(U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland via AP)
75 years ago, Eddie Glaude would not have been admitted to Princeton University as a student, let alone be one of its distinguished professors. The country at the time was willing to destroy itself over the desegregation of public schools. Even after the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, President Eisenhower had to send the National Guard to accompany and protect black girls whose only crime was trying to attend an integrated school in Little Rock, Arkansas.
This is a country that engaged in the bloodiest war of its young history, the Civil War, because the South refused to see Black people as fully human. Some Americans drained pools instead of allowing kids of different races to swim together. In 2024, a plurality of Americans decided to re-elect a criminal, corrupt, rapist vulgarian rather than a competent Black Indian woman, who despite her flaws, would have not started the murder-suicide of the US economy or banned books or dismantled the government under the guise of eradicating “DEI initiatives.”
Some Americans cannot stand sharing the house with the rest of us. Instead, they’ll burn down the entire village. In addition to self-immolation, they unfortunately harm the rest of us along with them.
This is where we are in 2025, thanks to the Trump Administration, whose greed is matched only by its racism and fidelity to white nationalism. How does the majority confront such a threat when a country refuses to acknowledge and uproot the sin that animates such a destructive force?
Professor and author Eddie S. Glaude Jr., editor of A Native Son Substack, joined me to discuss how we, as Americans, came to such a critical moment and how the majority can lean into empathy, decency, and resilience as a way of shepherding a better future for our country.
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