A Native Son

How Have Americans Celebrated Their Past? A Live Conversation with Professor Eddie Glaude, author of America, U.S.A: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversary

Eddie — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:16:29 GMT

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Weekly Wrap Up - June 19, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:50:31 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie defends the new U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding as a crucial victory for ending war and saving lives, despite regional escalations by Israel designed to stall peace talks. Turning inward, he views the opening of the Obama Presidential Center as a happy reprieve from today’s political vitriol, though he notes that the era’s centrist policies inadvertently fueled the rise of modern white nationalism. Finally, tying the episode to Juneteenth, Eddie uses the framework of “delayed freedom” to historicize a contemporary “second redemption” of voter suppression, urging grassroots civic resilience over national mythmaking.

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U.S.-Iran Agreement & Public Opinion

Suspended Talks & Regional Escalations

The Obama Presidential Center Grand Opening

The Power of Subversive Joy

Eddie — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 18:09:21 GMT

When I was a young graduate student in the Religion department at Princeton University, Cornel West drew this distinction between happiness and joy. Happiness is ephemeral, he argued, often driven by and dependent on external circumstances like markets that lead us to believe that we might be happy only by possessing things.

But joy is something deeper. Joy is rooted in love; in the deep relation we have with others. It isn’t ephemeral. Instead, joy emanates from the depth of one’s soul, and though it may seem fleeting, it grooves pathways in the spirit that endure long after the moment that occasions the experience. In this sense, joy can be subversive.

Imagine the joy in holding your child in your arms for the first time. The feeling that settles in the heart, the sense of grace and gratitude that engulfs the spirit, and the responsibility that reorients you to the world and to the life that you claim as your own. That joy can hold off the ugliness of one’s circumstances and ignite a fierceness in defense of that love that can challenge anyone or anything that endangers it.

To put it another way, joy can be a reservoir of hope that sustains us in dark days.

I was thinking a lot about subversive joy this weekend. My son married the love of his life. I watched her watch him. Smiling as wide as the universe. I heard them declare their love for each other in front of family and friends who love them dearly. Tears accompanied the sacrament. I noticed his friends from different phases of his life—friends from college, law school, and the young men he has known since the fifth grade. Communities of love.

Happiness cannot bear the weight of what I felt. This was joy. In my son’s face I saw the baby who laughed fully belly laughs when I pulled his bouncy to my face and made funny noises, chuckled at the young toddler in his Tiger Halloween costume saying “cheese” as he put his hands on his hips to take a photograph, felt regret as I saw the adolescent who cried tears because of me, and overwhelmed by the young man who brought the love of his life to our home for the first time. Smiling shyly but clearly smitten.

At the wedding, we danced. We cried. We shouted with joy with grandparents who ranged in age from 96 and 93 years to 83 and 78 years old. Survivors of cancer. Steps a bit slower and uneasy, but whose love blossomed in another generation. They were witnesses, still.

And no matter the absurdity of the world, and the ugliness of our days, joy broke through. Cage fights and war didn’t matter. Trump didn’t matter. My son and new daughter embarked on a life together. So, we tended to our hearts, because that remains the prize.

Joyful. (I suppose some Knicks fans are feeling this, too). Resilient. This feeling won’t change the world, but it helps us survive so that we might keep on fighting the good fight.

Psalms 30:5 comes to mind: “Weeping may stay for a night, but joy comes in the morning.”

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Weekly Wrap Up - June 12, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:03:01 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie critiques the escalating conflicts in the Middle East and U.S. political leadership, highlighting tensions in Gaza, the West Bank, and Iran, as well as rising inflation and economic anxiety at home. He also reflects on increased Black voter turnout as a hopeful sign while raising concerns about racial bias in the justice system, citing a controversial sentencing in Texas. Despite these heavy issues, he centers the episode on a personal note—his son’s wedding—emphasizing the importance of embracing joy and cherishing loved ones even amid global and national turmoil.

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Bitterness at the Bottom of the Cup

Eddie — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:39:03 GMT

I am still on my book tour for America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries. The conversations have been amazing and the responses from people have left me, at times, stunned and amazed. So many are ready to reimagine the country. They are ready for us to live into a different way of being together. Below I have included an excerpt of what some consider to be the controversial opening of the book. The first sentence works on several levels: 1) it announces a disagreement with James Baldwin. Baldwin writes in Notes of a Native Son: “I love America more than any country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” I start in a different place; 2) it rejects the distinction between “good” nationalism (patriotism) and “bad” nationalism; and, in doing so, sets up a riff on Hannah Arendt’s skepticism about the love of nations and 3) it turns the attention of the reader to the interior experience of the country’s contradictions. Implicitly, I am asking how anyone can expect me to love the country. All of this sets up how I try to reimagine love and country in the book (notice the shift from the preposition “of” to the conjunction “and”).

I do not love America, and never have, especially now. It seems to me misplaced love or dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious. Love is most often felt and experienced close to the ground – in the life lived in a particular place and time, and in memories that take up residence in the heart. I suspect “love of country” is a shorthand for the heartfelt relationships and experiences that make us who we are—things that happen in the place we call home, no matter how complicated that place may be. James Baldwin was right: “Whoever is part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it, and some of the people in it.” And I suppose that is why, in part, we are willing to risk our lives in defense of this place, and of what it might become.

But in America, those feelings and experiences have always been stained by the ugliness of what white people believe about color—that somehow or in some inscrutable way, the color of one’s skin determines your value. You end up spending much of your life trying to prove to others and to yourself—not because you are obsessed with white people but because you want to live—that you are not a “nigger.” Some Americans may believe that this view is a relic of a past that we have long left behind. After all, they might say, we elected a Black president and vice president. Look how far we have come. Stop complaining, I hear them say. You teach at Princeton University. You are not a victim. But I speak from the experiences of a life lived in this country. Not in the abstract but close to ground, and I trust what I know, what I have seen, and what now sits in the pit of my stomach.

Each one of us must face the battle with this place to live fully, and to try to beat back the bitterness that threatens to overrun everything and to consume us. It’s enough to drive you to madness. I can still feel the sting of my neighbor’s dad screaming at his son to stop playing with “that nigger,” wondering then what was wrong with him and asking myself what was wrong with me. An adolescent version of a familiar cry arose: Why did God make me a stranger in my own house? Would I resign myself to such a world, or slip into what W.E.B. DuBois described as a “silent hatred of the pale world…and mocking distrust of everything white?” Either way, a wound deposited by a calloused heart made it difficult, if not impossible, to love the place that hurt me. I had to learn, instead, how to survive it.

