On Friday, Nov. 1, commentator and Princeton University’s James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor Eddie Glaude Jr. will visit Swarthmore. Glaude will deliver a lecture as part of the “James Baldwin for Our Times: A Centennial Celebration” symposium, part of the 2024-25 William J Cooper series. Ahead of his visit, Glaude sat down with The Phoenix to talk about the upcoming elections in the United States, James Baldwin, race, and higher education.
Glaude is a prominent national voice and academic on how religion, race, and civil rights movements intersect with politics and American cultural history. Born in Mississippi in 1968, he attended Morehouse College for his undergraduate degree, and later received graduate degrees in African American studies and religion from Temple University and Princeton University, respectively. He began teaching at Bowdoin College before moving to Princeton University, where he developed and chaired the Center and then Department of African American studies. While teaching and researching in academia, Glaude has gained attention for his commentary and writing, in addition to his media appearances. He is a columnist for TIME magazine, a contributor to MSNBC and Meet The Press, and the author of five books, including his most recent work, bestseller “Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.”
Below is a transcript, edited for clarity, of his conversation with The Phoenix.
Daniel Perrin: So, let’s start with the elephant in this (Zoom) room. We have an election in eight days, and you wrote a book about James Baldwin’s thoughts on politics and race, and you’re speaking at Swarthmore as part of a symposium on Baldwin. What would James Baldwin have thought about this election? What would he be writing about right now?
Eddie Glaude Jr: You know, I’m always hesitant to try to anticipate what Baldwin would say or write. I know what I’ve learned from him, and I think he would see this as another inflection point. I know that I see it as an inflection point, a moment where the nation has to make a choice, and that choice involves confronting the ghosts that have haunted the country since its inception. And so, as a reader of Baldwin, I’m not overly optimistic about the outcomes. This election is not going to settle the contradictions. It’s not going to settle the problems that we face, but as Baldwin said in “Notes on the House of Bondage,” it can buy us some time.
DP: Can you say a little bit more about Baldwin’s writing on the concept of “buying time” and your own analysis of it?
EG: Baldwin was grappling with this moment in 1979 for the 1980 election. Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California, was running against Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter had greatly disappointed a lot of Black voters who had helped him win with some austerity policies that really adversely affected urban areas and the like. So there were a number of folk who were really, really angry with him. But they also knew who Ronald Reagan was. Ronald Reagan to the Black Power movement was as sinister, as insidious a figure as George Wallace was to the Civil Rights movement. So Baldwin knew who Ronald Reagan was. He understood what this meant. And so he was saying, “My vote won’t change the fact that we may be barreling towards war. The vote won’t resolve the issues that we’re confronting, but it may buy some time until the tide turns,” as he puts it. It gives us some space to struggle, to continue to fight. It matters in some ways, for the context of struggle, who sits in the White House and what are the conditions under which one organizes. So I think Baldwin understood that. Even though he was angry with Carter, he understood who Reagan was and what he represented. And I think the same holds true for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. We know who Donald Trump is, and we may not be supportive of the Biden-Harris position vis-à-vis Israel and Gaza. One may be critical of the Democratic Party in a lot of ways, but we know who this guy is, and so we need to buy ourselves some time until the tide turns, as Baldwin says.
DP: Building on that note, you’ve made waves at times and had varying perspectives on how to approach electoral politics in modern times. I will not make you rehash the same question that I’m sure you’ve rehashed countless times, but I’m wondering what you would say to Swarthmore students who are questioning how to approach electoral politics and its hopes versus its shortcomings and limitations. What was it about the Trump era that made you gradually change your position about voting for Clinton in 2016 and how do you then apply that to 2024?
EG: In 2016, I didn’t think the country would elect someone as obviously unqualified as Donald Trump. So I thought we had space and room to push the Democratic Party, to break the whole of Clintonism. Not [specifically] Hillary Clinton, but Clintonism. This Democratic Leadership Conference orientation had been at the heart of pulling the Democratic Party to the right. I thought we had space and I wanted us to really hold the party’s feet to the fire. It was an ill-fated gesture in so many ways, because we ended up with the disaster of Donald Trump.
