Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Their faces revealed nothing.

They were inscrutable, at least to me.

I had not been in Heidelberg for two hours, and police had a black man's face pressed down on the concrete with a knee in his back.

And I knew that when I started reading him in graduate school, that he was going to have me deal with my own traumas, my own wounds, my own pains.

And I didn't have a philosophical language for that yet.

He would, in effect, open me up.

And then I would have to deal with the fact, and it is a disturbing fact in some ways, that I am and remain a vulnerable little boy.

But in order for me to say anything substantive about the world, I would have to confront that vulnerable little boy, you know.

He's this child of Harlem, not Sugar Hill Harlem, but Harlem.

You know, the ghetto of Harlem, born in August of 1924, who had stories dancing around in his head, who was misfitted and the like, but whose mind was unbounded by his circumstance and his environment.

Yet he had to fight and work desperately to hold off what the world said about him.

in all of its ugliness.

And he willed himself into becoming one of America's most amazing and accomplished writers.

I think he's this mixture of Henry James, Malcolm X, and Freud.

His writing demands a kind of deep sea dive.

He believes in the Socratic dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Before we can say anything about the world we inhabit, we need to say something about ourselves because the messiness of the world is actually a reflection of the messiness of our interior lives.

So there's a kind of demand for self-examination.

To my mind, he is perhaps the most insightful critic of American democracy and race we've ever produced.

Yeah, so the lie is what I call the value gap.