Remembering the American Revolution through the Years

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There is this interesting quotation, a fascinating moment in James Baldwin’s corpus. He says, the past is all that makes the present coherent. The past is all that makes the present coherent and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it. Honestly, the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it. Honestly, celebrations of the 4th of July tend to gum up earnest attempts to examine the country’s history,
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Right?
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We get caught up in the storybook notion of America’s greatness and in the power of the American idea, fireworks good barbecue, a day off, all of that matters most.
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Yes,
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But what does it mean to grapple with the history of the country?
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What does it mean to grapple with our national sins? What happens when the 4th of July is not seen as a moment of celebration but exposes itself as instead as a kind of repository of buried anguish that allows our national sense of identity to cohere? I want to talk about a moment that in so many ways calls our attention to the contradiction at the heart of the country. What does it mean to reach back to the past in order to account for our present? What does it mean to remember? What does it mean to confront the past in order to release ourselves into a certain understanding of the present and perhaps a certain imagining of the future? These moments of milestone commemorations the 250th in this time where we’re so in so many ways, overwhelmed by grievance, overwhelmed by uncertainty, overwhelmed by the question of whether the American experiment will survive, and our tendency, the country’s tendency is not to see this in relation to its past choices, but perhaps to understand it solely as the consequence of contemporary villains as opposed to perhaps being of reflection of the underbelly of the country, perhaps the latest instantiation of a problematic that has haunted the nation since its founder on July 5th, 1852,
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About
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Eight months before WashU was founded in the heat of the battles around the fugitive slave law of 1850, the question of slavery that would result in the horrors of the Civil War leaving 600,000 plus American soldiers and sailors dead Frederick Douglass delivered his famous July 5th speech. What To the Slave is the 4th of July? And in that speech, he exposed what I take to be exposed the lie that was the nation’s celebration and revealed the duality at its heart. Those of you who’ve read WB Du Bois’s book classic Text 1903 text, the Souls of Black Folk Du Bois, makes the claim that black folk experience this kind of double consciousness, this sense of seeing themselves through the eyes of those who despise them, a consequence in some ways of the horror of slavery itself. But in some ways, I want to suggest to you that that double consciousness is a reflection of the divided soul of the nation. That America imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And that imagining that doubleness, that double consciousness deposits a kind of madness at the heart of the country because you can’t hold both simultaneously without contradiction.
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That double consciousness, the madness of imagining the country as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic, and we see this in all of the maddening compromises that led to the ratification of the Constitution itself. We see it with the fugitive slave clause. We see it with questions around apportionment. We see this with the transatlantic slave trade. We see it as these two different nations, so they weren’t really nations at the time, but these two different regions trying to pretend to be one with the question of slavery at the heart of it. But I don’t want to step into that lecture that’s coming later, y’all. All right, I’m making this up as I go. What did Douglas say? The fourth is yours, not mine.
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The fourth is yours, not mine. And with this speech, he made explicit what was a standing practice in black America as the country began to commemorate its founding. That is a resounding dissent to the nation’s public self imaginary, a running commentary that refused the myth that America was in fact a beacon of freedom. Now, I think this is important. Remember we began with the Baldwin quote. The past is all that makes the present coherent and the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly. In other words, what I want to suggest to you before we jump into Douglas is that history matters. History haunts.
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We can recall the power of the American Revolution and the ideals that animated and we can acknowledge how the country has repeatedly failed to live up to those ideals. History isn’t this fixed basket of facts that escapes our comprehension. That’s me rejecting John Des Pasos and USA. It is more than a chronicle of events in people. What we bring to it and for what purposes matter. Our memories of America’s past can be sources of power or the iron shackles that bind our feet. That is the mistakes and failures of the country can inform how we address the problems of today, or we can resign ourselves to the idea that the past is in the past, it is irreversible. Our orientation to the past then can be more than remembering it or submitting to it. Instead, we can look to the past for resources, not simply to affirm our goodness or to illustrate our sins 1776 Commission 1619 project, but to grasp more clearly the problems that the present that confront us. In other words, I always approach the past because a present is in dire need to account for itself.
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So there’s this present, his preoccupation driving how I want to turn to the Douglas speech in 1852 because I think confronting the past confrontation with the past is different than just simply remembering it or submitting to it. I might remember a childhood wound. I’m from Mississippi, I’m from the coast. I might remember that wound. I might remember my father’s snarl. I might remember the tears that followed. I could describe it in detail and I can give you the date it happened and how it happened, but to only remember the details isn’t the same as confronting what the event means for me today or how the wound shapes the way I deal with relationships or how I desperately try to hide my sensitivity and vulnerability. Fanny, because of it, those childhood tears still matter, and if I’m honest, simply remembering them did not guarantee or do not guarantee that I wouldn’t repeat the same thing with my own child, right? It’s not enough just to remember the past. We have to confront it. I’m thinking about TS Eliot. Yeah, somewhere around here. Time, past time, time present, time passed, both perhaps present in time, future and time future contained in time past for Quartet’s Bird Norton. Yes.
