They're telling themselves the story that this is a white nation, the vein of old Europe. And yet folks are doubling down on the lie. “And so there's this clamoring for a different way of imagining who we are. And people are worried about, ‘Well, is this the America that I know?’ There's this cultural unsettling that's happened. You know, those commercials on television with those racially ambiguous children and same sex marriages. In this moment where demographic shifts are putting pressure on how we imagine the country. We protect that belief with a series of lies, with an architecture of lies that protects our innocence. “If we've built a country predicated upon the idea that white people matter more than others, and that belief and that idea evidences itself in our dispositions and in our characters and our practices, it shapes our social, political and economic arrangements. On James Baldwin’s essay ‘The White Problem’ and the lies of white America And Baldwin's writing offered me resources to think about our current moment in that way.” I had to figure out how to manage my rage and to hold on to my faith. And we see all of this nonsense, people doubling down on the ugliness. And then the country elects Donald Trump. And then Black people are being killed in the streets. He comes of age in a moment with a Black family in the White House. “I had to figure out how to deal with my despair, how to deal with my disillusionment in another moment of betrayal.

Author of ' Begin Again.' ( Interview Highlights GuestĮddie Glaude Jr., chair of the department of African American studies at Princeton University. We look back on the life and work of the great American writer and thinker James Baldwin. This segment originally aired on July 29, 2020.

(RALPH GATTI/AFP via Getty Images) This article is more than 2 years old. American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist and civil rights activist James Baldwin poses at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, southern France, on November 6, 1979.

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