Black Political Thought Through Turmoil

you Hello and welcome back to the African American Studies podcast. My name is Justice Wilhoyt and today I will be your host. I originally hail from Kenosha, Wisconsin and I'm a junior in the politics department. What excites me most about politics is its intersection with media and journalism and the many ways it implicates me, you and literally everyone in the country on a day to day level. As a host, I am excited to share this passion with you.

I'm looking forward to perfecting my craft as a journalist. while at the same time listening and responding to you, the listeners at home, as we engage with the issues that matter most. The forthcoming episodes of the AAS podcast will feature a range of lively candid and critical conversations with some of the leading thinkers of this moment. And this moment is a lot. I can imagine that you too have felt the weight of it.

It's defined by a damning election that has fundamentally placed the social and political fabric of this nation into question. It comes before a backdrop of multiple concurrent genocides unfolding across the globe. It comes at a time when many leaders in seats of power continue to reveal the ways in which our structures and its key players are morally bankrupt. It's a lot.

But through all of this, we aim to wrestle with these questions together, leaning on a rich tradition of Black thought that has always pushed these conversations forward. We hope that these episodes can serve as a source of moral clarity and critical thought through these times. In this episode, we sat down with Eddie S. Glod Jr., the James S. McDonald Professor of African American Studies at Princeton, and incoming AAS Professor Marcus Lee.

These thinkers have long studied and spoken out about the political state of our country, raising important questions of what our leaders ought to do for us and how we have an immense amount of power invested within ourselves. With Professor Glod being the former chair of the department and Professor Lee serving as the newest and youngest faculty member, this conversation offers a dynamic perspective.

It goes without saying this election was inspired by and perhaps made absolutely necessary because of the election. To be completely transparent, we had this conversation before the election with intentions of releasing it before results came out. We wanted to think through how we should be approaching a complicated election season full of many twists and turns, what we should be bracing for, and how to make sense of the trends we saw leading up to November 5th.

However, due to some delays, we were unable to release this conversation until now, when we have finally seen the Harris campaign fall flat and Trump enshrined himself as the next president-elect of the United States. Nevertheless, I strongly believe that Professors Glawed and Lee shared many nuggets of wisdom that are still worth seriously sitting with.

With that being said, I invite you to reflect on where we have been in our pursuit of Black political thought so we might clearly and morally move forward as our nation undergoes inevitable changes

any growing pains under the forthcoming administration, a reality that'll be the backbone of future episodes. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Thank you for sitting down with us today, Professor Lee, Professor Glawden. Honorary alumni, Colin Riggins. Thank you again. He's in our department. We love him. Thank you for letting me be an honorary African-American studies, you know, scholar, maybe not a scholar, but a student. So thank you. We're trying to poach you and bring you over.

Politics is a good argument. Maybe. But thank you for sitting down with us today. Our conversation today really is just going to be about the election with less than 40 days left to go and kind of about how did we get here? Let's get into it. So going back to a couple months ago, after that first presidential debate between President Biden and President Trump, you kind of saw public confidence in Biden start to drop. And I guess I just wanted to ask you, did you see Biden's dropout coming?

I think I saw it coming. I would also say that in some ways, I think it was a long time coming. I mean, I think that when Biden first was elected, he sort of fashioned himself as a transitional president, right? That he would set things up for the next wave of the Democratic Party. And I think that we saw perhaps maybe beginning in 2022 that public confidence in him as a leader was already dropping.

So there's this question for me about what kept him in the race so long or what kept him with his eyes on the prize for so long. Right. We can imagine another scenario in which President Biden may have, you know, sort of said in 2022, you know what, like, I'm going to finish out my term. I'm going to accomplish these goals, but I really want to see what the Democratic Party wants to do next. And so let me pass the baton. So I think for For me, it's a question about why so long, right?

And what was the final thing that made the difference? Because I don't think it was just age. Right. I think, you know, I agree with most of that. I think there was this assumption, wrong-headed, I think, that he was the only one who could beat Donald Trump because he had already beaten him. And given that the Republican Party had nominated him, I think there was some concern or worry among the political consulting class.

the Democratic Party that to have a Democratic primary, to have this debate among these folk would actually set it up for Donald Trump to be more likely than the next president of the United States. So not going through a primary, you know, he was supposedly best situated to beat him. But there was whisperings, murmurings of decline that he was a hard 80.

Right. Not an easy 80. And so there was some concern. I had, you know, for full disclosure, I've been in the White House talking with him among historians that he was sharp as a tack. And then there were moments where he wasn't. And so I think there was also some concern, not only about his decline, but some concern about, well, what do we do if he steps aside? Do we immediately go to Kamala Harris? And would that activate the kind of deep-seated racism that would then activate his base?