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So how we relate to this moment, how we turn to the past and understand the whip and the whirlwind that has shaped us now much has been written about Douglass’s. July 5th oration, the Yale historian Dave Blight. David Blight in his pulitz surprise winning biography of Frederick Douglass describes the July 5th speech as a symphony in three movements, the first movement honors the genius of the founding fathers. The second details, the hypocrisy of slavery and racism in the country, and the third offers the nation resources to imagine itself differently and to think of the Constitution as an anti-slavery document with an ethical mandate. Now, it’s important because Douglass in 1851 breaks from Garrison, he breaks from Garrison, and Garrison is this anti abolitionist movement that believes that the constitution is fundamentally a slave holding document, and that if we’re going to break free from the sin of the institution of slavery, we need to understand that the Constitution itself represents the scorge of the peculiar institution.
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Douglas rejected that view right by way of reading the declaration into the Constitution, seeing the Declaration of Independence as in so many ways, the preface right that which gives meaning to the execution, which was in fact the Constitution. Right now, in the course of this debate, before I get to Douglas, I want you to understand why July 5th is so significant. I’m just going to stand here. Is that okay? Yes. Alright. Used to this stuff. Why is July 5th so significant? Why is it so significant? Well, there’s an alternative celebratory calendar that marks the way the country is imagined. These black folk, these persons who are means to someone else’s is that means they’re heteronomous, right? These persons who are viewed as chattel. Well, when the nation decides, I’m going to talk about this in a minute, but when the nation decides to celebrate itself, to celebrate itself as the embodiment of freedom, right?
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These other folk who are examples, the embodiment of unfreedom offer a different kind of account of the history of the country. So there’s this alternative celebratory calendar. So in black America, you will find January 1st, I’m moving around and the camera back there probably pissed. So I’m going to come back here. So there’s this alternative celebratory calendar in black American life, particularly in the northeast corridor. January 1st, 1808 represents a day of celebration and commemoration. Why? It’s the end of the transatlantic slave trade. August 1st, 1834 becomes an amazing day of celebration because it represents the end of slavery in the West Indies. So it’s West Indies emancipation Day. So black folk are celebrating freedom Juneteenth, right? 1865 becomes another day, right? Freedom delayed. It becomes an important day on the black African-American celebratory calendar, but one of the most important days, July 4th, 1827, why New York abolition day and black folk across the country? Remember, the country’s not from there to California at this point in life, but July 5th would become today to celebrate freedom. So it became this built in signification on the hypocrisy of July 4th. Douglass is speaking on July 5th, ironically, because it rained on July 4th, 1852. And so we find ourselves on July 5th, 1852 a day that has all of this importance precisely because its sits in this alternative celebratory calendar in which African-Americans are making the case that freedom
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In the United States has to be understood in light of the presence of Unfreedom. Okay, we’ll keep going now, is that all right? So blight gives us these three movements, these three movements. Douglass offers us in the end a different way of thinking of the Constitution as an anti-slavery document with an ethical mandate, and he ends with these visions of hope for an immature nation. Now, I think the speech does a lot more than this, a lot, much more than this. Douglass laid bare in my view, the tragic split that compromised the foundation of American democracy in this speech. This is more than mere hypocrisy. It cuts to the heart of the nation’s self-conception. The answer to the country’s moral crisis on Douglass view is not that all Americans need only live up to our principles. Something akin to what Gunner Medaugh would argue in the American dilemma.
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No, what Douglas is demanding and what the country requires on his view is a confrontation with that aspect of itself that clings to the idea that it is a white republic and that freedom, that freedom is the possession of white Americans to give in to take away. He’s challenging it head on. Now, this view doesn’t understand the belief in whites racial superiority as some kind of false consciousness on the part of the nation and suggest simply that it requires a more truthful understanding of itself. Instead, the idea of a white republic on Douglas’ view is a constitutive part of who and what America is, and this is the acceptance necessary for the constitution. I mean the confrontation with the past honest self-awareness of that fact and accepting responsibility for it on Douglas’s view constitute the beginning of the remedy, not just an admission of hypocrisy, although the admission is an important first step.
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So even as Douglass acknowledged the importance of the day of July 4th of the celebration of the founding, he refers ironically to July 4th as America’s Passover, right? As a black person in the United States where slavery condemned so many to a life of toil and servitude, he claimed no possession of the significance of the fourth. How could he claim the day as his own? How could he was a fugitive? He was a thief because he stole himself. To use Andrew Del KO’s language, Douglas was a thief precisely because he stole himself. He stole his own freedom and many others still languished, unfree, and in chained Douglas said, it is the birthday of your national independence of your political freedom. This to you is what Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the clay and to the act of your great deliverance and to the signs and to the wonders associated with that day.
