Eddie Glaude Jr.: To Save Democracy, Americans Have to Become Better People

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, with trust in leadership and democratic institutions faltering around the world, New York Times bestselling author and professor of African- American studies, Eddie Glaude Jr., explores how everyone can be a leader in his new book. And he’s joining Walter Isaacson to discuss how we can learn from history.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you. And Professor Eddie Glaude Jr., welcome back to the show.

EDDIE GLAUDE JR., AUTHOR, “WE ARE THE LEADERS WE HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR” AND PROFESSOR, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY: Thank you so much. It’s good to be with you all.

ISAACSON: So, you got this new book out, it’s called “We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For.” And it’s a collection of your 2011 Du Bois lectures at Harvard with some wonderful introductions, stitching it together. Tell me why you went back after a dozen years to look at these lectures again.

GLAUDE JR.: Well, first of all, it’s always a delight to be in conversation with you. It was an attempt to make sense of the moment to kind of see where we’ve been and where we’ve come. You know, when I gave these lectures, Michael Brown was still alive. George Floyd had moved from Houston to Minneapolis. Sandra Bland was still blogging, you know, and I was growing in so many ways as an intellectual, as a writer. And so, I wanted to, in some ways, figure out, Walter, my journey. I wanted to pick up the pieces, because in some ways, the politics of the moment, COVID, I felt like I had been broken in two. So, I had to write myself into something. And so, the book is this kind of combination of a retrospective kind of thinking about democracy as such, because the ideas I’ve been thinking about for the last 10, 12 years kind of find their beginnings in these lectures. And in so many ways, it’s an act of self-creation, kind of a reflection on who I take myself to be as an intellectual and scholar.

ISAACSON: And you say you were broken at the time, and you had to write in order to fix yourself. Explain that to me.

GLAUDE JR.: Yes. Well, I think — you know, I think we all are, if we’re honest with ourselves. You know, it’s not just our politics, it’s us. You know, I mean, I had to deal with COVID and, you know, a million people are dead. A couple of my friends, close friends, are dead. And trying to figure out, you know, how do I find my feet? How do I find my voice in this moment? How do I speak through the chaos? And so, I think returning to these lectures, looking back, is in some ways what was an effort to kind of stitch together the pieces that I am, you know. And so, it has something to do with my relationship, not only to the political hall, but our responsibility for democracy as such. It has something to do with my own intellectual formation. You know, there’s a cliche at the heart of the book. You know, “We Are the Leaders We’ve Been Looking For.” Yes, OK. That seems right. And if we are the leaders we’re looking for, that is to say, we must take responsibility for democracy. We have to become better people. And you know, Baldwin has — James Baldwin has this wonderful formulation that the messiness of the world is actually a reflection of the messiness of our interior lives. That if we want to make the world better, we have to become better. And so, in this book, I’m not only claiming that we need to take responsibility for democracy, we also need to take responsibility for reaching for higher forms of excellencies, becoming better people, yes.

ISAACSON: You talk about, you know, “We Are the Leaders We’ve Been Looking For,” it’s a title. It actually comes from Ella Baker. You got a wonderful essay on her in the book. Tell me about her importance and what that title really means to you.

GLAUDE JR.: Yes, you know, Ms. Baker is a hero of mine. And I have a complicated relationship with heroes as I make it clear in the book. But, you know, when we think about — think the Black Freedom Movement of the 20th century, Walter, Ms. Baker is at the center of it. You know, she helped — she was a field secretary for the NAACP in the 1940s, organizing in the south. If it wasn’t for her and her relationship for Amzie Moore in Mississippi, for example, Bob Moses would have never had that connection when he made his way to Mississippi and Macomb and all those places, right? She was the first executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King, Jr. She organized SCLC. And when all of those students in the 1960s in Nashville and North Carolina and Atlanta engaged in those student sit-ins, she helped organize a conference at Shaw University in April of 1960, Walter, that led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And she had this wonderful philosophy. She used to tell some of these SNCC students who were 18, 19, and 20, she used tell them when they would go into the bowels of south, shut up, you might learn something. Shut up and listen, you may learn something. Her task was to create the conditions under which ordinary people could understand their responsibility to pursue their interests. She had a fundamental faith in self-governance, a fundamentalist faith in everyday ordinary people, yes.

ISAACSON: And she called it sort of Pew focused rather than pulpit focused. And that’s the theme of this book.

