Quotes from Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

writing this book, I wanted to understand more fully how Baldwin navigated his disappointments, how he lived his refusal to chase windmills any longer, and how he maintained his faith that all of us, even those who saw themselves as white, could still be better. I needed to understand how he harnessed his rage and lived his faith.

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. For Baldwin, the accumulation of lies suffocated the white southerner.

The lynched relative; the buried son or daughter killed at the hands of the police; the millions locked away to rot in prisons; the children languishing in failed schools; the smothering, concentrated poverty passed down from generation to generation; and the indifference to lives lived in the shadows of the American dream are generally understood as exceptions to the American story, not the rule. Blasphemous facts must be banished from view by a host of public rituals and incantations.

It was a place that denied the contradiction between its commitments to freedom and democracy and its practice of slavery and white supremacy.

what W.E.B. Du Bois described as "a hope not hopeless but unhopeful.

Harry Golden, editor of The Carolina Israelite, suggested that the 'hoodlum element' might not have so shamed the town and the nation if several of the town's leading businessmen had personally escorted Miss Counts to school.

There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt,

One of the more insidious features of Trumpism is that it deliberately seeks to occupy every ounce of our attention. In doing so, it aims to force our resignation to the banality of evil and the mundaneness of cruelty.

I believe an elsewhere can and must be found here: in our efforts to refuse to accommodate and adjust to the status quo and in those very small moments when we make choices that place us outside of the norms and expectations that confine us, when we cultivate the capacity to say no. In

I remembered working on my last book and traveling to Ferguson, Missouri, and to Raleigh, North Carolina, to bear witness to what happened there. In those spaces, I saw and heard people saying no. In their pursuit of a more just America, they made a choice to not adjust themselves to the status quo and to put their bodies on the line for a different America where black people and those on the margins of this society might flourish.

We have to find and rest in a community of love.

Trump and his legions invoke a history to justify their belief in the value gap. In doing so, they stand in the long lineage of white people in the United States who have used a certain understanding of the past to reinforce the injustices of the present day. Baldwin's moral vision requires a confrontation with history—with slavery and with the ongoing consequences of the after times—shorn of the rosy tint of American innocence in order to overcome its hold on us.

On one level, America and the South are one and the same, both are haunted and vexed by the macabre reality of the dead, the suffering beneath the country's and region's feet, and by the lie of their innocent role in it all. That innocence allowed the bodies to continue to amass.

Trump did not stop the "American carnage." He unleashed it.

Baldwin's essays forced you to turn inward and confront whatever pain was there, and I did not want to do that. I damn sure didn't know what to do with my pain philosophically.

The seventies involved a confrontation with a frightening truth: that despite the sacrifices and costs of the black freedom struggle, the country remained profoundly racist and, no matter its proclamations to the contrary, white America was perfectly comfortable with that fact.

If the condition of the love of country is a lie, the love itself, no matter how genuine, is a lie.

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.

In the effort to deny from whence we came," Baldwin declared, "we've had to make up a series of myths about it.

bear witness. To what life is—does—and to speak for people who cannot speak. That you are simply a kind of conduit.

Don Sturkey's images of Dorothy Counts find their inheritors in pictures and videos we see today of the suffering of black people at the hands of police forces. We have become a world of people using their cellphone cameras to bear witness, filming the brutality of police or recording the callousness of white people who feel threatened

by black people who they believe don't belong in their space.

this black queer man represented a different kind of radicalism than the masculinist politics of black male preachers, they maintained).

In front of him was the bitterness and disappointment in a country that fought them at every turn.