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In fact, even as Douglas celebrated the wisdom of the founders, he was very clear about the meaning of the 4th of July for him and his kin. I’m not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary, your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. He said, the blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common, the rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeath by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This 4th of July is yours, not mine. You must rejoice. I must mourn. Freedom is white America celebrated it in 1852 and remember the 1850s next run up to the Civil War, 1857, we’re going to get the Dred Scott decision. Why did I bring up Dred Scott? Because it’s not 1852. Well, we just dealt with Dred Scott and its logics with birthright citizenship, the past horns still, I’m getting excited.
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The cruelty of slavery called into question the moral claims of the nation about that freedom, the freedom that they possessed, that they were celebrating, and in Douglas’s hands that cruelty was not some abstract reference or an account aimed to produce tears where eyes were not His ambition sentimentality not his aim. Instead, he forced the audience and it was an interracial audience. In Corinthian Hall, he forced the audience to confront the cracked sound of the whip, the cracked sound of the slave whip and the moral implications of those human flesh jobbers who profited in the snatching of men, women, and children with each word. The audience was implicated in the horror and terror of slavery. With each sentence, Douglas made clear why he could claim no possession of the fourth and why the audience should feel the same. He held up a mirror that in some ways revealed the soul of the nation. July 4th and July 5th, blending in this ritualized moment as the sun, right as the sun shined on that gorgeous Corinthian hall in Rochester, New York, Douglas announced his words, America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. It sounds like an executive order.
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Then as today, the country tells itself a story that secures its virtue. The cruelty of slavery is banished from view, such that so that the rich inheritance of freedom and justice can be celebrated without contradiction. One of the most dangerous days for African-Americans in the early 19th century was July 4th. Douglass is speaking July 5th, 1852. He had to know of the stories, the story of the July days in 1834 in New York when literally there was a riot because certain churches were supposedly engaged in sanctioning interracial marriage and African Episcopal church was literally burned to the ground. 4th of July celebrations had to be postponed. Literally when this body would show up during the celebrations of the 4th of July, it had to be banished from view because the body em embodied the contradiction of the claim so-called claims around freedom could not deal with the contradiction of the presence of unfreedom in its midst.
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So it literally had to be banished to the margins made invisible as it were. Maybe John Adams was right, at least this is apocryphal. When he told King George, we will not be your Negroes at the moment in which he’s giving voice to a notion of freedom, it’s predicated upon an intimate understanding of unfreedom. You see, Douglass announced America’s fault to the past. He insisted that America confront his choices in the lived experiences of all of his people, not above the fray and outside of what men and women actually do or with a nostalgia or in the haze of national mythology, but in the fitful encounter with the ugliness of who we are, the ugliness evidenced in the cruelty of slavery for Douglass and many in the anti-slavery movement, the idea that led some to believe that they could hold another human being in bondage and that others could turn a blind eye to it all for profit, that indelibly compromised the soul of the nation.
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And that conclusion did not mean that white abolitionists accepted the social and political equality of black folk for them slavery malformed the republic, not the idea that white men were superior in the possesses of freedom. So you can read Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, one of my favorite poems, and when you read it early, the early editions of the poem, it’s an actually anti-slavery poem, but you read the last edition of the poem, all of that anti-slavery stuff has been redacted. Whitman firmly against the cruelty of slavery, but to extend the franchise to these people who had the intelligence of baboons, the man who wrote democratic vistas said that y’all didn’t know y’all were coming to this, did you? You’d rather be out there in the sun since we’re in, I know we are in St. Louis.
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For them slavery malformed the republic, but not the idea that certain people were the possessions of freedom. Douglas did not come to this conclusion that for a black man to make the claim about slavery or freedom, which takes on a certain kind of significance, he did not come to this conclusion as an object of philanthropy or charity, but as someone who asserted his right to claim freedom as his own, but then might this day mean to those who bore the brunt of the country’s refusal to live up to its promise, Douglas said, what to the American slave is your 4th of July. I answer a day that reveals to him more than any other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim to him. Your celebration is a sham. Your boasted liberty and unholy license, your national greatness, swelling, vanity, your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless.
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Your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impedance, your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery for the darkest souls of this nation. The 4th of July amounted to a cruel gesture, a lie told by people who snatched away promises and who are desperate to believe they are righteous when the evidence suggests something much more sinister. Now for Douglass, this desperation was particularly evident among those who professed to be Christian and who defended slavery. These people conscripted God to justify their evil on his view. He’s a ME Zion conscripted God. To justify their evil pro-slavery churches supported the fugitive slave law which transformed the nation into a hunting ground for men. Douglas Wrights in his first autobiography about what it meant to be a fugitive to live among the wild beasts. He said the church was not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, Douglass maintained it actually takes sides with the oppressors.