Part of what I’ve come to learn, and what I hope Swarthmore students understand, is that the context of struggle is important. The struggles that we are engaged in for a more just society aren’t going to be resolved by elections. Elections have to be understood strategically and approached tactically. Bob Moses, the late student nonviolent coordinating committee organizer of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, taught me this, and he used this wonderful example. He said, “If we didn’t have the Civil Rights Act of 1960, we wouldn’t have been able to organize around voter registration the way we did in Mississippi Freedom Summer and the like.” Because the Civil Rights Act of 1960, as weak as it was — no one thinks Eisenhower was this progressive president — criminalized any effort to obstruct voter registration. So he said, “If we didn’t have that law in place, they would have locked us up like they locked Nelson Mandela up for twenty-plus years in South Africa; they would have locked us up and thrown away the key.”
So part of what I’m suggesting is that we cannot fall for the fantasy that an election will suddenly make society just. We’re still struggling. Elections are about creating the conditions under which a) we can help alleviate the suffering of the most vulnerable among us and b) we can help create the optimal conditions for the work necessary to build a more just society. But the idea that Kamala Harris ought to be a savior — my vote for Kamala Harris is not going to resolve the issue in the Middle East, but I do know this: any pretense to restraint is better than someone who doesn’t give a damn about it. And, particularly what motivates my politics isn’t some ideology. What motivates the way in which I engage the political arena is a deep and embodied concern for the welfare of the most vulnerable among us, the least of beings. That’s what motivates it. Not a kind of performance of political virtue, or an insistence that I’m right. I’m most concerned about not layering the suffering, not piling suffering on top of suffering.
DP: In “Begin Again,” you compare the Trump election and the resurgence of white nationalism as a reaction to Obama’s presidency and racial justice movements in the 2010s to the mid-20th century’s violent reactions to the Civil Rights Movement, including the murder of movement leaders. But you wrote that in 2020. How have things changed, and how have they stayed the same four years later as we look to the 2024 election?
EG: Baldwin has this wonderful phrase. He says, “The horror is that America … changes all the time, without ever changing at all.” So there’s a dynamism to the place, but there’s this eternal return, this constant repetition. We are fixing once again, I think, the choice of whether or not we’re going to be a genuine multiracial democracy [and] are going to be on the road to that, or whether or not we’re going to double down on the idea that ours must remain a white nation in the vein of old Europe. The choice we faced in 2020 is the choice we face now. It’s more intense. They’re more organized. They’re more violent. Whether Kamala Harris wins or not, we’re in for a very bumpy road moving forward. If she wins, I don’t think Trump and his people will concede the legitimacy of her presidency. So we have to buckle up. If he wins, oh my God, democracy as we know it may very well be over. And that’s not hyperbole.
One thinks that, given Black Lives Matter, given the protests, the organizing, that we would be in a different place. But the backlash was quick, the betrayal was deep, and 77 million people voted for it. Remember what it took to defeat Donald Trump in 2020? It took the largest number of Americans to ever vote for a presidential candidate in the history of presidential elections. And the interesting thing is that the second-largest number of Americans to ever vote for a presidential candidate also happened in 2020 with Donald Trump. We have to understand the nature of the crisis we’re facing now.
DP: I wanted to ask about the comparison you make between Trump as a reaction to Obama’s presidency and Black Lives Matter to the violence in the mid-20th century as a reaction to civil rights movements. How does that comparison balance, then, with the more logistical reshaping of the electorate that we’ve seen in the last few years, where there were a huge number of voters who voted for President Obama in 2012 and for President Trump in 2016 and probably again in 2020?
EG: I love that question because it calls up history. You think about [U.S. Senator] Tom Watson, one of the most virulent racists of the 20th century out of Georgia. Before that, Watson was a populist who was trying to resist the planter class in Georgia. He found himself, along with other white farmers, defending Black farmers. But he then realized that if he was going to change the material conditions of the people he cared most about, he would have to double down on racism. So here’s a man who once defended Black farmers with his own gun, who turned out to be one of the most virulent racists of the 20th century.