And so there was some real concerns about what happens if he steps aside. You can't just jump over to the vice president, although some people were saying, let's have it open. So it was a really kind of complicated moment that crystallized when he immediately walked onto the stage during the debate. Everyone knew something. What do you think it says that he did bow out? What do think his legacy will be now? And if he didn't bow out, what do you think his legacy would have been?

I think that's a good question. mean, and I think it's one that's hard to answer right now because I think that the fate of this election will partially determine what his legacy will be. I think that there's this sort of rush to frame him as this really, really consequential president. And I think that that rush partly reflects this anxiety that he will go down as a president who was failing for a couple of years and then eventually bowed out of the election.

So to me, it's not clear what his legacy will be. But I think that that question is really important in part because I think that part of what Kamala Harris is reckoning with is this need to distinguish herself from Joe Biden while also trying not to tarnish his legacy, right? So she has to position herself both as the next page candidate, but also as the candidate who represents the importance of Biden's administration.

And so I think that question is really being actively worked out right now in the campaign. Indeed, indeed. I mean, she's a sitting vice president. she can't distance herself from policies that she's a part of in some way. I think, you know, I mean, we can say something just about human beings and particularly about politicians, right? Whether it's consequential or not, politicians don't do this typically, right? The idea of stepping down from being the most powerful man in the world.

We can read it as a selfie facing gesture or, you know, a sacrificial gesture, or we could read it as reading the tea leaves, right? That the monies, the dollars had dried up. The major donors said, we're not going to support your presidency, your candidacy. We're gonna...

only fund downstream or down ballot campaigns. And so in some ways he was forced to make the decision and in other ways he made the decision. So as a politician, it's unusual. So we have to give him credit in that regard. But in terms of the legacy of his presidency, it's not going to be reducible to that one act. It's just a lot of things happening from COVID policy to Gaza, the policy in Gaza, to the policy.

from the ways in which the infrastructure bill was constituted to the failures of Build Back Better, the initial plan to what he's going to do with regards to Israel's approach to Lebanon and to the Houthis and others. And so that's going to take that judgment historically will look at the wide sweep of his four years in office. And we'll see what happens. You talked earlier about how lot of people had put faith in President Biden because he was the only one to beat Trump.

Back in 2016, Hillary Clinton tried to beat Trump. That was not successful. So what is it about the power of putting a Democratic nomination back to a woman again? I mean, we now have Vice President Harris. Why are the stakes so differently? One thing that I've recognized is I feel like Vice President Harris with this nomination, she hasn't necessarily been so historical about it and recognize the national presidents or the international presidents that she's about to set.

Why do you think she hasn't been talking so much about her identity in a way that maybe was different from Clinton or different from Obama? Well, let me just say this. You know, I think it's an overstatement on the part of the Biden administration to talk about that he was the only one to Donald Trump. If we remember the campaign of 2020, right? I mean, there were practical considerations. It wasn't like the electorate was just kind of jumping head over heels about Biden's presidency.

It was a pragmatic choice. And if it wasn't for James Clyburn in South Carolina and black voters making a pragmatic decision. Do we want to make a bet on this progressive agenda of Bernie Sanders and the like, or do we just go down this pragmatic line? So with the understanding that he was just going to be a placeholder, a transitional figure, right? So I think it's a misreading of the 2020 election in that.

As opposed, I mean, with regards to Vice President Harris, I would be interested to hear what Professor has to say about that. You know, there are a number of ways of reading it, right? One is a kind of old strategy of kind of erasing racial specificity as a way of making the electorate more comfortable. We saw this in the 90s with black elected officials from

Cory Booker on down to Obama in 2008. Or we could read it in a different sort of way, right? Not so much making oneself, watching one's face blank as James Baldwin would say, in order to make you feel comfortable. But we could also say that she been there done that, right? You have, we've had a black candidate who became the president. We had the first woman nominee for major. political party, been there, done that. I am who I am. I don't need to billboard it.

And so it's, you know, we're both Morehouse men. And it's not like you walk around Morehouse just, you know, declaring, you know, I'm a black man and Morehouse, you're just like oxygen, you just be it. And so, you know, she's a Howard graduate. And so a generous reading, although I know there's politics going on, it's just, she's just inhabiting a body. She just being who she is. And she doesn't have to defend it or billboard it. She just, she just needs to be.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to go back to your, first part of your question about, about Biden, I mean, I would say one thing I would say will be the legacy of this or, is the thing that we are facing now is this sense within the democratic party that intra-party competition is connected to failure. That if actually people compete for votes among Democrats, the party will fail. And so there is this insistence that we need to quash all intra-party competition. There can be no competitors, right?