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It has made itself the bulwark of American slavery and the shield of American slave hunters. One can imagine the discomfort of those who sat in the seats of Corinthian Hall. They were good Christians after all, many of them one can imagine the discomfort. Douglass echoed then his scathing criticism of the hypocrisy of American Christianity in his 1845 autobiography narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave, the first one he said. In that text quote, we see the thief preaching against theft. We see the thief preaching against theft and the adulterer against adultery. We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel and babes sold to purchase bibles for the poor heathen, all for the glory of God and the good of souls. The slave auctioneers bell in the church going bell chime in with each other and the bitter cries of the heartbroken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master.
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The church steeple in the slave auction block right next to each other. Far too many Christians, Douglas suggested could not disentangle their faith from the evil of tyrants, man, Steelers and thugs. That’s his language in 1852. These were white Christians and the adjective matters because it over determines the noun. This is at the heart of the idolatry that Howard Thurman described that he said, the slave dared to redeem the religion profaned in his midst, right? But these white Christians who would distort the gospel, the ancestors of those today, who would’ve seized the state and who would condemn most to the gallows, those who would even claim that empathy is sin. Douglas spoke directly to them, invoking the book of Isaiah. He bellowed from the podium, your hands are full of blood no matter his anti-slavery, reading of the constitution, his faith in the moral rightness of his cause, that quote, the arm of the Lord is not shorten and the doom of slavery is certain and his excitement about the power of modern progress across the globe.
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That’s that those visions of hope, that blight talks about. Douglas’ hopeful vision for the nation at the end of his speech remained blues soaked. Remember I said that the country that the double consciousness often attributed to black folk is actually a consequence of the double consciousness of the nation. The nation imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. I said, you can’t hold those two claims together without contradiction. And to do so is to deposit a kind of madness at the heart of the country, a madness that we experience in cycles. We’re in one now. We are in one now.
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Now, one way to describe what I just described is that that contradiction deposits a blue note at the heart of the nation, a blues chord at the heart of the nation. And any of you who are musicians, you know that the blues chord is the most unstable chord you can imagine. It gives. It is at the heart of that feeling, that sound, that sense that we get in Melville. It’s at the heart of that feeling, that sound that we get in Faulkner. It’s at the heart that sense that we get when we read more. It’s at the heart of our literature. It’s at the heart of our language. It’s at the heart of our sound. That’s what makes us who we are.
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But no matter his position, Douglass wrapped his huge hands around the strange melancholy, the gripp, the nation in 1852. In the end, the fate of the young republic rested with our ability to confront who we really are as a precondition for who we might become. Lies about the past and the present, bound the country to a future where white Americans and a few others would continue to live by lies. Instead, Douglass urged white Americans to deal with what was happening to them on the inside. That the two warring souls of this nation threatened to undo everything. We are not just, we’re not the only victims here you are.
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It is no amount of sentimental tears in the face of evils. No matter the longing for absolution or the rage that destroys leaving lives in ruin will end our torment, our as a country of tortured souls repeatedly trying to rip out its heart. And I’m reminded of the cries in Dante’s eighth circle of Hell. Why do you split me as Douglas put it and I hear his words echoing down to our own times fellow citizens. The existence of slavery is the antagonistic force in your government. The only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your union, it fetts your progress. It is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education. It fosters pride. It breeds insense, it promotes vice. It shelters crime. It is a curse to the earth that supports it. And yet you clinging to it as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes.
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Oh, be warned. Be warned. Bless you. Be warned. A horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation’s bosom. The venomous creature is nursing at the tender breasts of your young republic. For the love of God, tear it away and fling from you the hideous monster and let the weight of 20 millions crush and destroy it forever. The promise of America on Douglas’s view is conditioned on its willingness to rid itself of the serpent that eats its end trails. On this July 5th celebration on this July 4th, Douglas’s vision of hope at the speeches in was qualified by the choices we must make, the choices Americans must make in their rejection of the idea that justified slavery. The idea that justifies the notion that some people because of the color of their skin are actually the possesses of freedom that God had made white folk to rule instead of making all men and women equal in his sight. July 5th, 1852, a moment of remembrance, a founding. Now Douglas would come live long enough to steal his freedom to deliver this speech to become one of the most famous faces, the first African-American to be photographed actually in the country.
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He would live to see the emancipation proclamation in 1863. He would see the Civil War amendments ratified. He would see the end of slavery and he would live long enough to see the first Jim Crow law passed in 1876, the centennial anniversary of the country, the year that we’re trying to celebrate 100 years of the American experiment in Philadelphia, the exposition in Philadelphia. This moment when the country has to tell itself a story in the aftermath of the carnage of the Civil War, black folk had to be disappeared. Douglass was invited to be on the day with President Grant as he was trying to enter the exposition in Philadelphia. Some Philadelphia police officer stopped him, said, no n word can be on the DAAs. He shows him the ticket and they said, no N word can be on the DAAs. And one reporter reports that Douglass is being overwhelmed by the throngs of people because remember, 10,000 people a day attended that exposition.
