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There are so many of us joining the call if the stream gets choppy reduce the image quality and we will give you instructions on how to do that in the chat. You could always navigate back to the page. This will have live closed captions. If you have any trouble in thank you for live captioning this event we will pace our speech with this in mind and then have a conversation and then to ask the question and then q a. And then just put them in the chat its my pleasure to introduce the most wellknown books how race inflates the american soul and pragmatism and the politics of black america a professor of religion and africanamerican studies at princeton university. He will have to tell doctor west from Harvard Divinity School and his memoir and also is the host that we will be discussing the book that was just released yesterday so please add yourself and its hopeful. It begins with all that love and labor comes to nothing we knew where we had been of those who had been murdered. Not everything is lost responsibility cannot be lost and if one refuses abdication and begins again. So welcome. Thank you. Im so delighted to be here. We are excited to jump in this question. Why now . First of all thank you to everybody to make this possible all of those that Haymarket Press in thank you to doctor west who has been so important in my life that made this possible just to be with you in this moment that we saw baldwin emerge in that context as black lives matter was beginning to give a voice for a more just america reaching the black man who had a straight no chaser and who offered a different kind of understanding of a different way to be in the world. So trying to grapple with my own despair and delusion and then we saw for eight years what that meant we witnessed Police Murdering and brothers and sisters in the streets risking life and limb with voter suppression. So this was a moment of profound betrayal to see how he dealt with his moment of betrayal. How did he pick up the pieces and what resources are available now. Because he is one of the most insightful critics of american democracy to ever produce so it made sense for me in this moment what do you think . The poetry section and manuscript section in general. And this brother right here, lord have mercy. Looking i into his eyes and remembering 30 years ago i was convinced i said you see that brother talking, hes going to be one of the great exemplars of our great tradition. Talking about the greatest tradition in the modern world, unflinchingly and love is a beauty, love is a truth, and christian love of god. Those 30 years have been such a magnificent journey for me because this is such an occasion in the decline of the american empire, being in dialogue with my dear brother and see what you have in this text, see what you have in this text is the way in which you intend to regenerate and revitalize the greatness of a tradition of black intellectuals or any concern about the sufferings of the begins talking about the end of his life. I try to do my work, he says. I hope somebody will find when they did in the wreckage in the rubble of the ruins something that could be of use to them. Thlow and behold start taking it to a whole new level like im going to take mary lou [inaudible] is the exemplary figure among others as well. As much as im going after that brother, he is, to back. We have a whole cloud of what is to keep this alive and he represents the voices of a cloud of witnesses, a custodian of a rich inheritance and caretaker of a great tradition of a hated people. This is by the highest levels of greatness isnt, i want the book to be number one, but the greatness othat thegreatness oft measured by just the number but what went into it and the courage to generate and practice how and be connected to understand what its going to do to the molding. That is what is in it. To make that tradition available to the whole world is a different level of catastrophe. People have been able to somehow keep on so that is what you actually get and begin again. Lets be honest about it is the bloodsoaked soulful tradition. I hope my mom was listening. I pray that she heard that. There are so many lines but there is a moment in istanbul and he uses begin again and the interviewer asked about hope. I remember that. He said it must be invented every day. Thats our tradition. Its motion and movement and practice and youve got to be improvisational and reinvent every day, good morning heartache, i have resources to deal with it. It will come back the next day. I was thinking about that line as an answer in the space of the assassination of doctor king and jimmy could barely pick up the pieces, tried to commit suicide. Has defined relationships and still thinks that he is this loveless child in his daddy told him he was so ugly nobody could love that little boy. Find your self, trying to figure out how to speak to this moment and fair to give utterance to this line of. That is that is a necessary practice, but we are the hope, it is our commitment to showing up, that is the practice. Its so bright and so often. The courage and the risk and willingness to be misconstrued and still have that kind of bounce back. What we have in the book in the middle of the blues situation in the u. S. Empire hes saying this isnt new for us. Weve been here before. Not at this historical moment, but a similar kind of moments and it is a human thing. Dont have to prove nothing to nobody. You have to learn how to love and fight in our temples and synagogues and churches and universities. [inaudible] to be distinguished university professors. To no surprise hes our fellow colleague and a teacher to teach us as we grow and mature, we are not surprised that in the fact, that is the thing about it. You tell that story to. They produced that radical cohort. They all come out of that group so they invite him to come to campus and hes supposed to be on stage but couldnt make it. They retreat after the panel discussion. Now come was then that audience as well. When he comes i know