There is only Joe Biden. This is the only way, right? And in that context, we are always voting against something and hardly ever for something. So I think that this point about the overstatement of Biden's pragmatism is really important because what happens when we overstate it is that we get this sense that there is only one way to win an election. There's only one way to turn people out.

And that is to say that the alternative is so bad that we just have to do this thing, even if you disagree with this person on however, whichever policy initiatives. So that's one thing I really would like to see the Democratic Party turn around on that. But, know, to your point about Kamala Harris, I'm inclined to agree. that I think that she is letting identity, let's say, speak for itself. You she, you can see it in the mobilization.

She's not talking about identity, but you know, in the immediate aftermath of her rise, we saw black men for Harris, black women for Harris, white men for Harris, you know, so on and so forth. So we see the proliferation of these sort of identitarian claims about her importance and her historic rise.

I think that the issue that she is facing in terms of discussing identity is one that is longstanding, which is that to the extent that she does discuss identity, she does not sort of disclose herself as a universal candidate. This is the issue that Shirley Chisholm faced in 1970s, So we saw her, I mean, I was really stunned by this a couple of weeks ago, but we saw her do the interview with Oprah. And she said during the interview, someone walks into my house, they're going to get shot. Right.

And then she framed it as a blunder, like, I shouldn't have said that. Kamala Harris, like you are a person that thinks about everything that you say. And in fact, in maybe two interviews before that, she said on stage, I was a prosecutor. So I know the power of the tongue. I know that what I say can mean someone's freedom or, you know, their imprisonment. Right.

So when you've sat in front of Oprah in front of thousands of people, you didn't accidentally say that I'm bringing up that moment to say that I think that she is really sort of invested in appealing to some invisible middle, right? The middle, everything. it gets on my nerves to be honest with you. mean, particularly with the last, I mean, the last speech when she went to Arizona to give the immigration speech in a moment when nativism is spiking.

to engage in that Clinton triangulation and try to take an issue from the Republican Party and make it your own by way of, with the aim of appealing to those disaffected Reagan Democrats, the so-called middle, right? When in fact what you're doing is moving the embers around, which could easily ignite. And we see it just recently with Donald Trump's talk about Springfield and Aurora and They're coming into your kitchens and they will slice your throats.

And what does it mean to enter into that debate on those terms? in light of the rhetoric of the invasion, to use Representative Johnson and Senator Reid's language of these aliens who are infecting the bloodstream of the nation, as it were, not that language, but to argue around immigration. as a problem in the way that we do is to concede to the framing of the immigration issue that the Republicans put forward. And that can only exacerbate the problem.

But this ongoing appeal to this invisible middle, this center just hamstrings it all. And I think we have to talk about it politically. mean, not to anticipate your questions, Justice, but I imagine that part of this conversation will be about race. And Kamala Harris is running for a position for which if she wins, the entire nation will be her constituents.

There is this enduring question that reemerges over and again about what sort of racial discourse the average white voter can actually tolerate. And the fact that she's appealing

to said voter and also largely unwilling to even utter the word racism, I think speaks not just to her unwillingness to do that, but it actually speaks to just how impoverished our discourses of race actually are today, right? Where we really just can't, in 2024, we really can't talk about race, right?

And to the extent that race is talked about, it's either talked about in these sort of inflammatory terms by those on the right who are, you know, talking about Haitian immigrants, so on and so forth, or those on the left just avoid race altogether, right? So then are we left with any sort of critical language with which to think about race relations today?

I want to go back to your point, Professor Lee, about intra-party competition in terms of on the Republican side, because I think you're seeing with V.B. Harris, Republicans for Harris, right? In a way that you've never seen it before. Basically, just because of who President Trump is and how he's created a divide within the Republican Party, how much do you think that'll hurt them, this election, even in spite of them getting more black Republicans in a way?

How much do you think that'll hurt them, this election, and going forward to 26 and so forth? How much will it hurt the Republican Party? I think that's a good question. mean, but I think that Trump's strategy is about appealing to the base, right? I mean, in some ways, I think that he'd like the sort of Mitt Romney Republican. He is not thinking about that person much at all.

And in fact, I think that he is sort of making this bet that if he gets turnout, maximum turnout among his base, then it just won't matter if those in the middle the invisible middle will go for Kamala or not. Now, you know, I think that, you know, we have to narrow this conversation to specific states, like will it matter in Pennsylvania? Will it matter in North Carolina? So on and so forth.

