Named one of the best books of the year by Time, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune, Begin Again by Princeton University’s Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is a powerful reckoning with America’s ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race. Just as in James Baldwin’s “after times,” when white Americans met the civil rights movement’s call for truth and justice with blind rage and the murders of movement leaders, so in the current moment were the Obama presidency and the birth of Black Lives Matter answered with the ascendance of Trump and the violent resurgence of white nationalism. Glaude finds hope and guidance in Baldwin as he mixes biography – drawn partially from newly uncovered interviews – with history, memoir, and poignant analysis of our current moment to explore what we must ask of ourselves to call forth a new America.
Please note: only the Q&A portion of this program will be recorded.
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New York Times Bestselling Author & Chair of Princeton’s Department of African American Studies and one of the nation’s most prominent scholars, Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr. is an author, political commentator, public intellectual and passionate educator who examines the complex dynamics of the American experience. His writings, including Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, and his most recent, the New York Times bestseller, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own, takes a wide look at Black communities, the difficulties of race in the United States and the challenges we face as a democracy. Combining a scholar’s knowledge of history, a political commentator’s take on the latest events, and an activist’s passion for social justice, Glaude challenges all of us to examine our collective American conscience, "not to posit the greatness of America, but to establish the ground upon which to imagine the country anew."