Bitterness settles in the heart of a child and innocence is lost, because the world announces in stark terms that you, no matter how young you may be, do not belong here. This happens in every corner of the country. The hurt I felt all those years ago wasn’t an isolated incident or something unique to Mississippi or the South. America believed what that man said about me and that word—that belief—did not die with the civil rights legislation of the 1960s or the election of Barack Obama. Its sentiments and sensibilities have not been relegated to the dustbin of history. Too many lives have been lost since then to believe that. Instead, these ideas have lurked beneath the surface of American life like a Leviathan. Today, the monster is in full view, eating the souls of the damned.

I saw it with the election of Donald Trump in 2024 as millions of white Americans, and a smattering of others, declared that the country belongs to them. I can hear it in the summary judgments about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI): that, by definition, diversity (and the word always seems to refer to Black people) involves the compromise of standards; that Black people in leadership positions or students who are admitted to Ivy League schools and elite state colleges, or professors like me really did not earn their place—that any attempt to address racism in this country amounts to reverse discrimination. I see the monster in masked ICE agents snatching people out of their homes, at courthouses, in front of schools as parents wait for their children—people the American government has determined do not belong here. Those who still believe themselves to be the “true” Americans repeat an old, insidious idea of white people that requires a certain view of Black and Brown people. The “true” Americans desperately need, and still want, their “niggers.”

No. I do not love America. I only wished that the country could be better, more decent and just, and in wishing that, I confess that I love deeply those who have borne and must bear the brunt of the country’s madness. Even if most Americans don’t see it, that love includes us all.

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Weekly Wrap Up - June 5, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:55:41 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie analyzes the collapse of the fragile Gaza ceasefire and the resulting escalations that have strained relations between Trump and Netanyahu. Domestically, he highlights the House’s historic bipartisan vote to end the war with Iran—a direct rebuke of the executive branch by the President’s own party. Eddie also condemns the expansion of police interventions against nonviolent protesters at Newark’s private immigration detention centers, as well as the Supreme Court’s shadow docket decision greenlighting Alabama’s racially gerrymandered electoral maps, characterizing both as systemic rollbacks of civil rights protections.

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Trump Administration Seeks Seizure of Cuban Property Amid Heightened Tensions

Protesters Face Charges Following Delaney Hall ICE Detention Center Demonstrations

A Rememory: Ralph Yarl and America, U.S.A.

Eddie — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:31:58 GMT

The young man walks quickly by himself through a neighborhood that sleeps. His eyes dart back and forth. It is dark, but the streetlamp offers a glimpse of the houses that once represented the American dream. They seem old and a bit worn, where children were raised and have long-since abandoned home, where parents are left to grow old together or, after death or divorce, to live alone, and where bright-eyed young couples who live there now reach for what was to be imagined as possible. Manicured decay.

Not long ago the neighborhood teemed with the activity of people protecting their way of life from the demands of integration. Northland was not Kansas City. A suburban haven, it belonged to them. Eyes greedy for faces that looked like them. Blood boiled over as others claimed the country’s promise as their own. Now they fight to secure and safeguard that inheritance—to fight for the America built by those who toiled in the factories, who hauled the slithery net, and who ploughed their own furrows. Irony. The young man walks by himself. The darkness howls at his presence. He must have lost his way.

He is somewhat puzzled that his twin brothers would be here. It is 9:45pm. This place or places like them were not meant for him or his younger brothers, especially after the sun goes down. It is a lesson he had to learn: that the South isn’t the only danger.

The insight did not come naturally like it does for some. American flags and yard signs declare the neighborhood’s loyalties and politics. They stand as warnings to people who look like him that, perhaps, they should reconsider. Turn around. Walk away. Don’t knock on any door. Hidden in the shadows of the house of an old, bitter and fearful man, next to his two-car garage, is a sign on a rusting chain-link fence that says in bold red ink, “THIS PROPERTY IS PROTECTED BY SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS.”

The young man is a child of immigrants. His parents migrated from Liberia, I suspect, with the hopes of a better life for themselves and their children. Of course, Liberia carries the burden of its history with America, U.S.A. The country’s contradictions became, in a way, theirs. Over the course of the 19^th century, the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1817, helped roughly 16,000 free Black men, women, and children to migrate to what would become Liberia. Recognizing the bicentennial of the first settlement in 1822, the United States State Department acknowledged “the racist nature of the American Colonization Society and that slavery continued in parts of America for more than 40 years after the arrival of the first Black Americans in Liberia.” No matter. A lot has happened between then and now. Wars. Movements. Betrayals. Trump. The young man thrives here. He is in the marching band and wants to be a chemical engineer. The success of his family is supposedly an American story.

But the idea of Ellis Island can be tricky magic. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” did not and does not apply to everyone. Certainly not to this young man’s family. Even those migrating from Europe had to come from a particular part of the continent to avoid the slur or the scornful glance. They couldn’t be Catholic or Jewish or have swarthy skin. The Old World had to be transformed in America, U.S.A., as James Baldwin put it, where Goldsmith had to become Smith and Giorgio, Joe. With that change of name, they could become white and required of us a song. And that is the tricky magic: to transform the incoherence at the heart of America, U.S.A into something clearly possessed and cherished—to be white and to live in neighborhoods like this one.

The young man walks fast by himself, but not fast enough. He is trailed by a host of assumptions about who he is and what he is capable of. He is a thug, lazy, an imminent danger; he is to be surveilled and contained (faces with badges and guns shadow his steps, pundits on conservative news shows and podcasts talk people into panics; white and Black liberals concede the terms of the debate; crime threatens their way of life and he is the reason why). His grades are not enough. Legislation is not enough. A Black President or Vice President is not enough. The fact that he is a good kid is irrelevant. Waving the Liberian flag doesn’t exempt him from stereotypes. He is one of them. Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Atatiana Jefferson, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd. The young man walks up the steps alone, but not really. Ghosts walk with him to the door of 1100 Northeast 115^th Street.

He rang the doorbell. No answer. Sound. An old white man shot him in the head.

Only the ears too busy listening to the lie are not alone; they are linked by the tendrils of words and image that hide, obscure, and deepen what makes us so afraid. The spiral form of our speech and what lies behind the words stretches out and twines through city blocks that harbor the imminent threat and spread from manicured suburbs to the outer edges of dusty roads in small towns that lull and lumber. The words grow wild in Silicon Valley and nest in cool shadows as others toil under the brutal sun, belts pulled too tight as they, undocumented or not, harvest crops for America, U.S.A. They are dangers, too.

His mother told him to pick up his brothers. He went to the wrong address. No words. Sound. The old man shot twice; told the police he feared the young man (who stood at 5’8” and weighed 140 pounds) threatened his life—that he “was attempting to break into his house.” Haunted words.

