Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

And that is the belief that white people matter more than others.

And that belief evidences itself in our dispositions, our habits, our practices, our social and political and economic arrangements.

And they're protected by the lies we tell ourselves.

Baldwin in 1964 wrote an essay entitled The White Problem.

And he has this wonderful passage, it's so poignant, where he, and I'm paraphrasing here, where he says, the founders of the country had a fatal flaw.

They said that they were Christian.

They said that they were founding the nation on these principles, but yet they had chattel.

They had us.

And in order to justify the role that these chattel played in their lives, they had to basically say that these men and women were not human beings.

Because if they weren't human beings, then no crime had been committed.

And then here's the line.

That lie is the basis of our present trouble.

And so we tell ourselves this story that we're the redeemer nation, that we're the shining city on the hill, as Ronald Reagan said.

And we tell ourselves we're the example of democracy achieved as if we didn't do what we did in Haiti, as if we didn't do what we did in Cuba or what we did in Puerto Rico or what we did in Hiroshima, what we did in Nagasaki, right?

So we do all of that to protect our innocence, right?

So Baldwin is insisting we have to confront the messiness of who we are, our ghastly failures, in order to release ourselves into being otherwise.

And that, at the personal level, also must happen at the societal level.

So we have to tell the truth about who we are and what we've done, but the lies get in the way.

Yeah, you know, confrontation is also a sign of maturity, you know, where we've grown into the resources requisite to do it honestly.

He has this line, and I'm paraphrasing again, you know, is that, you know, the trouble we're in is deeper than we thought because the trouble is in us.