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And only when a senator saw him saw the big gray mane of Frederick Douglass that he was allowed to come. And then they brought him up on stage, but they wouldn’t let him speak. Black folk had to be disappeared in the moment the nation was telling itself a story about its founding in the aftermath of the horrors of the Civil War. Fast forward to 1926, another exposition. Did you know that in the sesquicentennial that the KK K was approved to hold his convocation on the grounds of the exposition? We often think of the 1920s as the age of jazz as that period of the Charleston, but it was also the decade of the Klan. The Klan was most proud of its signature piece of legislation, the Immigration Act of 1924
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Immigration
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Regime that we’re currently trying to return to. But the interesting point here is that at this moment, at this moment, right, the country wanted to tell itself a story. It was going to celebrate flag and burn crosses at the same time. There was a pushback from this interesting coalition of black folk and Catholics and Jews because it’s at this moment that the debates around immigration are intensifying anti Catholicism and anti-Jewish antisemitism at its height, Hitler’s looking, finding an example, not just with the south, but with the fact that the nation isn’t imagining itself as a white republic. And so they invite a Philip Randolph, the president of the sleeping carb porters, to give a speech. And why am I bringing this up? Because 1926 is the week is the year that Negro history Week was formed. And so the way in which a Philip Randolph addresses uses the platform is that he speaks back to the effort to disappear black folk from the story. So he marshals African-American history and like the alternative celebratory calendar, he gives us a different story of freedom.
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So why is it important for us, you and me to sit with Douglas in this moment, in this day? Because the ghosts still hold. We’ve yet to resolve the contradiction at the heart of the nation. We still imagine ourselves as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And it’s defining our days, it’s defining our days. Now, I could talk about 1976 and the bicentennial. I still remember myself as a young 8-year-old with red, white, and blue pants. My mother took a picture of me, the kitschy toys that we had on some of us. You remember those plastic toys made in Japan and China,
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This attempt to embrace in some ways the ethnicity what’s going on the ethnicity of the American project, we’re going to embrace African-American history itself. President Ford suggests he’s the first president to acknowledge Negro history week because in 1976, Negro history week becomes African-American history month, black history month. We try to tell our story as the nation lies to itself about itself. We are in such times as these, let’s go back to where we began. Where do we begin? We began with Baldwin’s quote. The past is all that makes the present coherent. And the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
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And if we were to extend it, we will always be on the cusp of being monstrous us. Unless we confront it honestly, we will always be shackled to it unless we confront it. Honestly. We cannot release ourselves into the future, a future that is possible unless we tell ourselves the truth. And no amount of appeal to incremental progress, no claim that we are better than we once were is sufficient. The answer to our malaise rests with an honest confrontation with what has made us who we are to ask the hard question and to be prepared for the rude answer. Okay, let’s ask some questions.
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I was curious about towards then you said if we don’t acknowledge the past, the past is all that makes the present coherent. We are on the cusp of being monstrous. Is that belief, is that premised on the fact that there’s an inherent evil to human nature? Is that premised on the fact that there is an inherent evil to the American experiment? I’m just curious about what are the underlying assumptions and beliefs that create a statement like that?
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So it’s not about a claim about what’s inherently American or who we inherently are. It’s really a claim about the consequences of what it means to avoid and evade responsibility. So character formation
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Is bound up in the way in which the transactions with the environment that exacts choices from us, the experiences had the meaning that comes out of our efforts to make sense of the life lived or the life that we are living, right? And so part of what I’m suggesting is that a set of practices now form our characters. So on one view, my view, I will make the claim because of Abraham Lincoln’s racist commitments, he can’t become the kind of human being as conception of democracy requires. Because when the demand emerges, how do you reconcile your commitment, democratic commitments with the fact of these particular folk? Suddenly he becomes really undemocratic.
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So that’s not saying something about who Abraham Lincoln inherently is. I’m trying to think about the context that shapes who we take ourselves to be and the stories we tell. Of course, if I’m reading my Aristotle right, stories are really critical for character formation. And maybe I’m reading my McIntyre through Aristotle, right, is that stories are critical to character formation. Who and what you choose to exclude often reveals the limits of your conceptions of justice because the folk you exclude from your stories, the details that you exclude from your stories often mean that these people don’t come into view or to use a azarian kind of formulation. They rest outside the sphere of your moral concern. You see? And so part of what I’m suggesting here is that if we don’t grapple with the muck to use beckett’s language, the myth of what it means to be American, we can’t engage. We can’t become the kinds of people that our democracies require and we end up in this right, or we end up with the madness overwhelming everything. Follow me
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In terms of moving forward and what kind of a vision of what this reconciliation would look like in the near future. I kind of have a question about, let’s just present a hypothetical. Let’s say during the Obama administration, Obama gave that exact speech in his state of the Union. I know that I have a family, we all celebrate on 4th of July big black family that a single person has ever mentioned July 5th as an opportunity to celebrate. And as I kind of think about what it would take for all the millions of Americans to treat July 5th and July 4th with kind of the weight that maybe those things deserve, I just kind of have a question about what you think that inflection point might look like for America.
