Eddie Glaude: “Can You Imagine What Our Politics Would Be Like If We Would Untether It From The Ugliness Of Race?”
On Friday’s broadcast of “Morning Joe,” Princeton professor Eddie Glaude Jr. argued that America has often framed racial justice “as a charitable enterprise” rather than a matter of equal citizenship.
EDDIE GLAUDE JR., PRINCETON PROFESSOR: You know, Joe, we’ve been talking about this issue for so long and I think so much of it is rooted in this idea of racial justice as a charitable enterprise, as a philanthropic gesture. I write about the way in which we’ve grappled with the issue of race in the United States is often sentimentalized. It is something like that that white America possesses that it could give to us. It can give to others. And then when the demand for justice continues, the question becomes what more do you want? What else do you need? You keep begging as it were and then we get the backlash, right? And so I think part of what we have to do is kind of disentangle the idea of freedom as the possession of one group and begin to live it in a very powerful way because just as you had those amazing teachers in Meridian saying this is what we’re going to do. We also have folks starting sex schools around the same time, right? And we know what those sex schools meant for education, public education in the state of Mississippi. And so there’s this kind of lived contradiction that I think Joe requires a kind of honesty. Can you imagine what our politics would be like if we would untether it from the ugliness of race that shadows this country? If we weren’t talking about states rights politics and thinking that it was shadowed by the ugliness of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, that it was just an ideological difference that I could actually get voice to some of the conservative tendencies that I have without it seeming like I’m selling out black folk and the like. Could you imagine untethered our politics from this? But that requires honesty. It seems to me.