Alone, the young man managed to run away and cried out for help; neighbors kept their doors shuttered; someone finally helped him as he lay in a pool of blood and his eyes darkened. The young man survived. “Now Ralph has to look over his shoulder everywhere he goes,” his mother says. “Ralph has a scar on the top of his head that everybody recognizes him wherever he goes as the kid who was shot.” The judge expresses concern for the health of the old man. He is 84. Ralph’s mother says her son cries for a sense of normalcy. “Can I please graduate like maybe a normal person?” The scar on the top of his head answers back. One wonders where he is and what he dreams.

What is not said, but known and felt, what lingers behind the words and image cling to the ear and color the eye, the rusted chain-link that contaminates the blood; America, U.S.A.

This place, with its ideas and ghosts, remains a riddle. A bundle of contradictions: a promise of freedom, a place of unfreedom; a country of unimaginable wealth and unbearable poverty, where the equality of men and women guides our way and white people stand above it all; where God saturates everything but repeatedly comes up missing in how we live together; where liberty is cherished and selfishness is freedom. America, U.S.A is a country of longing and restlessness, a place of titillating happiness and paralyzing melancholy; where we confidently know what we are and have little patience with who we really are; where politicians exploit fear and hatred, and where ordinary people, if they decide, can change the course of history. America, U.S.A is haunted by the madness at its heart, and the reality of race resides there. Coiled tight. The young man with the scar on top of his head knows this now and forever. We are not who we say we are. That fact and the fear of it unraveling this fragile experiment plague this nation. It cowers behind our words and image. That fear is the wheel within a wheel.

“Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities and institutions. Let us rise into a new idea, and they will disappear.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Weekly Wrap Up - May 29, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:04:43 GMT

Summary

In Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie analyzes intersecting global and domestic crises, highlighting how Israel’s directive to seize 70% of Gaza and the U.S. military buildup near Cuba reflect dangerous geopolitical overreach. Domestically, he connects rising American food insecurity driven by federal cuts to SNAP with the militarized enforcement of immigration policies, citing the detention crackdowns and hunger strikes at Delaney Hall. Drawing from his new book, America USA, Eddie frames coordinated efforts to suppress Black voting power in the South and alter historical narratives as a contemporary “second redemption,” arguing that safeguarding democracy ultimately requires collective civic mobilization rather than reliance on political elites.

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Middle East & International Conflicts

Domestic Politics & Electoral Battles

“On this Memorial Day: A Different Story”

Eddie — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:36:39 GMT

Americans take shelter in stories that secure our virtue and innocence, particularly in this 250th year of the nation. In the hands of Donald Trump and his supporters, this milestone anniversary offers an occasion to reaffirm the inherent goodness of the American project and to insist that the country belongs to them.

All that is required of the rest of us is gratitude and a recognition of the victory secured in the founding of the country (and with the continued sacrifice of American veterans who protect our freedoms). No need to talk about slavery, or the ugliness of the past. Even invocations of “a more perfect union” are banished. Such talk blasphemes and, as the Department of Interior’s Secretarial Order 3431 declared, “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times.” But these are the words of a desperate and frightened people.

This approach to American history requires that we pluck out our eyes and refuse to see the past for what it is and for what it can teach us: that we can, in fact, use our history to free us from the ghosts that haunt. Instead, many Americans remain imprisoned in their myths, locked up in stories of the past that refuse to acknowledge the tragic consequences of America’s divided soul. This is, as James Baldwin noted, “the root of our unadmitted sorrow.”

In 1797, after ten years of living as a free man in Philadelphia, Moses Gordon found himself in shackles. Enslaved. Freed. Enslaved, again. Escaped. Caught. A harrowing repetition. But this time, when faced with the prospect of living as a slave without the people he loved, Moses Gordon chose death by his own hand. He chose death when he couldn’t have liberty.

His is a story that haunts our nation’s anniversary and teaches why we cannot celebrate with ease. I turned to it to make sense of the coming sesquicentennial. As history is being erased from federal sites, we must redeem its truths.

Gordon was first freed because Caleb Trueblood, a slaveholding North Carolina Quaker, had come to believe that slavery was a sin against God, and in November of 1776, just three months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence and in defiance of a North Carolina statue that forbade masters from liberating their slaves except for meritorious service, he decided to release Gordon from bondage. A confluence of faith and democratic principles.

But the colony of North Carolina remained committed to slavery. Four months after Moses Gordon was freed, the North Carolina legislature passed a law that made manumission a crime. The statue was explicit about the threat that Quakers like Trueblood presented to the institution of slavery and the danger of a growing free Black population. As such, the law required that those manumitted illegally be captured and “sold to the highest bidder.”

Moses Gordon had been free for two and half years when he was arrested by the local sheriff and sold in July 1779 to William Skinner, a brigadier general in the North Carolina militia. As the Battle of Stony Point was waged on the banks of the Hudson River, Moses found himself, once again, in shackles and the property of a white man.

One can only imagine the heartbreak, the shattered faith in the stated promises of the American revolution, and the pressing question about the humanity of these flesh jobbers who believed, as if they were gods, that they alone could determine who could be free or not.

After six years as a slave on General Skinner’s plantation, Gordon had escaped, made his way to Philadelphia, and lived as a free man for over ten years. He married the love of his life and, together, they raised four children. But Skinner refused to give up his possession, and the law of the land supported his claim. Article IV, Section 2 Clause 3 of the Constitution of the new nation was clear:

No Person held to service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labor, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.

This came to be known as the Fugitive Slave Clause and was one of the tragic choices that paved the way for the founding of the nation. The Constitution, along with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, gave slave owners like Skinner the legal right to seek rendition of their property, and the courts consistently upheld the law even as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 threatened to rip the country apart.

In Prigg v Pennsylvania (1842), for example, the Supreme Court upheld the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 by overturning a Pennsylvania law that prevented the use of violence to remove any person from the state to return them to slavery. Justice Joseph Story wrote the opinion of the Court, and he was clear about the centrality of the Fugitive Slave Clause to the founding. The clause “was so vital…that it cannot be doubted, that it constituted a fundamental article, without the adoption of which the Union could not have been formed.”

Moses Gordon’s new life in Philadelphia was haunted by the specter of slavery. Not just by his memories or the hard reality of his escape, but by the fact that even as a free man, he was condemned to look over his shoulder for the four horsemen who, at any moment, could drag him back to hell.

No matter the life he lived, Moses remained, as the historian Andrew Delbanco describes the fugitive slave, a thief in “the contorted sense” that he had stolen himself.