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It’s hard for me to answer that in these days. My eyes are so cloudy. Obama’s a complicated case study because he, I have a chapter in my new book entitled The After Times. And I’m really interested in how the presidents from Reagan to Clinton, to Obama, to Biden mobilize African-American history for their own purposes and ends in purposes. And there are these moments when Obama sounds just like Reagan.
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So the 50th anniversary of the march on Washington, for example, he narrates the decline of the civil rights movement in a way that shifts the blame onto black folk. There was a moment where we lost our way, Clinton said at John Lewis’ funeral, and we moved too close to Stokely talking about Stokely Carmichael and Black Power Obama making the point about riots and moving from equality of opportunity to just simply wanting a handout and just kind of scratch your head. And what he was doing in that moment, he was signaling that I’m safe for the American story. I’m safe as your president and black history is safe for you. And that was part of the 1976 Faustian Bargain, right? The incorporation of black history into the story of America meant that our story had to affirm the promise of America. So it required redacting certain parts of it, right, in order for us to be a part of the more perfect union story.
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And that’s not confrontation. So when we look at, and I should do say this by, I shouldn’t say it, but when we look at Biden’s speech at Tulsa, it’s a whole different kind of formation formulation, because Tulsa can’t be absorbed into the American story of ongoing perfection because it’s sheer violence and barity. So I’m just complicating Obama on that side. The other thing I would say is that these celebratory days, they wax and wane. So July 1st was eclipsed by July 5th. January 1st was eclipsed by July 5th, west Indian Emancipation Day had an impact alongside of July 5th. Juneteenth is still celebrated today. Well, maybe not because we thought that Juneteenth could actually, at least Biden thought, some folks thought that Juneteenth could be introduced as a national holiday
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To help the nation grapple with on its liturgical calendar the presence of slavery, the very, the end of that cruel institution. And it has been in the bullseye ever since. Yes, right. So maybe not July 5th, but Juneteenth. But now that’s indicative of wokeness where the cudgel of we’re being bludgeoned rather with the idea of political correctness, which has been rebranded as a wokeness. So I can’t, there are days and today might be one of them where it’s hard for me to imagine the hypothetical because we’re so immersed in the ugliness. But as Baldwin to paraphrase, Baldwin human beings are monsters and miracles. So I’m going to double down on the fact that we can be miraculous
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Going off of Baldwin. Baldwin argued that America was a nation fractured by the nightmare of racial injustice, but had the potential for redemption. Now that we see America etching towards the idea of a white state, how do you think we could take redemption into our daily lives? Or what do you think are actionable steps we can take for redemption?
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What are the actionable steps? This is such an American question on a certain level. No, no. I think one of the things I’ve, I was trying to say with this reading of Douglas’s, July 5th address is to say that we need to tell ourselves a better story about how we’ve arrived at this moment.
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So part of my task as a writer is to offer the nation languish to understand itself differently. And that involves not standing passive in relation to history’s haunting practices, history haunts. I said, I want to change the direction to invoke Imani Perry. I want to haunt history, want to haunt history. And so with the new book that I’m writing, the new book that’s coming out in May, I take up a strategy of quilting. I want to quilt together these discarded bits and those quilts in the context of slavery, would actually give directions for the runaways, for the fugitives. So I want to tell a different kind of story over the course of these milestone anniversaries that’s at a certain level of abstraction. But even more practically, where are the critical points in which you and I can do the work? Well, obviously it’s elections we have to mobilize and turn out. You have to mobilize and turn out, in particular in this election, they say at every election cycle, but this one is the most important election in your lifetime. So we have to do that and we can talk about what that will look like in its particulars. But we also have to understand that democracy is more than just simply voting.
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We’re
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Going to have to reimagine what constitutes the notion of the public good, and that has to happen closer to the ground. So what does it mean to imagine your communities in particular sorts of ways? What’s the social contract of our particular neighborhood, of our particular municipality? What do we take to be a living wage? What do we take to be the right of housing? What do we take to be the right of education that every child, no matter their zip code, no matter their color, deserves a quality education. So how do we reinvigorate a notion of the public good, right close to the ground? Because if we try to think about it in its totality, we’re going to be overwhelmed. And there are days when I can’t get out of the bed because there’s so much coming at me, but there’s something right in front of us that we must address. And so I just gave you three, right? And then you align that with particular organizations that are doing work in those areas.
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But I would say this, to go back to the level of abstraction where I’m most comfortable, I would say this too, get clear on your commitments. Get clear on your understanding of justice without exception because it’s precisely the notion of justice with exception that’s at the heart of so much of our troubles. I want a great education for my child, but I’m not going to defend it for that child. I want my neighborhood to be safe, but I have no concern about the safety of that neighborhood. So I think get clear on your idea of justice without exception. Does that make sense? Yeah. But you asked the wrong person about practical stuff.