But I think that there's something to be said about the nature of a strategy, which is to over and again appeal to the base and to move rightward over and again, whereas, you know, we see Democrats also moving rightward actually in response, right? Moving to the middle. And so there's something about, you know, if we take away the normative parts of this conversation, there's something about the extent to which the far right has actually sort of gotten some electoral responses from the party.

that is really significant in ways that's different from progressives who increasingly, I would say, are marginalized by the Democratic Party and are thought to be, you know, in some cases expendable. mean, I think that's absolutely right. And I think there is a kind of calculation that the Mitt Romney types will come home at the end of the day because they can't find themselves voting for a Republican. even remember, Mitt Romney has not come out and endorsed Kamala Harris at all.

mean, Dick Cheney, my god, and Liz Cheney and those folks. But there's a sense in which the idea of being a Republican goes beyond just simply a political ideology. It's an identity. It's an existential position. So you can bank on those folks coming home eventually. And then your task is to get those low-propensity white voters to turn out, because they're looking at the numbers and they're saying there more of us that don't vote than them that don't.

And so if we can get more of these low propensity white voters to turn out by stoking grievance and hatred, by claiming that we're going to return the country to you, then that's the strategy. And that's the strategy that got him into the White House. And that's the strategy that led many Republicans to hand the party over to him, because they saw, given the demographic shifts, that they couldn't win a popular election based on the old strategy.

So I think, but again, he's lost repeatedly since 2016. And a lot of that is outside of him being on the ballot, but when he's not on the ballot, they don't turn out. So we're gonna see come November, whether or not that strategy will hold, whether or not he will actually turn out all of these folks. But I think there is an underlying assumption that even if he doesn't, they're gonna cheat anyway. They're going, you got to count the votes.

You're to have to engage in voter suppression, voter nullification. know, Mark Elias has been screaming from the top of his lungs about what they're doing to impact how we count the vote. So it's not even just simply a matter of who comes to vote, who turns out to vote. It's how they even process the voting. And how do we prepare if a candidate is not willing to accept? How do we prepare for another cycle? This is going to be even more intense. Right.

mean, this is not going to be what we saw in 2016 where he was the sitting president then justify Jan six. There's going to literally be a denial of the legitimate. If, if Kamala Harris win a denial of her legitimacy as the incoming president. And, and the question becomes, what will that look like on the ground? So whether he wins. or whether she would buckle up. Yeah, agreed.

A big topic that we talked about this election already was the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, largely due to the terrorist attacks that happened on October 7th last year, coming upon one year anniversary this week. This past spring on our campus, actually right outside this building, we saw lot of Princeton students get engaged in a lot of protest. And I guess I just wanted to ask, how did you make of it? mean, both of your work, you kind of talked.

about Professor Gladhow, power and leadership can enact political change. And you, Professor, you talk about how like black queer students, they're able when they're participating in activism and stuff, they're able to change the stereotypes and generalizations made about them. So how did you make about the encampment overall? And how did you feel about students if they didn't identify as Israeli or Palestinian?

How did you feel that they were advocating for the betterment of other people or for peace relations to come about? Well, I was I was thoroughly excited about what I saw. A lot of students from African American studies were in leadership, standing in the best of our tradition. I think the issue's complex in a number of different ways, and in a number of ways it's simple. And part of what folk were trying to do, at least put in context, the horrors of October 7th and the horrors of what followed.

and not only the horrors of what followed, but the historical context, which set the stage for what followed. And part of what we saw in the midst of that is this odd moment, and I say that generously, where the critique of Gaza, the critique of Israel's incursion in Gaza, became the basis for a critique of quote unquote wokeness.

The criticism of DEI merged with the criticism of students in the encampments that somehow this was a result of woke curricula, radical left-wing professors teaching that Israel was a colonial occupying power. And by virtue of this fact, these students who had not been taught the classics were ignorant of history, quote unquote, and were behaving accordingly.

And so we saw this weird allegiance, which actually reveals something that has been at work for a while, right, where you had certain defenders of Israel, right, joining with the Bill Ackman's and the Christopher Ruffo's and critiquing students, black students and students of color, Palestinian students, and so-called virtue signaling white students. And so what, so The encampments were important because this is the moral issue of this moment.

But it was also important because it revealed in very clear ways, right, the divides, the fragments, the fragmentation, the political currents that define the moment. I think that's right. I mean, and I would also say, you know, I think that in the immediate aftermath of some of the encampments, I think some students were demoralized in some ways.

definitely demoralized by university responses, but maybe demoralized in the sense that, you feel like there's this immovable object that you're trying to do something about. But I would say that, you know, we have to think about the outcomes of that wave, this ongoing wave of student protest activity in different ways.

You know, one of the things that I tracked was the extent to which the encampments really forced a reckoning with issues with regard to Israel and Palestine in ways that no other wave of protest had before. The reason I'm saying it that way is because I remember that when the encampment was first formed at Columbia, the news coverage of it was awful. I remember watching Inside Politics on CNN with Dana Bash, who might watch off. no.