Gordon’s is a decidedly American story, a story of freedom and unfreedom, of cycles of sentiment and rage rooted in the duality that resides at the heart of the nation. America was a country defined by the principle of the equality of men and, yet, held others as chattel or resigned them to second-class status. The nation imagined itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white Republic. This is America’s double consciousness, its divided soul. And it is our inheritance as we commemorate the nation’s founding.

From the beginning of this fragile experiment in democracy, America has been split between its commitment to liberty and equality and to the idea of white superiority. In one moment, the country could embrace the idea of liberty and freedom for all (e.g., the freeing of slaves, the radical experiment of Reconstruction, the promise of the Civil Rights movement, the reckoning of Black Lives Matter), and then as quickly as storm clouds can hide the sun, the mood darkens and freedom can be snatched away.

The repetition, the back and forth, rests in the heresy that freedom is the possession of white Americans to give and to take away. A repetition of the evil and hubris at the heart of slavery. Living in this contradiction, Black people were swept up in the whirlwind as profit and prejudice collided with justice and virtue, as America imagined itself as a New Israel and lived as if pharaoh resided in Washington, D.C. People like Moses Gordon knew intimately of the hypocrisy and the cruelty of American freedom snatchers.

We do, too. Ours is a moment characterized by the whip of the whirlwind as MAGA claims the country as its own. We have witnessed an assault on the basic values of diversity and an attack on any attempt to remedy historic harms that resulted from the tragic choices of the founders. The Trump administration, for example, has set out to destroy the basic governmental infrastructure of civil rights. They have attacked DEI in the public and private sectors; instructed federal agencies to stop enforcing key civil rights protections; engaged in an all-out assault on American education, using diversity initiatives and so-called “woke” histories as examples of reverse discrimination; gutted the civil rights division of the Justice Department, ended consent decrees with police departments around the country; attempted to upend a hundred years of jurisprudence with an effort to end birthright citizenship; and, finally, put the last nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act.

Hatred and grievance saturate our politics, and it happened in the blink of an eye. Just a few years ago, as we were locked up in our homes because of Covid, Americans witnessed the murder of George Floyd. People flooded the streets. They risked death as the virus raged, and they demanded the country reckon with its racist past and present. But some cried out that we were going too far: that the sentimental liberals, with their wet eyes, had overreached and threatened the very character of the nation.

Whenever the tensions between our stated commitments to freedom and to the idea of the white Republic become unbearable, it leads to a kind of delirium that erupts in draconian policies and in a manic search for scapegoats that can wash away our sins.

Today, it feels as if some white Americans pine for what they believe were the halcyon days before the civil rights movement as they attack voting rights and immigration. They also yearn for an understanding of the nation’s past in which Black people were on the margins, playing minor bit parts and white people were at the center of everything, innocently inhabiting a nation of unblemished virtue and seamless progress. This is the history that redacts and evades the past, a storybook version of America required by Donald Trump’s executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” An America where all are grateful for living in the greatest country on earth.

We have had to struggle with the madness that comes with the split in our national consciousness: that who we say we are as Americans runs smack up against the reality of our daily lives.

We are not who we say we are.

There were no halcyon days. Fears and terrors shadow our lofty ideals and color how we deal with each other in this country, especially when it comes to matters of race. James Baldwin got it right when he wrote in “Nothing Personal” (1964),

We are afraid to reveal ourselves, because we trust ourselves so little…[I]n this labyrinth the person is desperately trying not to find out what he really feels. Therefore, the truth cannot be told, even about one’s attitudes: we live by lies.

And those lies have become the source of our suffering.

In the 250^th year since the founding, America finds itself battling its ghosts once again. I cannot say with any degree of certainty that the country will survive the madness of these dark days. Time will tell.

What I do know for sure is that we must tap the source of our unadmitted sorrow. It is clear, and it has been since the founding, that we cannot be a white Republic and a beacon of freedom. A choice must finally be made. Trump and his supporters have made their choice. Now we, those of us who truly believe in justice and freedom, must make ours and finally allow the ghosts of all those who have sacrificed for this nation – the ghost of Moses Gordon – to rest and set this nation free.

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Weekly Wrap Up - May 22, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:08:05 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie offers a critical analysis of compounding geopolitical and domestic crises, beginning with a condemnation of the IDF's interception of the Global Samud Flotilla and recent airstrikes that violate the Lebanon ceasefire agreement. Shifting his focus to the domestic front, Eddie draws profound inspiration from grassroots civic organizing in Mississippi, invoking the enduring civil rights legacies of Ella Baker and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Ultimately, he posits that the preservation of democratic institutions does not depend on the authority of strongman leaders, but rather on the relentless, collective mobilization of ordinary citizens claiming democracy as their own.

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Middle East Conflict & Israel

Cuba Tensions & Castro Indictment

Iran War & War Powers

Domestic Policy, ICE & Legal Battles

Elections & Voting Rights Protests

Vote For Us!

Eddie — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:17:37 GMT

So much has changed, and in a blink of an eye. In 2020, I ended my book Begin Again by saying that Trumpism presented Americans with a choice: we could either continue to lie to ourselves about the superiority of white people and choose the lie’s illusion of safety, or we could finally do the hard work of ridding ourselves of the assumptions of race that have stained this nation since its founding. I held on to the belief that we could be better and that we could work tirelessly for a third American founding.

But the country made a different moral choice. A sizable portion of white America had a powerful allergic reaction to self-examination, doubled down on its illusions, and elected Donald Trump again. They turned their backs on the so-called racial reckoning and retreated into the comforts of categories (and policies) that cut off the humanity of others from their own. We have gone too far, they said. Transgender athletes became an avatar for fears and rage. Identity politics blocks the way to what really matters, both political parties declared. Inflation was the excuse. Hatred, greed, and grievance were the motivation.

The shift was so breathtakingly fast that one could only conclude that people lied after the murder of George Floyd—that the outpouring of concern for racial justice was mere sentimentality. Or people had nowhere to go with their rage and frustrations and simply returned to business as usual.

After 250 years, and after all that has been done and said, Black people still face the consequences of a country that insists it must remain white. By now, and given our history, one would hope that we would have honestly confronted the madness that haunts this place. The soil of the country has been soaked with blood because of it. Many Americans throughout our history have lost their sense of morality, or lost their minds, because they either believed the country must be white or had to bear the brunt of that belief’s implications. We should know better.

But here we are. Caught up in the whip of the whirlwind. The Trump administration has engaged in an all-out assault on Black people in this country, with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act as the latest in a slew of cuts and slashes.

This weekend thousands of people gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, at the All Roads Lead to the South (ARLS) rally. It was the inaugural event for a summer of action aimed at organizing and mobilizing like-minded people to fight for the political power that MAGA has relentlessly sought to diminish.