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Could you explain a little bit more about what you meant when you said celebrate the flag, but burn the cross?
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Yeah, so the burning cross is the image of the clan,
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Right?
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So it claims to be a Christian organization. And part of what I was saying is that AJ Sutton, who was one of the principal organizers of the 1926 exposition in Philadelphia, was purportedly a clan member. And they initially approved that the clan could have its annual convocation on the grounds of this 1926 sesquicentennial exposition. So we’re going to celebrate the founding of the nation, the flag at the same time that they were going to burn across. I think that image is startling. It’s as startling to me as the 19 75 76 image in Boston. It’s called soiling Old glory of a young white teenager with the American flag at an anti busing protest attacking a black Yale train lawyer with the flag.
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It’s
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This visual representation of the madness that I’m trying to get at. There’s a repetition. Remember Douglas wasn’t admitted to the 1876 exposition. Well, US occupied Haiti, the president of Haiti was there. He was trying to get in with this driver. Philadelphia cop says to him, you can’t come in, you have to pay. He says, I’m the president of Haiti. And he says, I suppose you want to get on the days with, I mean with Grant, there’s no n words here. And it was only when one of the organizers found him eating a hot dog outside. He was not allowed to come in
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To pull from another James Baldwin thing, and this might be a bit of a stretch, but it came to mind tangentially is the stranger in a village.
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So he’s like being in this village. There’s an inherent foreignness there, and obviously we’re operating with some sort of international context there. But then Chu Cole writes, I’m not an interloper. When I look at a Rembrandt, what does that mean for in the way that we understand art, in the way that we understand race in America, where it’s very much like we are pigeonholed into these identities? I’m trying to grapple with that in the 21st century in the way you are explaining things. How do we grapple with a history that is inherently divided, but we want some sort of unified future that is inclusive of all
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Without falling into some kind of pollyannish understanding of us. We’re just all human beings. I think that’s a really important question. The categories are the traps, the categories help us make sense of a world that rushes in upon us. If we didn’t have these categories, could you to give some kind of order? That’s what language does for us. But Baldwin says, in notes of a native sons in everybody’s protest novel novelist, those categories, they give us order and some sense of safety, but then they also spring the trap. So we are much more complicated. We are the excess that which seeps beyond these efforts to render the world in an orderly way or to render the world in a way that makes sense to put it better.
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I’m going to go to another Baldwin moment in the name in the street, and he talks about what it meant for him to have the opportunity to reject the brilliance of the west. He never had an opportunity to because it was stuffed down his throat that all that was good, all that was precious came from you. And that part of what was necessary, right to release me from that stranglehold, from that burden is the freedom to reject it so that I can then come back to accept it on my own terms. So Walt Whitman is one of my favorite writers.
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Democratic Vista is one of my most important books, but I had to come back to him on my own terms for my own purposes. Does that make sense? So this question of how we come to see the world and come to see it in all of its vast diversity as our own possession first requires an honest assessment of what has us shackled in the first place, which enables me to say no or to invoke barby the Scribner. I prefer not to. That’s right. I prefer not to. Right? If you haven’t read it, go read it. Right? That refusal, that duty to refuse to resist is important because it frees me up to embrace on my own terms. It’s like every parent will say, when you’re a teenager, you could tell the child is the sky is blue. No, it’s purple. And my dad would tell me, oh, they’re going to come back to you eventually.
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But the work that has to be done initially for my son to find his own voice is to say no to me. And then he can come back to me on his own terms. And I think that’s what we have to do. One of the things I do in this new book, I commissioned an original piece by the classical composer, the award-winning classical composer, Joel Thompson Du Bois, and Souls of black folk in 1903 has western pros and African American, the slave spirituals. And so there’s this kind of doubleness, so I didn’t want to do that. I wanted a classical, excuse me, I wanted a classical composer to bring these two things together. And so each chapter has a bar of music as its epigraph, and each bar of music taken together makes one composition, which will be debuted, world debut will be in February 20, I mean May 27th.
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We’re in an environment of academia, of course, and so your speech can move a lot of people in this room. But my question just becomes, how do you engage with those who aren’t willing to listen, who aren’t in this room, who this confrontation runs contrary to their entire understanding of their own identities and their own privilege? How do you find common ground with them? And instead of, for example, just striking further polarization in this whole wave of wokeness as talked about before.
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Yeah, yeah. There’s a moment in many thousands gone, we keep bringing up James Baldwin. Baldwin says that I must make myself, I must make myself blank in order to wash away your guilt. That the precondition for my entree into such spaces that I have to leave the particularity of who I am at the door. I lay fumes. Common ground cannot be predicated upon my loss of voice. Common ground cannot be acquired or had, if its condition is that I must mute the experience that makes me who I am. My task, our task is to bring the fullness of who we are into every ring and let the cards fall as they may, but to do it lovingly. One of my students in my Baldwin seminar, I teach a Baldwin seminar, a nonfiction every year, and I was telling Fanny about this, oh, professor, I’m sorry. I was telling her about this.