GLAUDE JR.: Yes. You know, I’m skeptical of leadership that ask you and me to give up our distinctive voices and follow them. I’m skeptical of fans in the pews, people who are just coming to churches and being led by pastors as if they’re just simply sheep being shepherded to, you know, the pastors, as it were. Ms. Baker understood, and I think this is really important for us in this moment, that each of us has the capacity for greatness, that we are the prophets we’re looking for, not prophets who have been anointed from on high, but people who have the ability to see beyond the limitations of now, and to an imaginary future that can guide our actions in the present, as a prophetic act. Or Emerson and representative men telling us that great people come to us to make even greater people possible. That we’re not here to get lost in the Obamas or in Jesses or the Kings or in the Malcolms or even Ella Bakers, that Eddie Glaude, that Walter Isaacson, that our voices are distinct and have historical resonance. And so, I love this Pew centered focus. You know, and at the heart of it, Walter, is this what she calls — or what I’m calling, following the philosopher Sheldon Mullen, of politics attending. It’s a politics rooted in care that’s close to the ground. It’s not about these abstract considerations that allow us to fall, shall we say, for the siren songs of autocrats or even for so-called democratic saviors. We are the saviors we’re looking for.

ISAACSON: You mentioned the early 19th century philosopher just now, Ralph Waldo Emerson, plays a big theme in your book. And it’s interesting because there’s a thread that goes through to Ralph Waldo Ellison, who by the way, gave the graduation speech when I graduated in 1974 and looked at the people on Memorial Hall, those names, and you mentioned this in the book, who had fought to end slavery. And he said, we’re not honoring their legacy. Talk about Emerson to Ellison in your mind that way, and the legacy we are not honoring.

GLAUDE JR.: Wow. That blew my mind. I did not know you were there, Walter. That’s amazing. You know, Ellison has been — he’s so important to me. And in so many ways, he’s the figure that stands alongside Baldwin in my imagination, right? And Ellison’s insistence in that moment, that — because he is in the moment, you know, ’74, as you as a graduating senior, was a moment of extraordinary turmoil. The nation didn’t quite know who it was and where it was going. The conflicts of the ’60s and the Nixon era had really grabbed the whole of people’s imagination. And Ellison was trying to say that it is necessary for us to look our past squarely in the face, to know from whence we came as the precondition for us to be conscious and conscience, to express conscientiousness about where we need to go. And so, I think for him in that moment, wow, in the moment in ’74, he offers me language for our current moment now, a kind of honest assessment of who we are in light of whom we can be and what has made us who are, right? I think, yes.

ISAACSON: Let me read you something from the book that really struck me, which is, “The answer to the troubles in this country rests, as it always has, with the willingness of everyday people to fight for democracy. Not with outsourcing of that struggle to so-called prophets and heroes.” And then you go on a bit and you say, “We must be the kinds of people democracy requires.”

GLAUDE JR.: Yes.

ISAACSON: What kind of people does democracy require?

GLAUDE JR.: Oh, an affirmation of the dignity and standing of everyday ordinary (INAUDIBLE), a commitment to the democratic virtues, of freedom, of open-ended inquiry, right? What else is democracy, as Ellison said, Walter, but a disinterested form of love? And what does that mean? I don’t have to know you, but I want to live in a society that affirms your ability to not only dream dreams but to make those dreams a reality. You know, but at the history of our country is a history rife with example of willingness to throw those virtues into the trash bin. You know, I use this example of Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln gave us this understanding of democracy in the second founding where he reads the Declaration of Independence into the constitution, right, that declaration of the equality of men and women becomes the ethical frame of the constitution itself. But Abraham Lincoln couldn’t become the man that his conception of democracy required because he believed white people mattered more than others. Because he actually was invested in the idea that the color of one’s skin determined one’s value. If we’re going to be the kinds of people that democracies require, we’re going to have to become better people. And in the United States, Walter, that means we’re going to have to finally give up this idea that the color of one’s skin determines one’s value.

ISAACSON: When you talk about the color one’s skin is determining the value, it sort of clashes to with this backlash against diversity, equity, inclusion. And I think you have a phrase in there, here it is, which is you talked about, the reality of the Americanness of American diversity. What are you thinking now with this really almost tsunami-like backlash against the concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion?