And the immediate sort of response to it was to completely demonize the students. They didn't do any interviews with any of the protest protesters. No one in the encampment was actually interviewed by any journalist. It was just a complete, like, this is the worst thing that we have seen on this camp campus in so long. What I've tracked since then though, is the evolution of media ties discourse. about Gaza and about Israel, right?

Where, you know, the shift is subtle, but I think it's a shift, right? And the way that even the mainstream media talks about this issue, right? It doesn't really strike the same way. The coverage is not actually the same. So I think that there's something important to be said about the extent to which the encampments really forced all stakeholders involved and the media to reckon with what was happening in ways that they wouldn't have otherwise, right?

To actually finally ask students, wait, what do you want? Wait, what is happening over there? Wait, what is the history of this thing, right? I think that that was extremely important. And so, you know, I know that students can sort of feel like we did this thing, maybe the university didn't change. has an effect.

And the last thing I'll say about it is that I was listening to Democracy Now and the co-host was involved in the earlier wave of student protests at Columbia in, what was that, that 68? he also was talking about, you know, being denied a degree and so on and so forth. But, you know, he was a part of this really formative moment, right? Where he made this statement that was ultimately historic, right, about the Vietnam War and about the US's involvement in it, right.

So this is not to just put what he did on the pedestal, but to say that the sorts of change that students want to see, think, happens over a long period of time. And so there are many different measures of progress I think we have to pay attention And this is particularly important in this moment now when we have at the national level, national election site. Baby boomers are not the majority of voters anymore.

And so when you think about the combination of millennials and Gen Zers and Gen Y, the nature of elections, even though the running claim is that young people don't vote, even though the evidence is trending, suggests otherwise, that what we saw with the encampments suggests that the way in which the US government policy has been thought about with regards to Israel for a generation is shifting, has shifted.

And one of the criticisms of the Biden administration is that they're actually lagging behind the shift that seems to have happened in the country broadly. It's hard to kind of hear that given cries of anti-Semitism, but it's happened. And that shift is an anti-Semitic. It's just a critique of the right return of Israel in the Likud party and Netanyahu's role.

I mean, matter where you stand on this issue, no matter what your position may be, it seems to me reasonable to conclude that Netanyahu is a bad faith actor. And based upon that, a ceasefire and an arms embargo should take place. precisely because he's not a good act, good faith actor. And you could have different motivations driving that claim, but you actually meet on the basis of the claim because this guy is not a good faith actor. Colin, I want to bring in your perspective a little bit.

You've been sitting comfortably over there. As somebody who was on the front lines of this encampment, what did you take away from it? Just a general question to all of you, but specifically you.

How is participating in these kind of acts or participating in these encampments covering them even, can that show and represent privilege? Honestly, a very candid response, and it's going to be a bit photographic because I think that's how I was seeing the encampment unfold, is I really had to reckon with what you place faith in, if that makes sense. And I think that the issue is a lot of us know these things we're talking about to be true.

We understand the significance of supporting life in Gaza. We understand that this is decades and decades of turmoil. We understand that the tradition that we think within, which is Black Studies, is fundamentally constituted, I think, by an international perspective.

But I think what I realized is as we're doing these acts, and I think trying to express that to a more like outward public, taking photographs, showing people evidence that I think defines what this movement is and what we stand for. The inability of those materials to do any sort of shifting, I think to me that was the most humbled I have been as somebody who places so much personal faith in I think a lot of these traditions.

But that's all to say, I don't think that has led to despair in any sort. of thing, I think it's taken a lot more accountability on my behalf and asking ways to push these traditions further innovate iterate because I don't think we're at a time where we can just use the models that have existed in the past and expect them to work today. We need to be able to learn to yeah, just be innovative and keep pressing forward so we don't despair because I think despair is always looming.

especially amongst those who care. How did the encampment represent privilege from more of a not being on the front lines, but how do you think it represents? Because I think, especially in the black community at that time, there was a call to come to the encampment, even though it was during such a very academic period of time when things are rounding about. Why do you think that some people are like, if you don't come, you're not enough, you're not representing the cause. What does that do?

Does that hurt a movement, or does it push it forward? Well, I you know, I think it hurts the movement and it's actually lazy because you got to do got to do organized. You just can't engage in virtue signal. Right. You have to do hardcore organized. And that is it's not just, you know, the fact that you're not at the encampment somehow signals that kind of a bad character or bad politics.

It's incumbent upon people who are engaged in political action to understand the necessary work of of convincing others to join you, not just assuming that they will.