So there’s this sense in which folks are uneasy about the current state of affairs. The contradictions of neoliberalism are in full view. People are working hard. They don’t feel as if they’re handing their children a brighter future. And because of the zero-sum game logic, a lot of folk believe that they’re catching hell because big government has put his thumb on the scale on behalf of these, these Black and brown and queer others. So there’s a way of accounting for that shift that has everything to do with how people imagine their own self-interest. That’s not to attribute bad faith to folk, it’s just simply saying that we have historical examples of folk who were, at one point, who we might be described as invested in a multi-racial democracy, who turned out to be deep-seeded racists. I think that’s really, really important for us to wrap our minds around.
I think at the heart of a lot of this is a panic and terror around demographic shifts. Obama’s presidency was a symbolic representation of the fundamental shift that’s happening demographically across the country. It’s a reflection of the deep divide between rural and urban America. One is cosmopolitan and bustling, the other is provincial and finds its economic opportunity contracting. It’s all of this stuff that’s motivating our current political reality, and I think it’s a toxic brood of selfishness, greed, and hatred. I think that’s what’s gumming up our politics. And it’s an echo, although it’s distinct, of what has gummed up our politics from day one.
DP: Building on that, we’ve talked a lot about elections, but there are administrations in place between these elections. What is your analysis of the Biden administration’s four years in office in the context of these topics of race and elections and politics that you’ve written about, but also how those intersect with public policy and the federal executive branch?
EG: I think the Biden presidency is going to be historically understood as a very important transitional moment. I think, rhetorically, we have never heard a president talk about race and our history in the way that Joe Biden has talked about it. From Juneteenth to Tulsa to the various ways in which he just acknowledges white supremacy to the apology to Native peoples around Native schools. It’s not just simply symbolic. The rhetorical framing opens up space. Now, there’s a lag between how he talks and the policies, but it’s really, really important. Additionally, when we look at unemployment, when we look at the infrastructure bill, when we look at what he’s been able to do and achieve in this very hyper-partisan environment, I think he has had a successful run. And you can tell how crazy and bizarre our politics are, because some of the richest people in the world have become even richer over his four years in office, right? Jeff Bezos, [Mark] Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk in particular — we still have a deep wealth inequality in the country. We still have, I think, a health-care crisis in the country. But we’re seeing modest improvement. We’ve seen wage growth. We’ve seen union organizing. All of this is a good thing, and again, I think he’s provided a very important environment for struggle.
He’s failed miserably, in my view, in the Middle East. We can disagree on the particulars, but I think we can agree that [Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin] Netanyahu is a bad faith actor. To give him carte blanche is the equivalent of giving Donald Trump carte blanche. It makes no sense to me. We can disagree on descriptions, on reasons and accounts for why this is happening. But we can agree that innocent children and women and men should not be killed, and should not be slaughtered in the way they’re being slaughtered. So the failure of the administration to insist on a ceasefire, the failure of the administration to hold Netanyahu accountable and to understand that he’s dismissing the U.S. over and over again, and insist that we have control — that we can engage in an arms embargo to make this happen — I think is a monumental failure on the part of the administration. And, it has set the stage for the question of Israel and Gaza to be the moral issue for your generation.
DP: You write about how, after eras of change, there’s backlash and eras of conservative, regressive upholdings of the status quo. This metronomic nature of American politics seems to me, at least, to be both true for electoral politics and for cultural politics, which I think is probably more what you were writing about. It often seems inescapable. What do you prescribe to escape the metronomic back and forth that both cultural and electoral politics seems to take?
EG: Well, I think we have to ask some hard questions, and some rude questions, really. And that is, “What’s the center of gravity of our politics? What’s the source of the sway?” Once we begin to interrogate that — and this is where Baldwin is so important — we will see that many folk believe that ours is a zero-sum game, that if we are to have a more just society, you’ve got to take things from deserving people and give it to undeserving people. We have to tell the story of the deep suspicion of government, and tell that story in the mid-20th century, right? People have been trying to defund public education. Why? Brown v Board. You think about the New Deal, and the way in which the New Deal set the stage for the emergence of the vaunted American middle class, but the way in which those policies were developed in order to explicitly exclude Black people and Native peoples and the like. So we have to ask ourselves, “What has deformed and distorted our politics? What’s at the center of it?” Then we have to take heed, to answer the question honestly. So if we’re going to change fundamentally, we have got to ask, “What’s at the center, culturally and politically?”
