that such a thing can happen/has happened/is happening here. Bring the suffering to the attention of those who wallow in willful ignorance. In short, shatter the illusion of innocence at every turn and attack all the shibboleths the country holds sacred.

not place that suffering all at the feet of Donald Trump, but understand it as the inevitable outcome in a country that continues to lie to itself.

Today, our task remains the same, no matter its difficulty or the magnitude of the challenge. Some of us must become poets, but we all must bear witness. Make the suffering real and force the world to pay attention to it, and not place that suffering all at the feet of Donald Trump, but understand it as the inevitable outcome in a country that continues to lie to itself.

But the lie's most pernicious effect when it comes to our history is to malform events to fit the story whenever America's innocence is threatened by reality.

This is the undertow of black politics: traumatic memories that cling to our choices like ghosts who can't find peace as white America refuses to change again. Like Baldwin, we have to bear witness to it all and tell the story of how we got here—and then, just maybe, we can muster the resolve and will to push this damn rock up the hill again.

King wanted to make the case for massive direct action in Washington, D.C., on behalf of America's poor, but he would need to marshal greater financial resources than ever before. Desegregating lunch counters didn't cost much, but ending poverty would cost the nation billions of dollars. Sentimentality alone could not pay the bill.

only [people] could trust that "thing," they would be less afraid of being touched, less afraid of loving each other, less afraid of being changed by each other. Life would be different. Our children would not be the victims that they are now, we would not be either. But for some reason love is the most frightful thing; something that the human being is most in need of and dreads most.

When a black man, whose destiny and identity have always been controlled by others, decides and states that he will control his own destiny and rejects the identity given to him by others, he is talking revolution." That threat to the

He was no longer writing from the standpoint of someone energized by the movement who took it upon himself to bear witness to it, but rather as a witness to the reassertion of the American lie in the face of that movement.

What do you do when you have lost faith in the place you call home? That wasn't quite the right way to put it: I never really had faith in the United States in the strongest sense of the word.

Baldwin wrote in another after times—that of the collapse of the civil rights movement, bearing witness to a time when many thought the nation was poised to change, only to have darkness descend and change arrested.

A moral reckoning is upon us, and we have to decide, once and for all, whether or not we will truly be a multiracial democracy.

those who willfully refuse to remember become moral monsters.

The storms keep coming, and we are expected to keep moving & to endure no matter what.