And you know, when I remember giving a talk, I think I was at UC Davis, and it might have been UC Davis, and these first gen students, and you know, some of them first gen students and some of them, their parents aren't documented, they're not documented, and they're feeling the pressure of their colleagues to come join the encampment, and they're trying to make choices, right? And they're trying to make choices in relation to their abuela and this, right?

And so, and that understanding that suggests to me that you have a flat understanding of what politics is actually entail, what organizing actually entail, because we're all differently positioned, right? There are different costs that are being asked of people, right? So what does it mean for the Department of African American Studies to orient itself in a particular sort of way when African American Studies suddenly is under assault? How do you think institutionally?

How do you move strategically and tactically in light of that environment? And so part of the difficulty is understanding that politics entails more than just simply a declaration of one's position, right? Of putting on the dressing of progressive politics or radical garb, as it were, right? It's all about the doing, the substance of the doing.

and the subtlety of the doing and to understand that this isn't a sprint, it's a long race. So what we wanna do, I'm just speaking from an institutional side, right? What we wanna do is continue to grow and expand to produce students who are gonna lead something like the Academy, right?

To continue to build our bibliographies and to support the context under which, continue to teach those bibliographies and support the context under which students who identify with that tradition have that tradition ready at hand in order to act in the world. And then as individuals, we can make choices in very interesting sorts of ways. So the short answer to the question is, condemning folks for making certain kinds of choices can be the easy out.

The more substantive response is to engage in the hard work of organized. I think that's right. I I would just add to that that I think political action never happens in the singular. There are many different things that people can do in part because the unfolding of the term, the sorts of domination that we are concerned with also don't happen in the singular, right?

There are many different forces that have to come together to make it possible to, you know, sort of for colonialism to flourish or mass killing to flourish. many things have to happen. So I'd say that, but I mean, more to the point in your question, you know, you asked that justice, I was thinking about the news coverage of the relative absence of encampments at HBCUs. Everyone's asking, right, why aren't students at Howard or Morehouse or Spelman protesting in the same way?

What's happening there? And this was especially the case at Morehouse. because Biden was giving the commencement speech. So there's a question about whether or not students at Morehouse, many of whom are first generation, including myself, would actually abandon their plans to go to graduation in protest of Joe Biden speaking there. it was a tough calculation, personal calculation for many people.

I I can think of myself when I was 22, graduating from Morehouse, I had maybe 15 people come to my graduation. If I told them a week before that I wasn't coming, I think, I don't know if I would be sitting here today. I think that I would be chained up or something. I'm not sure. But that's not to say that I wouldn't have done it if I was a 22 year old student. That's not to say that I would have shied away from it, but just to say that there's context there.

And there are reasons why people make the choices that they make. And I think this point about organizing is correct. You know, I was, you know, I had to cover, was, because I'm on the board of Morehouse and I was in conversation with a lot of those students who were thinking about a protest, right?

And, you know, one of the things I, I insisted upon, just as I talked with some of the students that here at Princeton is that we don't engage in a mindless imitation of the six and what we take to be. that form of protest, right? Let's be creative and imaginative in how we do this and understand the cost. Just because you protest doesn't mean the institution is gonna coddle. So if you're do this, understand that there are consequences that follow.

But I also worried about black people becoming the face of anti-Semitism. Because one of the ways in which the discourse of anti-Semitism works in the United States, at least over the course of

of my adult life is that when antisemitism spikes, black people become the face of it in the country. know, fair con. You know, we can go down to Jesse Jackson, and then wokeism and the like, right? And in some ways, it's functioning. It's an interesting kind I have to think about this a little bit more carefully, but it's an interesting way in which whiteness is reinscribed by way of making black folk the face of antisemitism. in interesting sorts of way.

And so part of the question I asked the students is that, you want Morehouse to become the face of this? And so they had to make calculations in relation to their own stewardship of the institution, their own sense of responsibility to Morehouse and what it meant for Morehouse to be the face of this and the kinds of pressures that would come our way when we don't have a billion dollar plus endowment and the like. And so the students made some interesting decisions.

But again, they were worried that that cop city energy was going to show up. And I was actually excited about the cop city energy showing up. they decided to express it in a very different way.

I would add, you know, mean, part of the reason why Professor Glaude and I like talking about Morehouse is because we went, but the other part of the reason why we like talking about Morehouse is that in many ways, people's relationships to Morehouse serve as a sort of as exemplum of people's relationships to black communities generally. And by people, I mean like elected officials, so on and so forth, right?

So the way that people engage institutions like Morehouse, House, Howard, Spelman, so on and so forth, often reflect general patterns of how people represent and engage black communities, which is not to say that Morehouse students are representative of black people, but just to say that there is a set of pattern, right? I'm setting things up that way because one of the things that I was, I was less anxious about this point about antisemitism, but I think you're right.

