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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC in our spring membership drive trying to reach our goal of 10,000 donors. Thank you for being one if you can. During this drive, we're sampling from The Brian Lehrer Show bookshelf. A lot of interesting books have come out this spring, and we've invited 10 different authors to share their minds and hearts as they poured them into their books. Back with us now is Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude Jr. with his new book, We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For.

Those of you who know Eddie Glaude's work may know him as a scholar of both religion and African American studies. He's officially the James S. McDonald Distinguished University Professor at Princeton. Some of you know him as an MSNBC contributor, also an author many times over, including his bestseller from 2020 called Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, for which he was on the show.

I think this book contains some of what Eddie sees as urgent lessons for our time as well, some of which may surprise you. Again, it's called We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For. Eddie, always good of you to come on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Eddie Glaude Jr.: It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Do I understand correctly that you started writing this book back when Barack Obama was president?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Yes. The book began as a series of lectures at Harvard in 2011, and I was trying to make sense of the Obama years. I was upset, actually, that people were interpreting Obama's presidency as the fulfillment of the Black freedom struggle. I was worried about what this meant for the nature of Black politics, what it meant for the struggle for democracy itself. These were the beginnings of a series of ruminations. Out of these lectures came four books. I decided to return to them and see what they had to say. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Did you see a little too much hero worship at that time in the way people related to Obama himself?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Absolutely. I thought that the idea of Obama as the fulfillment of the struggle was heresy, A. B, it was a outsourcing, Brian, of responsibility to continue the fight. Obama, of course, was a politician. Of course, he's a very skilled politician. He, of course, represented the symbol. The symbolic significance of his presidency cannot be understated. So much more needed to be done. Of course, we saw that immediately with 2016, right?

Brian Lehrer: Right. Heroes are important, right? Obama for some, a Martin or a Malcolm, a Gandhi, pick your one. What's a healthy relationship with those heroes who you might place that label on who inspire you?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: I learned this from Ralph Waldo Emerson, reading Emerson's Representative Men. Heroes are important because they exemplify in their actions, in the way in which they go about living their lives, what we are capable of. They are exemplars of traits, of characteristics that we can evidence in our own living. Emerson has this wonderful formulation, Brian. He says that great people come to us such that even greater people can follow. I think heroes are models for courage. They're models for excellence. They're models for risk, as it were. Heroes can be distorting for democracy.

You have to be skeptical of their sustained presence, as it were. I'm more interested in the representative figures, the heroic figures than the hero herself, if that makes sense.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. You do revisit the effect, for better and worse, that you think the election and reelection of Obama may have had on Black and other politics. Can you say something about how your take on that has evolved in the eight years since he left office and was succeeded, of course, by Donald Trump?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: That's a great question. I've been worried about the narrowing of Black politics, of what constitutes legitimate forms of political dissent. What we've seen since Obama's election is a narrowing of the field. That is to say that Black politics seems to be simply a debate within the Democratic Party, within the confines and structures of the Democratic Party. Where do you fall? Are you a progressive within the Democratic Party, whatever that might register or mean or are you just simply a centrist liberal, whatever that might mean?

I keep thinking about how rich the landscape actually was in the 19th century, at the turn of the 20th century. When you think of the early 20th century, Brian, you had Black Marxists, you had Garveyites, you had NAACP folk, all of these people were actually-- Pan-Africanists would emerge in the 1930s or even earlier. There was this vibrant political debate that wasn't settled within the limits of what we might describe as Black liberalism. Since those eight years of Obama's election, I've been worried about the narrowing of what constitutes legitimate forms of Black political dissent.

Brian Lehrer: We have had the Black Lives Matter movement since 2013. I think it traces to there after the killing of Trayvon Martin and even more so after the police murder of George Floyd. Of course, it went through the 2014-2015 traumas on Staten Island, in Ferguson, Missouri, and then George Floyd. Now everything that's happening on campuses and in the streets today, that isn't Black politics explicitly, but activism isn't dead or arguably dulled, no?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: No, not at all. Not at all. When I delivered these lectures in 2011, I was thinking about what would become democracy and Black, which is this engagement with the Black Lives--

Brian Lehrer: Your other book?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Yes, which is this engagement with Black Lives Matter, the movement. Not only do we have Black Lives Matter, we also had before that, Occupy Wall Street. We have these efforts among young folk in particular, trying to imagine politics differently. Part of what I'm trying to do in this book is to open up space for that imagining to flourish, to understand its power.

You're absolutely right. I think that many young folk, understand that the world as it is, America as it currently is, is broken. Some of them are reaching for the old languages of fascism, the old languages of order, and others are reaching for languages that we know not of yet. They're futurists, as it were, and they're trying to imagine the country differently on terms that we're not familiar with. That's scaring a lot of people.

Brian Lehrer: Eddie Glaude Jr., with us, if you're just joining us. His new book, We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For. Is Ella Baker a good example from your book of someone who is not as well known as some of the men we mentioned at the top as iconic political heroes, but has come to be a hero herself to some people in this generation, but was also interested in expanding democratic participation?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: I hope so. To my mind, without Ms. Baker, the 20th century doesn't make sense. At least the 20th-century Black political movement doesn't make sense. She was a field secretary for the NAACP in the 1940s. Without that work, Bob Moses, the famed organizer from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, would not have met Amzie Moore in Mississippi, which was so important for his own development. That's because of her connections.

She was the first executive director of the SCLC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King's organization. Without her, that organization wouldn't have had-- she organized it, put in place its infrastructure. I can only imagine what she had to deal with, with all of those Black preachers. Then there's a reason why the students after the sit-ins in 1960 are organizing a conference at Shaw University in April of 1960. That's Miss Baker's alma mater.