I wished I could have been there. I plan to make my way to Mississippi on Wednesday for another march. We must remember that these marches are dramatic forms of education – not the aim and end of mobilization. They afford an opportunity to orient people to the task in front of us and to dramatize the scale of the assault on Black people and our democracy. They amount to a readying of the self for the more direct action to come.

I have been thinking a lot about the various registers of how we might address this moment. There is the reality of the white nationalists who have seized government. They have attacked DEI, affirmative action in federal contracting, college admissions, redacted American history, gutted the Civil Rights division at DOJ (it now advocates for white Americans), effectively killed the Voting Rights Acts, etc.

These people have efficiently sought to cut off our political power and to shut down pipelines to wealth and economic security. They want to put us in our place and remind us that we’re just n**gers in their eyes.

In the face of this assault (rooted in a nostalgic longing for a country where white folk were at the center of everything and everyone else cowered in the shadows), we must assert our political power at the ballot box and defeat these people. That requires a massive voter registration and mobilization campaign – one particularly aimed at the demographic between 18-39 years of age.

It is true that MAGA is trying to dilute the power of our vote. But the fact remains we still can vote. We must turn out in historic numbers to affect elections across the ballot. And we must do so not only out of a fidelity to the past – that people fought and died for our right to vote – but we do so for us, in this moment, and for the future of our babies.

That’s what I am thinking: VOTE FOR US! Not for a politician or a political party, but for us. And, to my mind, that is a vote for a more just America.

I do not want us to be too backward looking in our approach as we struggle for our freedom: that we only draw on the rhetoric and the sloganeering of the mid-twentieth century black freedom movement.

We can’t counter their nostalgia with our own.

We must beat these white nationalists with new tools informed by the lessons of the past, and we must fundamentally shift how we do politics moving forward. We must be aware of the forces who will use the call for massive voter registration for their own purposes and gain. They want to turn us out in order to secure power, and then, as they have done historically, fail to deliver on policies that will impact our community.

We are not registering or voting for a return to business as usual. That is what got us here in the first place. We can no longer be a captured electorate. This movement must break the back of Trumpism’s assault on Black people, and we must reject the political status quo that made it all possible.

I am reminded of Frantz Fanon’s words in The Wretched of the Earth: “Each generation, out of relative obscurity, must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.” We have our mission. Now let’s get to work!

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Weekly Wrap Up - May 15, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:58:39 GMT

Summary

This Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie examines the global economic fallout of the U.S.-Iran conflict and compounding humanitarian crises in Cuba and Gaza. Domestically, he analyzes the systemic erosion of the Voting Rights Act and the necessity for civic mobilization in defense of democratic institutions.

Continue Reading…

Middle East Conflict & Israel

US-China Relations & Global Diplomacy

Economy & Inflation

Cuba Blockade

Immigration & Border Enforcement

Voting Rights & Domestic Policy

James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority: An Address” (1960) reprinted in NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME

Eddie — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:47:43 GMT

I think this speech is worth reading or rereading in this moment as the hoods come off and the pursuit of white power has made itself known explicitly.

I am supposed to speak this evening on the goals of American society as they involve minority rights, but what I am really going to do is to invite you to join me in a series of speculations. Some of them are dangerous, some of them painful, all of them are reckless. It seems to me that before we can begin to speak of minority rights in this country, we’ve got to make some attempt to isolate or define the majority.

Presumably the society in which we live is an expression—in some way—of the majority will. But it is not so easy to locate this majority. The moment one attempts to define this majority one is faced with several conundrums. Majority is not an expression of numbers, of numerical strength, for example. You may far outnumber your opposition and not be able to impose your will on them or even to modify the rigor with which they impose their will on you, i.e., the Negroes in South Africa or in some countries, some sections, of the American South. You may have beneath your hand all the apparatus of power, political, military, state, and still be unable to use these things to achieve your ends, which is the problem faced by de Gaulle in Algeria and the problem which faced Eisenhower when, largely because of his own inaction, he was forced to send paratroopers into Little Rock. Again, the most trenchant observers of the scene in the South, those who are embattled there, feel that the Southern mobs are not an expression of the Southern majority’s will. Their impression is that these mobs fill, so to speak, a moral vacuum and that the people who form these mobs would be very happy to be released from their pain, and their ignorance, if someone arrived to show them the way. I would be inclined to agree with this, simply from what we know of human nature. It is not my impression that people wish to become worse; they really wish to become better but very often do not know how. Most people assume the position, in a way, of Jews in Egypt, who really wished to get to the Promised Land but were afraid of the rigors of the journey; and, of course, before you embark on a journey the terrors of whatever may overtake you on that journey live in the imagination and paralyze you. It was through Moses, according to legend, that they discovered, by undertaking this journey, how much they could endure.

These speculations have led me a little bit ahead of myself. I suppose it can be said that there was a time in this country when an entity existed which could be called the majority, let’s say a class, for the lack of a better word, which created the standards by which the country lived or which created the standards by which the country aspired. I am referring or have in mind, perhaps somewhat arbitrarily, the aristocracies of Virginia and New England. These were mainly of Anglo-Saxon stock and they created what Henry James was to refer to, not very much later, as our Anglo-American heritage, or Anglo-American connections. Now at no time did these men ever form anything resembling a popular majority. Their importance was that they kept alive and they bore witness to two elements of a man’s life which are not greatly respected among us now: (1) the social forms, called manners, which prevent us from rubbing too abrasively against one another and (2) the interior life, or the life of the mind. These things were important; these things were realities for them and no matter how rough-hewn or dark the country was then, it is important to remember that this was also the time when people sat up in log cabins studying very hard by lamplight or candlelight. That they were better educated than we are now can be proved by comparing political speeches of that time with those of our own day.

Now, what I have been trying to suggest in all this is that the only useful definition of the word “majority” does not refer to numbers, and it does not refer to power. It refers to influence. Someone said, and said it very accurately, that what is honored in a country is cultivated there. If we apply this touchstone to American life we can scarcely fail to arrive at a very grim view of it. But I think we have to look grim facts in the face because if we don’t, we can never hope to change them.