But I was concerned just to bring us back to the election more squarely, that this was another moment in which an elected official was using Morehouse for symbolic value in order to escape other forms of criticism. In a moment when everyone is really concerned about Biden's supposed mental decline, his lack, the lack of confidence people were investing in him, his sort of stance toward the war on Gaza. He goes to Morehouse, right?

And it's like, I'm going to make this speech in front of black men. And it was going to be a symbol of something. So the thing that I was concerned with was the extent to which Morehouse students and black people more broadly would be conscripted into this major act of symbolic representation, right? to say, despite all of the criticisms that you have of my administration, look, I'm coming to engage black students.

I also took issue then with the university, not the university, the college's response to the criticism, because part of what they said was that, you know, we're gonna set up, this is gonna be constructive engagement with the president, so on and so forth. And I was like, Biden isn't coming to give a speech and then take questions from the audience. He's going to come give a speech and then he's going to leave. Right.

So there's something to me about extent to which the commencement speech reflected this sort of, let's say, objectification of black communities where like a person can just go with, you know, black people standing behind them, black people standing in front of them and just sort of offer these rhetorical flourishes that in some ways, detract attention from the substantive issues that those people might be concerned with. Of course, behind him was the flag of the Congo flag, the flag of Congo.

In front of him were students who stood up and turned their backs. And before that, that baccalaureate was an intense critique of the president, of the Biden's administration's position. So there was this kind of, you're right, it wasn't dialogical in the moment, but they had created this dialogical context for the students in interesting sorts of ways.

So I say that not as a defensive administration, but as a description of what was happening on the ground, because the flag behind him, as folk were focusing on Gaza, to have the Congolese flag behind him was to foreground another issue that was particularly relevant for the black folk.

on the ground there because there's a sense in which, you know, we are overrun with empathy and outrage with regards to what's happening in Gaza, but we're silent with regards to what's happening to these black bodies in Haiti and the Congo and the like, or relatively silent. And so it was this kind of interesting moment there. This is going to be a little bit of a two-part, so I apologize. We're going to go into the role of the media.

Sometimes, you know, lot of things happen about the dangers and disinformation that can come as a result of media.

But also, Professor Glad, you make many appearances on media. So I guess how do you kind of go about that? I think with this election cycle, a lot of times there's been a constant thing of mainstream media outlets to try to find black men and talk to them about the election only in black barber shops. That's the only place that you can meet them where they're at.

why is it important to not listen to mainstream, I mean to view non-mainstream media outlets and also like What is the power of media and should it still be so influential in politics or does it need to kind of detract? Professor Glott is looking at me, so I'll go first. Yeah, what's the power of media?

mean, again, I think I would say that the thing that I keep track of with regard to the media is, again, the extent to which the discussions on race are often just so, I don't know, vapid or defanged, right? The way that people talk about black communities, and the issues that are important to black communities are odd because on one hand we often see, this concern, for example, with, with black turnout, right?

So in terms of media representation, there is this concern about, you know, will, will black people vote? Will black men vote for Trump? You know, so on and so forth, but there's no there often isn't really a way to engage such topics beyond what I would call a really trite representations of those groups. Right. So I think that this is implicit in your question, right.

You think black men think of a barbershop, you know, like, let's go dribble a basketball with the, you know, camera and then, you know, run up on some black men and ask them what they think about, you know, voting or who they'll vote for.

So I think that you know, the one thing I just say about the media generally speaking is that it really has had a tough time grappling with the realities of black life beyond these sort of surface representations of, you know, different communities that help constitute black people generally speaking.

So then I do think, like you're saying, it's important to look to other outlets to see other sort of narrations of What black life entails but but I think it's but I'll turn the attention to the expert I'm not an expert I think it's really important for us to understand the role of the fourth estate in a vibrant functioning democracy So if the press isn't disseminating information such that Everyday ordinary people can make informed decision about their lives

then the very notion of democracy is undemied. Because the idea of self-governance is called into question if we don't have the resources, the information requisite to make informed decision, which is moved about by force. So just as we talk about the flood of corporate money into our politics, the corporatization of the media, mainstream media, is really important for understanding how information is disseminated.

What do we do with know, corporations who are trying to make profit, right, with the dissemination of news, where news becomes entertainment, profit making, as well as the source of information for democratic flourish. Those things run into each other over and over again. So part of what I try to do when I'm on these platforms is to try to figure out, given the constraints, how do I bring the full weight of my bibliography to bear on a question within the confines of a soundbite?