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And she wrote this wonderful paper. She was from Texas. She’s a neuroscience neuroscience major. She’s now a neuroscientist working in Washington dc and she would come into my office and Baldwin had her on the ropes and she wrote a final paper tracking Baldwin’s notion of love, and the country vex her. She was pissed. One moment, I love of America, the next moment I want to choke it out. And she wrote this sentence in her paper, well, maybe hope is not enough. And what we need is simply to tell the truth with love lit by rage to tell the truth with love lit by rage. I do the country no favors. If I wear the mask, I do you no favor. And my task is not to allow you to wallow in all of the assumptions that I think have deformed your character in my own. So don’t, I’m going to say this too. Now, this is going to be a different kind of claim. We only have a finite amount of civic energy. I have a fundamental belief that human beings can be better. If not, I would drink too much Irish whiskey.
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Think
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I have a fundamental faith in the capacity of human beings to be. Otherwise what it keeps me going, it lets me get up out of the bed, but we only have a finite amount of civic energy, and I’m not going to spend my energy trying to convince someone who believes that I’m less than that. They should not believe that I’m going to spend my time trying to build a new Jerusalem to use Jimmy’s language. And that’s where my energy goes. I’m not trying to get that. Have you had a student, have you ever had a group project and you have that one person in the group project that just doesn’t do shit, and you spend all of your time trying to get that one person to take up their responsibility and then you look up when it’s due, everybody’s in a panic because you didn’t do what you were supposed to do because you spent all your time managing the one person who didn’t do what they did. See, it’s the history of the country. So I don’t want to spend my energy trying to convince people who think that I’m less than that. They should think otherwise. I’m going to bring the fullness of myself into every room.
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And now I’m talking not just simply as a professor, I’m not talking about the nation. I’m talking to you, the world conspires, to make you small, you must not be complicit. You must refuse.
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Okay,
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My question is, is that a big part of America, two 50 or just the celebration of the 250th year, is not only for Americans ourselves to think about the liberty that we’ve had or the freedom, but also to show the world that we are this nation of freedom of liberty. So my question is, with all this messiness and muck, what responsibility does America have in this time to show the complexity and to show the lack of freedom as well that we
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Have? We need to show out and show off. Come July 4th. Folks are going to, they’re going to claim the country for their own purposes and ends. There are forces afoot, and I’m saying this as a person who’s not trying to be hyper-partisan at all. If you’re committed to the American Democratic project, there are forces that are roaming the land hell bent on destroying the experiment, period. I mean, have you seen, okay, this is going to sound trivial. Have you seen Francis World Cup song? It is so good.
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I mean, their World Cup song makes you want to run through a wall. Have you seen America’s World Cup song? It is so clearly in effort to narrow the vision of the country. You got this battle cry. Do you compare that to Brazil’s and you compare that to Portugal and all? Obviously, I’m trying to suggest something here, right? And then you listen to ours and you go, that’s not going to, that’s Appalachia What is going on here? It doesn’t represent the fullness of who we are. And so I think we have to, Ralph Ellison was clear on the lower frequencies we speak for you. The messiness of American democracy has to make itself known, not by way of the contradictions evident in foreign policy and domestic policy, but the rich cultural gumbo that’s us must make itself known. This English is ours for it sounds this way for a reason.
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Our music sounds, sounds the way. It sounds for a reason. Even if you listen to heavy metal, those riffs are complicated. They reflect the diversity of this place. Our best literature sits in the instability of who we are. And these people, whomever they are, whoever they are, want to deny it. Because whenever the country, as Ralph Ellison wrote in 1970, whenever the country ties of this question around racial justice, whenever it ties of the effort to address the duality at the heart of the country, it reaches for the fantasy of secession. It reaches for the idea of the lily white republic. We’re just going to get rid of it all. And that’s because the cycle is rooted in sentimentality and rage because some people believe that they still possess freedom. Whether you’re liberal or conservative, you still believe that freedom belongs to you. So when you give us freedom, you want gratitude. And when we’re still bitching, you get mad. What else do you want? We’ve given you all that you need. What else do you want? If you thought of me as a human being, you would have the answer to that question. I want the same damn thing you want, right? Instead, we cry crocodile tears. And when the wet eyes no longer work,
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Right?
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As Baldman says, sentimentality is the mask for cruelty. Uncle Tom is tied to Nat Turner’s, right? They’re linked, right? I’m just rambled on a question that was, but if you haven’t listened to the France to the French battle crime, listen to that and then listen to the American one and see which one are you, inspires you
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Sunshine. Let’s thank Professor Glaude
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Sunshine.