If we could finally rid ourselves of this idea that Reagan Democrats are the center of our political imagination, that they alone will determine the direction of the country, because “they’re neither this or that” and we always are appealing to them, or until we get a political consultant class that is not so obsessed with that demo, but to understand the broad diversity, we will be here over and over again. So, the short answer to your question is that you have to tell the truth about who we are a little bit more, we have to confront who we see actually in the mirror.
DP: That is incredibly applicable to a moment where — we talked about the idea of buying time already — we have a coalition of Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney. Talking about political centers, I mean, I never thought I’d be in the same coalition as Dick Cheney, but here we are.
EG: Bizarro world, right? Totally bizarro.
DP: You famously read Baldwin in graduate school and were initially uncomfortable with him. But obviously, you later found immense meaning in his writings. How did this experience inform the perspective you bring as a professor and an academic, and what would you say about this grappling with a writer and evolution you felt to the Swarthmore community as a learning community?
EG: Oh my God, I think it is at the heart of what it means to be committed to the life of the mind, to be committed to growth by way of engagement with ideas that unsettle assumptions and unsettle you. My hesitation around Baldwin initially fell along two axes: one was that he was asking me to ask myself questions that I wasn’t mature enough to answer. He was forcing me to deal with my own wounds, to deal with the scaffolding of lies that I’ve told myself over a lifetime. And you have to step off the edge of the world to do that. You have to take that risk. And then, in graduate school, I had to manage the reaction of my white colleagues, when they were confronting the raw truth and their rage and righteous indignation, even as Baldwin was saying it lovingly. I felt the need to manage it, but in fact, I was trying to manage my own emotions at that point. But I think this journey with people, with writers, is what’s so important about reading books over and over again. Especially classic books, you read them when you’re eighteen, and then you read them when you’re 25, and then you read them when you’re 56 — life has happened. Your eyes are seasoned. Your bibliography has grown. So you come to the text with a different level of attentiveness every single time. So I think not only reading Baldwin, but teaching him and constantly rereading him with each breath I take, with each experience I have and log in my life as my own, something new opens up in the text. I mean, I’ve been teaching “The Fire Next Time” for 30 years, and I taught it again this semester. And there’s a passage on madness that I had been just reading past all these years, and for some reason I lingered on it. And I’m talking about it at Swarthmore on Friday! I lingered there for a moment. And there’s also madness in “Notes of a Native Son,” and so it’s part of what it means to be open to growing, to not suture the mind.
DP: On this note about the life of the mind, how do you think institutions like Swarthmore, like Princeton, and higher education more broadly, fit into the cultural and political phenomena that we’ve been talking about? What can higher education do, particularly at a crossroads moment with protests over Israel and Palestine, but more broadly, to be part of that prescription you gave for breaking the cycle?
EG: Higher education can understand its purpose in its ideal sense. Not its purpose as its social function, but in its ideal sense. And that is to create the conditions and community with which we can engage with the cognitive virtues. We can think, in community with others, without fear of reprisal or repression. Universities and colleges are the most special places one can imagine in a country like our own. And to see them subject to these political forces in the way that they are, and to see them bend to the will of these forces, whether it’s the forces of Christopher Rufo or the forces of Bill Ackman, it harkens back to a previous age in which these institutions bowed to forces during the Cold War and the McCarthy Era. I think colleges and universities at their best are fertile ground for you and me to engage in the ongoing work of trying to become better people. Which means they create the conditions under which we can subject our most cherished assumptions to critical scrutiny. And that means that these are places we come to understand what the virtue of courage looks like, what the vice of cowardliness looks like. These are places where we learn how to be citizens in this country. And if we are faced or confronted or socialized into a pattern of behavior where we quiet our voices, or we cower in the face of power, then these universities and colleges will produce people not ready to take on the burden and the responsibility of democracy at all. So, live into the ideal. Be ideally what we’re supposed to be. And then we can disrupt this craziness, this madness that we’re confronting, it seems to me.
DP: Any final thoughts?EG: I look forward to seeing you on Friday! Swarthmore is one of my favorite places.