How can I shift the center of gravity of the discussion by bringing in or asking a question or bringing in material or providing a framing that forces a shift in perspective? So we're not just simply dribbling a basketball or going to a basketball, going to a barber shop and thinking about black folk as these flat characters in an Abbott novel, Flatland or something, right? Worried about needles, as it were, or lines. So that's the first thing.

But I think also what we have to understand is the fragmentation of the media landscape. But even that fragmentation is shadowed by corporate interests. So we go on social media platforms like X or threads or Instagram or whatever, and those are owned by corporations. And so we need to understand it even though there's a kind of leveling that happens there, but there's still profit making driving it. Same thing with Substack, right?

But what you get are these various other platforms that give you a way to either A, retreat into your silos and have your own opinions affirmed, right? Or retreat into different kinds of information streams that allow you to, what, engage in a 360 around a particular problem that's in front of you. And I think that's really important. Given the way the news functions in our country, it becomes incumbent upon us if we're going to be informed.

to really cross reference our information resources, right? To really begin to think about, right? If I hear this on MSNBC, need, what does this look like on common dreams.org? What does that look like with regards to all the folk that I'm following? What does that look like with regards? So to really cross reference so that you can actually be as informed as you can about the issues. But we can never lose sight of the fact that corporations have not only impinged on our politics, right?

the way our politics, elections function. You just think about the amount of money that Kamala Harris's campaign has raised in such a short period of time and what could be done to address social ills with that kind of money. And then you think about the kind of money that's being made off the spectacle of Donald Trump, off the spectacle of the politics that come in tow. I mean, this is our moment. This is the context of our troubles.

And so we have to figure out how we're going to find our feet. The one thing I really just wanted to ask was you were asked an interview recently by Robert Jones Jr. about who are your people? are the people that get you through your everyday lives, who get you through this election? Or was it your interview? I don't know whose interview it was. sorry. I thought so. Who gets you through this election?

And what is something that you look forward to or excited to see in the last 40 days until election day? Hmm. OK. Who gets me through?

I would say friends and family. I think that that's maybe a hackneyed response, but I think it's true, right? When the news drives me crazy and it drives me crazy every day, it seems. I think it's important, especially in this media scape that we're facing, to have a community of people to ground you and to sort of tease out what's good and what's bad and what you're hearing on a daily basis. And I think the thing that I'm looking forward to most.

think elections can be depressing and daunting and this one especially so, but I think they also can be exciting, right? I think elections always have this capacity to bring people into politics in ways that they may otherwise have not been a part of politics. And so I'm really interested to see what this wave of energy that is following Kamala Harris, what it means over the next 40 days for all sorts of people, right?

And the extent to which that sort of enlarges our thinking about what politics should entail. So. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I have my substack of Native Sun. I end my weekly wrap ups by saying, pull the people you love closer. Right. Because we're in a moment where those folk are really important. And so what keeps me going are the folks that I love and how to love. in a world that seems to be so loveless.

And you know, there's a faith that, you know, I have, you know, Baldwin, James Baldwin expressed kind of beautifully that human beings are at once miracles and disaster. So I have an unabiding faith. I mean, an abiding faith. You edit that, Elliot. I have an abiding faith in the capacity of human beings to be other. You know, and I really believe that. I hold that true. So my faith is in us, even when I'm disappointed. My faith is always in.

And so I'm really interested in what direction the politics will go. If she wins, what will we do? Have we learned the lessons of the Obama years? I hope we have. If she wins, what will we do? Will we demand a more progressive agenda? Will we demand a change of course? Or will we submit to the logics of of a political class that says that we can only do X, Y, and Z. Will we try to protect her left flank and her right flank and not engage in a wholesale critique of policies we disagree with?

I want to see where we go, whether or we're actually changing or shifting the center of gravity of our politics, because I think that's what we desperately want. Professor Glad, Professor Lee, thank you so much for sitting down with us today. From Morrison Hall, this is Justice for the Word. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope that this conversation showed that there was a lot to talk about and a lot that voters had to think about when deciding how to cast their ballot.

In many ways, this call to critically think through our political future together has only heightened due to the winding road that we now know lays ahead. It has become increasingly crucial that we continue to bear witness and speak out about the values that matter. And I cannot wait to continue doing so as one of your hosts of the AAS Podcast.

Behind the scenes, have recent AAS alumni Colin Riggins, serving as the new associate producer, our executive producer Elio Leo, the Department of African American Studies computing support specialist. Artistic and creative support was provided by Anthony K. Givens Jr., our communications and media specialist.

Also, a special thanks to the chair of our department, Tara Hunter, our department manager, April Peters, our events coordinator, Dion Worthy, and our academic and administrative coordinator, Shonda Carmichael and our undergraduate and graduate minister Sonja Hollis. Until next time, peace.