These vanished aristocracies, these vanished standard bearers, had several limitations, and not the least of these limitations was the fact that their standards were essentially nostalgic. They referred to a past condition; they referred to the achievements, the laborious achievements, of a stratified society; and what was evolving in America had nothing to do with the past. So inevitably what happened, putting it far too simply, was that the old forms gave way before the European tidal wave, gave way before the rush of Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, Irishmen, Poles, Persians, Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, wandering Jews from every nation under heaven, Turks, Armenians, Lithuanians, Japanese, Chinese, and Indians. They were here because they had wanted to leave wherever they had been and they were here to make their lives, and achieve their futures, and to establish a new identity. I doubt if history has ever seen such a spectacle, such a conglomeration of hopes, fears, and desires. I suggest, also, that they presented a problem for the Puritan God, who had ever heard of them and of whom they had never heard. Almost always as they arrived, they took their places as a minority, a minority because their influence was slight and because it was their necessity to make themselves over in the image of their new and unformed country. There were no longer any universally accepted forms or standards, and since all the roads to the achievement of an identity had vanished, the problem of status in American life became and it remains today acute. In a way, status became a kind of substitute for identity, and because money and the things money can buy is the universally accepted symbol here of status, we are often condemned as materialists. In fact, we are much closer to being metaphysical because nobody has ever expected from things the miracles that we expect.

Now I think it will be taken for granted that the Irish, the Swedes, the Danes, etc., who came here can no longer be considered in any serious way as minorities; and the question of anti-Semitism presents too many special features to be profitably discussed here tonight. The American minorities can be placed on a kind of color wheel. For example, when we think of the American boy, we don’t usually think of a Spanish, Turkish, a Greek, or a Mexican type, still less of an Oriental type. We usually think of someone who is kind of a cross between the Teuton and the Celt, and I think it interesting to consider what this image suggests. Outrageous as this image is, in most cases, it is the national self-image. It is an image which suggests hard work and good clean fun and chastity and piety and success. It leaves out of account, of course, most of the people in the country, and most of the facts of life, and there is not much point in discussing those virtues it suggests, which are mainly honored in the breach. The point is that it has almost nothing to do with what life is. Beneath this bland, this conqueror-image, a great many unadmitted crimes and failures hide. To speak in my own person, as a member of the nation’s most oppressed minority, the oldest oppressed minority, I want to suggest most seriously that before we can do very much in the way of clear thinking of clear doing as relates to the minorities in this country, we must first crack the American image and find out and deal with what it hides. (emphasis added) We cannot discuss the state of our minorities until we first have some of what we are, who we are, what our goals are, and what we take life to be. The question is not what we can do now for the hypothetical Mexican, the hypothetical Negro. The question is what we really want out of life, for ourselves, what we think is real.

Now I think there is a very good reason why the Negro in this country has been treated for such a long time in such a cruel way, and some of the reasons are economic and some of them are political. We have discussed these reasons without ever coming to any kind of resolution for a very long time. Some of them are social, and these reasons are somewhat more important because they have to do with our social panic, with our fear of losing status. This really amounts sometimes to a kind of social paranoia. One cannot afford to lose status peculiar ladder, for the prevailing notion of American life seems to involve a kind of rung-by-rung ascension to some hideously desirable state. If this is one’s concept of life, obviously one cannot afford to slip back one rung. When one slips, one slips back not a rung but back into chaos and no longer knows who he is. And this reason, this fear, suggests to me one of the real reasons for the status of the Negro in this country. In a way, the Negro tells us where the bottom is: because he is there, and where he is, beneath us, we know where the limits are and how far we must not fall. (emphasis added) We must not fall beneath him. We must never allow ourselves to fall that low, and I am not trying to be cynical or sardonic. I think if one examines the myths which have proliferated in this country concerning the Negro, one discovers beneath these myths a kind of sleeping terror of some condition which we refuse to imagine. In a way, if the Negro were not here, we might be forced to deal within ourselves and our own personalities, with all those vices, all those conundrums, and all those mysteries with which we have invested the Negro race. Uncle Tom, is, for example, if he is called uncle, a kind of saint. He is there, he endures, he will forgive us, and this is a key to that image. But if he is not uncle, if he is merely Tom, he is a danger to everybody. He will wreak havoc on the countryside. When he is Uncle Tom he has no sex—when he is Tom, he does—and this obviously says much more about the people who invented this myth than it does about the people who are the object of it.

If you have been watching television lately, I think this is unendurably clear in the faces of those screaming people in the South, who are quite incapable of telling you what it is they are afraid of. They do not really know what it is they are afraid of, but they know they are afraid of something, and they are so frightened that they are nearly out of their minds. And this same fear obtains on one level or another, to varying degrees, throughout the entire country. We would never, never allow Negroes to starve, to grow bitter, and to die in ghettos all over the country if we were not driven by some nameless fear that has nothing to do with Negroes. We would never victimize as we do, children whose only crime is color and keep them, as we put it, in their place. We wouldn’t drive Negroes mad as we do by accepting them in ball parks, and on concert stages, but not in our homes and not in our neighborhoods, and not in our churches. It is only too clear that even with the most malevolent will in the world Negroes can never manage to achieve one-tenth of the harm which we fear. No, it has everything to do with ourselves and this is one of the reasons that for all these generations we have disguised this problem in the most incredible jargon. One of the reasons we are so fond of sociological reports and research and investigational committees is because they hide something. As long as we can deal with the Negro as kind of statistic, as something to be manipulated, something to be fled from, or something to be given something to, there is something we can avoid, and what we can avoid is what he really, really means to us. The question that still ends these discussions is an extraordinary question: Would you let your sister marry one? The question, by the way, depends on several extraordinary assumptions. First of all it assumes, if I may say so, that I want to marry your sister and it also assumes that if I asked your sister to marry, she would immediately say yes. There is no reason to make either of these assumptions, which are clearly irrational, and the key to why these assumptions are held is not to be found by asking Negroes. The key to why these assumptions are held has something to do with some insecurity in the people who hold them. It is only, after all, too clear that everyone born is going to have a rather difficult time getting through his life. It is only too clear that people fall in love according to some principle that we have not as yet been able to define, to discover or to isolate, and that marriage depends entirely on the two people involved; so that this objection does not hold water. It certainly is not justification for segregated schools for ghettos or for mobs. I suggest that the role of the Negro in American life has something to do with our concept of what God is, and from my point of view, this concept is not big enough. It has got to be made much bigger than it is because God is, after all, not anybody’s toy. To be with God is really to be involved with some enormous, overwhelming desire, and joy, and power which you cannot control, which controls you. I conceive of my own life as a journey toward something I do not understand, which in the going toward, makes me better. I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others. Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is growing up. No one in the world—in the entire world—knows more---knows Americans better or, odd as this may sound, loves them more than the American Negro. This is because he has had to watch you, outwit you, deal with you, and bear you, and sometimes even bleed and die with you, ever since we got here, that is since both of us, black and white, go here---and this is a wedding. Whether I like it or not, or whether you like it or not, we are bound together forever. We are part of each other. What is happening to every Negro in the country at any time is also happening to you. There is no way around this. I am suggesting that these walls—these artificial walls—which have been up so long to protect us from something we fear, must come down. I think that what we really have to do is to create a country in which there are no minorities—for the first time in the history of the world. (emphasis added) The one thing that all Americans have in common is that they have no other identity apart from the identity which is being achieved on this continent. This is the English necessity, or the Chinese necessity, or the French necessity, but they are born into a framework which allows them their identity. The necessity of Americans to achieve an identity is a historical and a present personal fact and this is the connection between you and me.