that they will speak the truth. He goes to the apartment compl complex. They are talking until the late night hours and jimmy says if you promise you will not believe what the world says about you, i will promise you that i will never betray you. He tells in his autobiography and farewell quotes at and jimmy never betrayed the matter what they said about it. I was sitting next to Stokely Carmichael december, 1987 Saint Johns Cathedral and Stokely Carmichael cried like a baby. I traveled with stokely. She never sold out and he was never fake or a coward given all the ups anof the ups and downs e attempts. He never betrayed people. That is a beautiful thing and this is the most important text written on his relevance to. In terms of this moment politically, spiritually. Youve made it clear that he looks into the basis of his own demons because he was a person who believed you made yourself from your reality to get the perspective that you had to come back and show up and that is abundantly clear through the text. I barely survived writing the book. I knew when i decided to start reading that people would ask things of me but i wasnt quite ready for when i was younger and he assumed this as a precondition to say anything about the messiness of the world so youve got to deal with the pain of a precondition because he thinks that its a reflection of the dishonesty that we tell ourselves, so im sitting here wanting to write about the moment grappling with the fact that i am a board of a little boy still dealing with my daddy issues, grappling with the fact and that is why i began this way. I love my father, woke up every day delivering mail but he couldnt look at me and scared me to do i was grappling with what it meant and this and this came out a. By the time i get to the end, my father is with me as they visit the grave, and im talking about hothen talkingabout how us tellr how we love each other and how hes called me to tell me what to say on television and how proud he is. And when you read jimmy you read the critique of the stepfather is scathing but by the time that he is about to die in december, the later writings he understands what the world did to him so i think its a kind of writing that ive never been in public before. Im taking risks because ginny demanded of me and i should say this quickly hes forced me to deal with the scaffolding of my own life. Host is asking that of the country as well, those of us that are trying to pull the nation back, to be honest with ourselves because the narratives are important enough to take a moment to speak to the definition of both as we talk about in the book and the notion of the value gap resulting those things best way to talk about it is on page nine, 1964 essay. He wrote it for the volume 100 years of emancipation. The people that settled the country have a flaw. They could recognize the man. They knew he wasnt anything else but a man but since they were christian and since they already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify buzz to see that he was not a man or if he wasnt, that no crime had been committed. That is the basis. So what hes saying is thereve been lies told about our character and our passions all to justify this system of exploitation at the heart of the founding of the modern world and country and not only do you have lies about black people but about what white americans have done to black people, then this is the key point, the way that it works it now forms coming and i use the verb on purpose, for any effort to expose the reality of what it has done. So, anything that comes to reveal the truth of the nation has done and what he has done to the native people and to haiti and cuba and the philippines and hiroshima and nagasaki and anything that reveals that america isnt a shining city on the hill or the redeemer nation or do anything to reveal that reality. But that is what we mean and it is the architecture within which the value gap reads in this fundamental belief that white people madder than i do and that is at the heart of our social and political arrangements on our economic arrangement its an evaluation of folks that leads to the distribution of and distribution of the character so they cannot even become the kind of people whose conception of democracy requires. Absolutely. The key tool that we have two fighting this is to have a true sense of who we actually are, that we are human without having to ask, that we are important and deserving and we are not ugly. That is the sort of social truth that we have to fight. Im going to read a little passage from the book and then ask one more question about the notion of innocence. The most pernicious effect when it comes to our history is to get the story whenever americas innocence is threatened by a reality. When measured against the actions, weve told ourselves about america being a sanctioned nation called to be a beacon of light to. The idea is an honest assessment of what happened after the civil war is a lie. The stories would often tell ourselves in the movement and racial progress in the country with courage and doctor kings moral regime and unreasonable black power culminated in the election of bartok obama are all too often wise, so i wonder what can we gain in the notion of innocence as it relates to the citizenry of the state . We could leave behind the sparkling clothing. We could become mature and grow up. But it keeps us in never never land with a comfortable state so they dont have to be responsible for anything. It allows us to exist in a kind of willful ignorance. Remember that time in 63 when he talks about what is happening to the day dont want to acknowledge what they are doing a. Once we leave that behind, we are stepping into maternity. Part of the greatness is that he also knows how big the White Supremacy is. Its something too many have consented to so if you believe you are less intelligent, you run around scared, intimidated, fearful it is unfunny and scratching. The only thing that can break it is love. You listen to the emotions and reference to the third part. The id