This interview from July is worth sharing again and again. As I continue to read Eddie Glaude Jr.’s excellent book — Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons For Our Own — I’m struck repeatedly with how important this book is for all of us. And I say this especially as a white American. It’s hard and painful to wake up from the multiple layers of the Lie related to our indoctrination into American exceptional and white supremacy — and it’s essential. This is a significant, necessary, and urgently needed part of our evolution. We cannot stand strongly and consistently and ever more deeply in love, in truth, in the fierce demand for justice until we individually and collectively trade in the Lie for the Truth. — Molly
From Democracy Now! —
In 1963, James Baldwin spoke about federally-backed urban renewal programs, describing the efforts as "negro removal" programs. "That is what it means," said Baldwin. "And the federal government is an accomplice to this fact." That same year, four little girls — Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair — were brutally murdered in Birmingham, Alabama, in a violent white supremacist terrorist attack, now known as the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Princeton professor Eddie Glaude says that there are still many lessons to learn from James Baldwin's words from that time. "He insisted that we tell the truth about who we are and what we have done," says Glaude, "that we put aside the myths and illusions and understand what white supremacy has done in terms of disfiguring and distorting the character of this nation."
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