She's behind-- to my mind, those were the shock troops of the Black freedom struggle of the 20th century. She had this philosophy that everyday ordinary people were the leaders that they've been looking for. She said a strong people doesn't need strong leaders, and that we had to insist that our salvation was actually in our hands. There's this firm belief in the capacity of everyday ordinary people that animated her politics. I think it serves as an inspiration for me, as I call all of us, Brian, to take responsibility for democracy today.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, you also refer to what you call Ella Baker's democratic perfectionism. Is that a compliment?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Absolutely. I think if we're to be the leaders that we've been looking for-- This is the kind of cliche. It might be a cliche at the heart of the book. If we are to be the leaders that we've been looking for, we have to become better people. If we're going to become better people, we're going to have to try to work to make a better world, because the world as is currently organized often gets in the way of us being better people. When I describe Ms. Baker's politics as a perfectionist politics, I'm trying to call attention to her insistence on the idea that in our efforts to make a more just world, in our struggles together, we are actually reaching for higher forms of excellences. We're trying to become better people. I think it's hard for some to wrap their minds around such an idea, but I think what we need in our current moment is the coalition of the decent. I think if we're all reaching for decency, reaching for higher forms of excellences, it requires of us to be honest with who we currently are. I got that insight, Brian from James Baldwin, actually.

Brian Lehrer: Talk more about this idea of being better people and how you mean it. Is it living an ethical life in your personal life in addition to getting constructively involved in civic life? How do you mean it?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Baldwin had this wonderful formulation, I'm paraphrasing him here. He said that the messiness of the world is in part a reflection of the messiness of our interior lives. That our refusal to deal with our own wounds, the fact that we're broken in so many ways. That's why I began the second chapter with a hurtful experience with my own father. I think part of what I'm trying to suggest here is that-- How can I put this? There's a moment in the book where I talk about James W.C. Pennington.

He was the first African American to receive an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg. He was the first African American to attend Yale University. He wrote The Fugitive Blacksmith. He says this about the institution of slavery. He said, "This vile monster, it robbed me of my education and I could never forgive it for it." That slavery got in the way of his own improvement. He said, "The only thing I wanted to do was to make myself more efficient for good."

He couldn't become the kind of person he reached for, because of the way the world was organized. It's not just simply this internal personal development thing, that we just need to work on ourselves and engage in self-care. No, no, no. Self-cultivation in pursuit of a more just world is a radical politics. As we work to become better people, Brian, we have to work to make the world better. It's not just this selfish individualistic endeavor. No. Reaching for higher excellences requires that we work for a more just set of arrangements in which we are living with other people who are doing just like we're trying to do and that has become better people.

Brian Lehrer: Let me touch on some news with you in the context of your book before you go. President Biden is giving the commencement address at Morehouse College this weekend, and HBCU, of course, at a time when Black Americans and young progressive Americans, college students on many campuses are doubting his leadership more than before. What kind of reception are you expecting, and what can Biden do to inspire them, at least to vote for him, given their doubts, but given the alternative?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Let me just say by way of full disclosure, I'm on the board of trustees of Morehouse College, and I've been in conversation with some of President Biden's, speech writers-

Brian Lehrer: I did not know.

Eddie Glaude Jr.: -around this stuff. Apart from those two roles, I think President Biden has to understand that we're in a moment where the issue of the war in Gaza is the moral question confronting this generation. I think he has to thread this needle. That is he has to give voice to the right of young people to critique him, to hold him to account, to give voice to a conception of democracy that doesn't rely on supporting what they take to be mass murder.

He also has to say-- hold him to account. I think he has to give space for that. I also think he has to say there are these fascist forces waiting in the wings that want to undermine our ability to hold each other to account, that there are these forces waiting in the wings that are not committed to democratic debate and argument, who have a whole self-view of the country that excludes them, and that's going to be hard to do. It's going to be hard to do, but he has to try to do it.

Brian Lehrer: People, of course, have different views on the Middle East, and yesterday,-

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: -the house passed a bill led by Republicans to reverse Biden's withholding of thousands of bombs for the war so he's getting it from both sides. These polls that show increased Black support for Trump, how much do you believe them, first of all, or how much do you understand whatever part of that that's real?

Eddie Glaude Jr.: I don't really give much credence to those polls particularly when we drill down and see the nature of the sample, and how many Black folk are in the sample. They've been so wrong over the last few political cycles in so many ways. I do know this, and this might be hard for some people to digest, but I think it's true that Black people, many Black people-- and I don't want to generalize here.

I think when we see the country seized by the fever dream, when we see the assault on affirmative action, the assault on voting, the assault on DEI, when we see in effect, MAGA folk losing their damn minds, and we see folk standing by quietly in the face of it, not really trying to hold them back, but complicit in their silence, then the critique is, "Here we go again." The problem isn't the loud racist, Brian. It's never been simply the loud racist. It's been in so many ways those who claim to be Liberal, who are silent in the face of them. I think that is the undertow of a certain segment of Black America, the undertow of our politics when it comes to race issues in this moment.

Brian Lehrer: Eddie Glaude Jr., Princeton professor and author now of We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For. Always appreciate when you come on the show. Thank you so much.

Eddie Glaude Jr.: Thank you so much for everything that you do, and get the bag. Get the bag.

Brian Lehrer: Eddie Glaude Jr. That was not what I expected from you on the way out the door. Thank you very much. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More to come.

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