can break the back of fear [inaudible] people are fearful and the only way to grow into maturity is with history in the sense of memory and the love that empowers you to break the kind of anxiety that doesnt allow you to be a free person that you ought to be. It forces us to take off the mask we know and the fear they cannot live without a. He put more responsibility on himself now because baldwin of course was someone chewed up and spit out by the liberal establishment. Thats why he argues. Brother skip, we love you. Baldwin was great and by no name industry lost his literary power, he was bitter, read it and get it straightened out. Its where the only thing he can fall back on is the love of his family, ray charles and others because as he got closer to that which is true for all of us, those things that really, really mattered and can sustain you, that is what you are going to fall back on with your partners and intellectual ancestors. Baldwin never stopped telling the truth even when it seemed he was fully disheartened. Im reading a passage in that first couple of sections that it could be read as he gave up a. Our young activists talked earlier about the having the Third Movement where we hear the melody in order to show the beauty of destruction and the lyrics. Thats important. I want to turn to this idea that he points out in the book of memory. You had a different perspective and learned that comes with age and station. I try to say that i think that its much more articulate it. So the traditional, early and late baldwin, folks dont buy into that anymore, but biography has been kind of displaced by others, but i want to hold on to the claim that there is a continuity running through that hes grappling with different ideas that change how he is thinking about history and memory so its not that he succumbs to the propaganda of power only after he spun out of celebrity. No, he is grappling with the conditions under which folks have lived and the conditions under which life has to be expressed. Thats why i think somebody has to grapple with the evidence of things not seen but when hes writing and trying to figure out what are we dealing with when we have all of these black folks in power, how are we going to grapple with this, the book needed a good editing, but it is a growing and that requires a different kind of reading. But i think the the trauma that itrauma that isat the heart of k about reading this phase of these grapple with the narrating problems others of what they want to get into in this chapter and i remember writing this and trying to figure out, i got up and poured myself a stiff drink because i knew something had just happened, and it goes Something Like this. It fragments how we remember. We recall what we can and what e desperately need to keep ourselves together, his the present, threatens to render and if that happens, nothing else matters, telling the story of trauma isnt history any formal sense, it is the way that it works with recollection caught in the battle between remembering and forgetting. That is tony right there. The fact is on behalf of the muchneeded truths we try to keep our heads above water and tell ourselves the story that keeps our legs and arms moving beneath the surface. Then i go on page 43 and 44. Page 43 and 44. I dont have my glasses on. I had to take mine off, too. [laughter] i quote this passage. It cannot be remembered, one block south, one invents or creates a persona and the memory repudiates and moves us about and we did the trenches to get t them to flow away from us but like the waters of the mississippi river, the memory is always returned, flooding everything, no matter how high we build the stilts. But in the latter part of his career, he tried to tell the story of what happened and trying to overcome language that would allow us to pick up the pieces and move forward. To my mind that you cannot understand what tony is doing and not understand what baldwin is doing with no name in the street. Structurally, it is almost like they are echoing each other indys extraordinarily beautiful ways turning back on itself, anything triggering the return of. The mind is a strange thing. He was on the verge of matt us a. Back to my reading at the beginning of the dialogue where right before you talk about the beginning again, you talked about what is not lost is responsibility, responding, and the ability to respond, accountability, accounting of oneself and ones community, once society. We have to be able t to answer e another, and you think that this is all you think that they must take responsibility for the notes they play right or wrong and the impact on the audience to enable that in such a way that they can be agents of love and hope and i think baldwin understood, and as he laid this out so magnificently that the plugin selector velocity like that with musicians. Here comes another arrogance, so vendors are looking down on people thinking they are better than and so forth and so on. If they had the same status as black musicians, they would be looking for us. We are hungry for more. That is the argument that they are black intellectuals. Absolutely that is true. The. Its still a gap. In the academy and moving with music. Part of my critique of, we appreciate hes unbelievable and critical. His voice is very important and so on and so forth generated by the relationship with the Higher Standards and any two or three generations, let alone one, but the voice is very important to both my critique, and we talked about this with all the others that are they doesnt linger with his critique of the worst of the black bruzual shade did t it could delete code that critique has developed and is there that he doesnt really sustain it. In the obama era that we live in, we have a critique of the worst of the bruzual css has in fact too often turned its back to the black working class with the best. But baldwin tends to be reluctant. I think this is why we need to return to the statebystate. The what are we to make of this representation of the very class that you are talking about . So they ar