GOLODRYGA: Yes. I was thinking about this a while ago. You know, on April 6, 1970, at one of your old gigs, Walter, “Time” magazine published a special issue. Jesse Jackson was on the cover. And in that special issue was an essay written by Ellison entitled, “What Would America Be Like Without Blacks?” And Ellison was trying to reflect on this, that he says — he said something like this, he says, whenever the nation gets weary about its struggle around democratic equality, it reaches for a secession, or it reaches for the fantasy of a lily-white America. When we get tired of trying to be a generally multiracial democracy, we either want to get rid of folk, deport them, colonization, pass draconian immigration laws, or we want put folk in their place. Make them second classes, right? We want to ensure that ours is a white nation in the vein of old Europe. We’re in one of those fever dreams right now. And so, part of our task is to understand that the soul of the country, the soul of America has always been in its diversity and unity, its unity and diversity. It’s always been in the nature — the particular character of accent, the way we speak English. It has something to do with, you know, that cuisine that you love so much in the world. It has something to do with our music. It has something to do with the literature of the place where I’m from, in Mississippi, from Eudora Welty to Tennessee Williams to Richard Wright to Jesmyn Ward. It had something with a sound, that swing that comes out of the blues and the Delta and jazz in Duke Ellington’s compositions. That’s who we are. And when we deny it, we refuse to accept who we are, and that’s a kind of adolescence that can make us monstrous. So, we’re in that moment again. And our task, I think, as writers, as artists, is to lay bare as plainly and as powerfully as we can, right? The promise, the power of the American experiment, it seems to me.

ISAACSON: There’s some people who are saying that Donald Trump, if he comes back to the White House, that one of the goals is to focus on anti- white racism. What’s your response to the proposal?

GLAUDE JR.: Farcical, enraging. You know, my dad couldn’t go to Princeton. He might’ve been able to attend Harvard, maybe Bowdoin, Oberlin, perhaps. We just got access to these places. If you think about it, there’s folks still walking around this country, Walter, with intimate memories of Jim Crow. It’s not tattooed on their arms, but my dad can’t — I loved Ed’s drive-in in Pascagoula, Mississippi. He refused to go, right, no matter how good their crinkle fries are, because he experienced a moment of humiliation where they forced him to go to the back of the storm. Al Raboteau, my former colleague, the late Al Raboteau, lost his father, shot in the head in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. These aren’t distant memories. We just got access. And we had to bring the nation to the brink in order to get access. And now, we’re in this moment where folk are thinking that government — big government is putting its thumb on the scale, right, so that we can go back to a nostalgic longing where somehow being white affects the distribution of advantage and disadvantage. These folks have always threatened to choke the life out of democracy from the very beginning. And so, it seems to me that if we’re not honest about what they’re doing, then we’re complicit in what they’re doing. And that seems to me one of the charges and challenges of the book. It’s not just that I have to become better or black folk have to become better people, Americans have to become better people. And in order to do that, right, we’re going to have to take responsibility for democracy as such.

ISAACSON: When Donald Trump ran for president against Hillary Clinton, you didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. You made a mistake, you said.

GLAUDE JR.: Yes.

ISAACSON: Nowadays, do you think it’s a big mistake for people who oppose some of Joe Biden’s policies, don’t think he’s done the right things, to sit this one out? And I’ll add to it, you’ve got a mentor in the book, somebody who was in my class at college, Cornel West, and he’s running for president. What do you say to him?

GLAUDE JR.: Wow, man, you know, the book is in so many ways an argument with the man who made me who I am in so many ways, right? So, I’m not — it’s not a patricidal text, but it’s certainly me engaging Cornel, trying to figure out where he ends and where I begin, because he’s been so influential intellectually in my life. I think in this moment, I go back to a lesson that I learned after I wrote “Democracy in Black.” And I went back and reread Baldwin’s letter to Jimmy Carter. And, you know, Baldwin was angry with Carter along with a whole bunch of other black leaders and black politicians. In 1978 and ’79, Carter’s austerity policies had impacted urban communities, disproportionate black communities, disproportionately. But Baldwin says we vote in a presidential election, not necessarily to change things, but sometimes just to buy ourselves some time, right? Because he knew who Reagan was, right? He knew who Reagan was as governor of California. And reading that made me realize that sometimes, Walter, we have to vote to buy ourselves some time. If we let the fascists in, democracy is over. It’s a wrap. I don’t think — we’re not a young, strapping republic anymore. 250 years come 2026. I don’t know if we can survive a Trump punch to the chin, you know, the foundations of the country are already cracked. And so, I think it’s a mistake for some people to think that they cannot vote in the national election. But I do understand, though, that the part of the problem we face in the polity is the Democratic Party, right? We have to be critical of the party as we try to reach for a different way of imagining our politics, because I think the Democratic Party, as is currently constituted, is a mirror reflection of the age of Reagan. It is a component of that moment. And if that moment is collapsing, then the remnants confuse us, it seems to me. But as I say to my friend Cornel West, I don’t know if this is the right decision to make, right? I think we need to do some other kind of work in organizing everyday ordinary people to be the leaders. We don’t want them to drop their hose and follow you. We want them to be the leaders that they’re looking for.

ISAACSON: Professor Eddie Glaude, Jr., thank you for joining us.

GLAUDE JR.: Thank you so much, Walter.