Black unity event addresses politics
Speaker equates Jan. 6 attack as ‘betrayal of democracy’
YOUNGSTOWN — The insurrectionist attack Jan. 6 on the U.S. Capitol was more than merely a spontaneous act by hundreds of angry and radicalized supporters of President Donald Trump, but is the newest extension of a historical pattern that dates to the 19th century, a black-studies professor and scholar contends.
“It was the latest substantiation of U.S. betrayal of democracy,” Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., chairman of Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies, said.
Glaude was the keynote speaker for Friday’s sixth annual Black Unity Conference, a two-hour webinar in which he shared his views on racial and social justice, civil rights and the Nov. 3, 2020, election. Glaude also discussed how he’s been influenced by the famous writer, playwright, essayist and activist James Baldwin, about whom he penned his latest book, “Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own,” released last June.
Sinclair College in Dayton hosted the virtual Black History Month event, and Youngstown State University’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’s Facebook page directed people to the webinar.
The passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, as well as the Reconstruction era in the mid- and late 1800s, produced a concerted attempt to attain a multicultural society after the Civil War. It also led, however, to backlash from many white farmers, plantation owners, working-class members and other elitists, along with an incursion of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865, Glaude noted.
The longtime professor, author and intellectual wove a thread through the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and connected it with several other examples of backlash against, or reversal of, blacks’ progress. They include the Compromise of 1877, which in effect settled the disputed 1876 presidential election and ended Reconstruction via awarding the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes partly in exchange for removing federal troops from Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina, all former Confederate states.
Another example of white backlash in response to blacks’ progress includes the 1917 race riots in East St. Louis, Ill., in which hundreds of blacks who fled the South as part of the Great Migration were killed. Four years later, a white mob attacked the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Okla., which was a thriving black community often known as “Black Wall Street,” and killed an estimated 300 affluent blacks on May 31 and June 1, 1921, said Glaude, who also has written extensively for the New York Times and Time magazine, and has appeared regularly on MSNBC and “Meet the Press.”
Consequently, the Capitol attack was the extension of “racial reckoning” in which the participants believed the election had been stolen, and the latest result of an underlying centuries-old assumption “that only white votes matter,” he continued.
Similarly, the Tea Party that organized shortly after President Barack Obama’s election in 2008 sprouted largely because the idea of the nation’s first black president “scared the hell out of white America,” and was the result of strains of white nationalism and white supremacy that ran through the Republican Party, Glaude noted.
“We knew that racism was driving that political thrust,” he said, adding that Trump’s presidency was largely an extension of a lineage of leaders who support white supremacy.
“This is us; this isn’t anything new,” Glaude said.
He also has spent about 30 years reading and studying Baldwin, who often painted a bleak and blunt picture of America and shattered many people’s comfortable beliefs in how the country has lived up to its ideals.
“Baldwin’s writing does not bear witness to the glory of America,” Glaude wrote in his book about the highly influential writer. “It reveals the country’s sins and the illusion of innocence that blinds us to the reality of others. Baldwin’s vision requires a confrontation with our history (with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, with whiteness) to overcome its hold on us. Not to posit the greatness of America, but to establish the ground upon which to imagine the country anew.”
news@tribtoday.com
Black unity event addresses politics
Speaker equates Jan. 6 attack as ‘betrayal of democracy’
YOUNGSTOWN — The insurrectionist attack Jan. 6 on the U.S. Capitol was more than merely a spontaneous act by hundreds of angry and radicalized supporters of President Donald Trump, but is the newest extension of a historical pattern that dates to the 19th century, a black-studies professor and scholar contends.
“It was the latest substantiation of U.S. betrayal of democracy,” Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., chairman of Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies, said.
Glaude was the keynote speaker for Friday’s sixth annual Black Unity Conference, a two-hour webinar in which he shared his views on racial and social justice, civil rights and the Nov. 3, 2020, election. Glaude also discussed how he’s been influenced by the famous writer, playwright, essayist and activist James Baldwin, about whom he penned his latest book, “Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own,” released last June.
Sinclair College in Dayton hosted the virtual Black History Month event, and Youngstown State University’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’s Facebook page directed people to the webinar.
The passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, as well as the Reconstruction era in the mid- and late 1800s, produced a concerted attempt to attain a multicultural society after the Civil War. It also led, however, to backlash from many white farmers, plantation owners, working-class members and other elitists, along with an incursion of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865, Glaude noted.
The longtime professor, author and intellectual wove a thread through the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and connected it with several other examples of backlash against, or reversal of, blacks’ progress. They include the Compromise of 1877, which in effect settled the disputed 1876 presidential election and ended Reconstruction via awarding the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes partly in exchange for removing federal troops from Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina, all former Confederate states.
Another example of white backlash in response to blacks’ progress includes the 1917 race riots in East St. Louis, Ill., in which hundreds of blacks who fled the South as part of the Great Migration were killed. Four years later, a white mob attacked the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Okla., which was a thriving black community often known as “Black Wall Street,” and killed an estimated 300 affluent blacks on May 31 and June 1, 1921, said Glaude, who also has written extensively for the New York Times and Time magazine, and has appeared regularly on MSNBC and “Meet the Press.”
Consequently, the Capitol attack was the extension of “racial reckoning” in which the participants believed the election had been stolen, and the latest result of an underlying centuries-old assumption “that only white votes matter,” he continued.
Similarly, the Tea Party that organized shortly after President Barack Obama’s election in 2008 sprouted largely because the idea of the nation’s first black president “scared the hell out of white America,” and was the result of strains of white nationalism and white supremacy that ran through the Republican Party, Glaude noted.
“We knew that racism was driving that political thrust,” he said, adding that Trump’s presidency was largely an extension of a lineage of leaders who support white supremacy.
“This is us; this isn’t anything new,” Glaude said.
He also has spent about 30 years reading and studying Baldwin, who often painted a bleak and blunt picture of America and shattered many people’s comfortable beliefs in how the country has lived up to its ideals.
“Baldwin’s writing does not bear witness to the glory of America,” Glaude wrote in his book about the highly influential writer. “It reveals the country’s sins and the illusion of innocence that blinds us to the reality of others. Baldwin’s vision requires a confrontation with our history (with slavery, Jim Crow segregation, with whiteness) to overcome its hold on us. Not to posit the greatness of America, but to establish the ground upon which to imagine the country anew.”