This brings me back, in a way, to where I started. I said that we couldn’t talk about minorities until we had talked about majorities, and I also said that majorities had nothing to do with numbers or with power, but with influence, with moral influence, and I want to suggest this: that the majority for which everyone is seeking which must reassess and release us from our past and deal with the present and create standard worthy of what a man may be—this majority is you. No one else can do it. The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.

James Baldwin. Everyman’s Library (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024), pp. 162-168.

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Weekly Wrap Up - May 8, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 08 May 2026 20:38:47 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie highlights the collapse of Middle East ceasefires and condemns a barrage of domestic attacks on democracy. He calls out the administration’s threats against the press, weaponized DOJ indictments, and the militarized police crackdowns on “May Day Strong” student protests. Citing the Virginia Supreme Court’s recent move to strike down a citizen-led redistricting referendum as another effort to rig the system, Eddie urges us to fiercely mobilize ahead of the midterms.

Continue Reading…

Middle East Conflict & Israel

Iran War & Global Tensions

Cuba Sanctions

FBI Investigations & Political Targeting

Redistricting, Voting Rights & Domestic Policy

PRE-ORDER

2026 Book Tour Dates

Eddie — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:29:46 GMT

I am so excited about my new book, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries. As we celebrate 250 years since the founding, it’s time to have some difficult conversations about how the country has arrived at this crisis moment. If you are in any of these cities, I hope that you will join the conversation. The book drops on May 26th.

Order here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/673832/america-usa-by-eddie-s-glaude-jr/

Name The Devil

Eddie — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:28:01 GMT

The Supreme Court has gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Chief Justice Roberts has finally achieved what he has dedicated his career to doing, and the country is now poised to return to what it was: a herrenvolk democracy (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one).

If there was any doubt about the motivation behind the decision, the spiraling efforts of southern states to redraw districts in the immediate aftermath of the court’s decision betray the lie that this country is no longer exercised by racism in elections. Justice Alito cherry-picked data and contorted himself to assure “Americans that racial disparities in voting are no longer a problem.” https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/finishing-voting-rights-act-supreme-court-declares-racism-over-again

States like Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana are now hell-bent on redrawing congressional maps with the aim of increasing Republican representation in Congress and diluting the power of Black and brown voters. That is the rub: partisan gerrymandering is just the latest racial dog whistle.

And it is important for the Democratic Party to say as much.

This moment is more than a political will-to-power characterized by “the gerrymandering wars” with its race to the bottom. The court’s decision is part of a sweeping effort to undermine the country created in the aftermath of the sixties’ revolution – an explicit denial that our diversity constitutes a value worth defending and a rejection that ours is a multiracial democracy.

They want a white Republic.

According to a report by Fair Fight Action and the Black Voters Matter Fund, the court’s decision could result in as much as 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus losing their seats; close to 200 state legislative seats held by Democrats in the south could just disappear.

What we are facing here is the diminution of power, of an ability to impact policy and the direction of the country, of an effort to empty our votes of meaning. In many ways, it is reminiscent of the attacks on the civil war amendments and the world many sought to create in the wake of slavery’s end.

I am reminded of this moment in W.E.B. DuBois’s 1903 classic, The Souls of Black Folk, as he grapples with the implication of extending the right to vote to Black men. He wrote:

Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war. Thus, Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud.

This was 1903! And we are still fighting that feud in 2026.

Democrats, I believe, must make explicit the racist motivation of this assault on Black voting rights and representation. Not by way of a nostalgic longing for the 1965 legislation or an appeal to the legacy of the civil rights movement. Or, to reduce this decision simply to Trump’s ongoing effort to remain in power or to undermine democratic norms.

Tap dancing around the motivation of all this will let the racists off the hook and ensure that large segments of the country remain trapped in the belief that democracy is for rich, white people only. A historical repetition that made, in part, the Lost Cause possible.

We must name the devil that has us by the throat.

Some of us want to believe that the Earl Warren court (1953-1969) represents the historic role of the court when it comes to race matters. But that is an illusion. The court has played its role historically in ensuring that this place remains a white Republic. Louisiana v. Callais will take its place among a host of decisions that aimed to make it so as we cycled from sentimentality to rage.

We can’t rely on fantasies. Let’s ignore the political consultants and tell the truth about how we’ve arrived here and what these people are doing. It is the only way we can begin to break the fever once and for all.

In my new book, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, I ask this question. What happens to a country that must believe a lie because of a deep-seated fear that the truth will rip it apart? Trapped in madness for 250 years. Frederick Douglass knew this in 1852. We know it today. Americans cling to their storybook version of this place in order to avoid confronting madness. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it this way in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, his last book:

Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race. She has been torn between selves—a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she practiced the antithesis of democracy…. No one surveying the moral landscape of our nation can overlook the hideous wreckage of commitment twisted and turned into a thousand shapes under the stress of prejudice and irrationality.

With this decision, Justice Alito and the other five justices made their contribution to “the hideous wreckage” and we live in the ruins. How shall we stand our trial now that the ugliness of America’s racism has emerged from the shadows?

If you would like to preorder a signed copy of America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, and this is especially for the members of the A Native Son community, please click this link https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/america-u-s-a/ at Labyrinth books. I have signed copies just for you!

Thanks for reading A Native Son! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Weekly Wrap Up - May 1, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:40:33 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie addresses the collapsing ceasefire in Lebanon, highlighting deadly exchanges between Hezbollah and the IDF alongside escalating settler violence in Jerusalem. Domestically, he confronts a devastating new Supreme Court ruling by drawing powerful historical parallels to the brutal resistance against the 1966 civil rights movement. Recalling how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. overcame deep despair during that era, Eddie urges his audience to turn their grief into defiance, calling for a nationwide "Operation Show Out" and continued participation in "May Day Strong" protests to actively reclaim American democracy.

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Middle East Conflict & Israel

Iran War & Global Economy

Political Violence & WHCA Dinner

DOJ Investigations

Supreme Court & Voting Rights

Protests & Civil Action

Photos Of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Stanford University. Martin Luther King Jr. & Joan Baez march to integrate schools, Grenada, MS, 1966. Stanford Digital Repository, purl.stanford.edu/hg676jb4964.
Stanford University. Eva Grace Lemon (7 years old) Martin Luther King Jr., Aretha Willis (7), march to integrate schools Grenada, MS, 1966. Stanford Digital Repository, purl.stanford.edu/jc437rk5536.
Stanford University. Eva Grace Lemon (7 years old), Martin Luther King Jr., Aretha Willis (7), march to integrate schools Grenada, MS, 1966. Stanford Digital Repository, purl.stanford.edu/bj022hr0954.
Stanford University. Martin Luther King Jr. (left) & Andy Young, 1966 Montgomery AL airport. Stanford Digital Repository, purl.stanford.edu/bj665vr4930.

A Shooting and a Sound

Eddie — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:14:21 GMT

On Saturday shots were fired at the White House Correspondents dinner. Secret Service agents and police rushed to evacuate the president and other members of the cabinet. Guests hid under their tables as officers shouted instructions. Reporters offered commentary in real time. I watched stunned and, honestly, in disbelief. This is where we are as a country. Violence simmers underneath the political discord waiting to erupt.

Of course, Trump took full advantage of the moment. “When you’re impactful, they go after you. When you’re not impactful, they leave you alone,” he boasted. In a Truth Social post, Trump also argued for the need for a White House ballroom. The shooting “would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom.” It felt like a coordinated campaign as MAGA accounts on social media echoed the sentiment.

Over the next few days, we will be inundated with commentary about the shooting and the alleged shooter, Cole Tomas Allen. Conspiracy theories will circulate on social media. Some will decry the violence. Others will suggest that the shooting was a false flag. Conservatives will use this as evidence of the violence of the radical left (no matter what the evidence suggests). Liberals will call for gun control.

Standard political theater in these troubling times.

All the while, Americans still face the implications of the Iran war at the pump and in grocery stores. Trump continues to plummet in the polls, and we have no idea what he is capable of doing because of it. Politicians play their games. And the country barrels into whatever chaos awaits around the corner.

It is enough to drive us all mad. Breaking news swirling around our heads. I imagine eyes darting back and forth. People and algorithms demanding our attention. Something sour sits at the back of the throat and in the pit of our stomachs. You want to scream, “STOP!” and turn your face away from it all. You pine for some sense of normalcy and calm.

Before I heard the news of the shooting on Saturday, I smiled to myself as I recalled a conversation with my son earlier that day. There was something in his tone that reminded me of his face when he was toddler, of the sound of his giggles, the joy in his unstable run with his arms stretched out behind his back, as I chased after him. His chicklets, as the dentist used to describe his little teeth, exposed for all to see.

He was excited about his new job as an associate attorney with the Alameda Public Defender service. He talked about what he hoped to do as a public defender, his anticipation of having his own caseload, of doing some good in a system where good is often under assault.

I heard all the words, beamed with pride that he has finally landed, but my ears focused on the sound – his tone – not the words. This was my baby.

Time is ruthless in its indifference. We cling to what we have and what we remember. And as we age our grip tightens, because even though you are slowing down, life moves at an unsettling pace. Your parents, if you are blessed to still have them around, once indefatigable are now fragile and vulnerable. Your children grow up and start their own lives. Photos languish in drawers. Some memories fade. Regrets linger.

But there are moments that trigger memories that are etched in your DNA. Sounds that remind you of the beauty and innocence of your baby. I can hear when he’s sad or worried. I know the sound when he is teasing me. I recognize the slump in the shoulders or the distant eyes when he is doubting himself.

But that sound of joy, my God, takes me back to when he was a little baby in his bouncy chair. I would pull him close to my face and make some silly sounds, and he would laugh a full belly laugh. A bit of heaven. That’s what I heard and felt when he expressed his excitement about the new job.

And then the nastiness of the world intruded.

I know we will be swamped with the news about the shooting, about Trump, about the damn chaos that overruns everything. But I am going to hold tight to the reminder: to the joy in my baby’s voice amid the cacophony of these maddening days.

Thanks for reading A Native Son! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Weekly Wrap Up - April 24, 2026

Eddie — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:13:29 GMT

Summary

In this Weekly Wrap Up, Eddie cautiously welcomes a three-week ceasefire extension in Lebanon, though he condemns Israel’s continued military operations and occupation of the region. Turning to a heavy domestic news cycle, he calls out the DOJ’s weaponized indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, escalating racist rhetoric from the Trump administration, and the growing pushback against the economic fallout of the Iran war. Eddie - as always - concludes by urging us to channel our outrage into collective action, calling on listeners to actively salvage American democracy by joining ongoing nationwide protests.

A Native Son

How Have Americans Celebrated Their Past? A Live Conversation with Professor Eddie Glaude, author of America, U.S.A: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversary

Weekly Wrap Up - June 19, 2026

Summary

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U.S.-Iran Agreement & Public Opinion

Suspended Talks & Regional Escalations

The Obama Presidential Center Grand Opening

The Power of Subversive Joy

Weekly Wrap Up - June 12, 2026

Summary

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Bitterness at the Bottom of the Cup

Weekly Wrap Up - June 5, 2026

Summary

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A Rememory: Ralph Yarl and America, U.S.A.

Weekly Wrap Up - May 29, 2026

Summary

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Middle East & International Conflicts

Domestic Politics & Electoral Battles

“On this Memorial Day: A Different Story”

Weekly Wrap Up - May 22, 2026

Summary

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Middle East Conflict & Israel

Cuba Tensions & Castro Indictment

Iran War & War Powers

Domestic Policy, ICE & Legal Battles

Elections & Voting Rights Protests

Vote For Us!

Weekly Wrap Up - May 15, 2026

Summary

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Middle East Conflict & Israel

US-China Relations & Global Diplomacy

Economy & Inflation

Cuba Blockade

Immigration & Border Enforcement

Voting Rights & Domestic Policy

James Baldwin, “In Search of a Majority: An Address” (1960) reprinted in NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME

James Baldwin. Everyman’s Library (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024), pp. 162-168.

Weekly Wrap Up - May 8, 2026

Summary

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Middle East Conflict & Israel

Iran War & Global Tensions

Cuba Sanctions

FBI Investigations & Political Targeting

Redistricting, Voting Rights & Domestic Policy

2026 Book Tour Dates

Name The Devil

Weekly Wrap Up - May 1, 2026

Summary

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A Shooting and a Sound

Weekly Wrap Up - April 24, 2026

Summary

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Middle East & International Conflict

Iran War & Executive Powers

Elections & Redistricting

Public Opinion & Conservative Media Criticism

Immigration Rhetoric & Diplomatic Fallout

DOJ Investigations

Labor & Protests

Live with Eddie Glaude