![]() Quoting Baldwin again, he said the answer to those fears “is found in the love of others. … We’re going to have to run toward our fears.” Because if we refuse to admit the lies that have in so many ways shaped our formation, then we’re permanently docked in the station. “We have to tell ourselves the truth about what we’ve done and who we are.” To admit that, he said, “is to set the preconditions in place for us to be otherwise, for us to grow. Glaude said that “we are still in those difficult days.” Echoing James Baldwin, he said that our task is “to tell as much of the truth as we can bear,” and then a little more. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.” “We have to grapple with the late King,” said Glaude, “who looked at the ugliness of America squarely in the face and struggled to invoke a vision of how we might, could, be otherwise.” In a speech the night before his assassination, King said “We’ve got some difficult days ahead, but it doesn’t matter with me now because I’ve been to the mountaintop and I’ve seen the promised land. Recalling a speech by King, Glaude said that in the years soon after emancipation, “a kind of willful amnesia enabled the country to turn its back on the promise of emancipation and to reject the idea that Black people could be full-fledged citizens.” And now, “here we are in 2022, still fighting over the kind of story we tell ourselves about how we arrived at this moment.” Attempts to restrict teaching about the nation’s history of racism, and attempts to remove books that make some people uncomfortable about that history, shows “the nation doubling down on its ugliness.” … If we don’t tell the truth about what happened, about what is happening, if we try to forget or ignore what we have been through, we condemn ourselves to a certain extent to being moved about by the ghosts that haunt us, and left to wallow in a sea of lies.” History matters, he said, “because we carry it within us. If we are to imagine this nation anew, we have to look at the ugliness of who we are, who we’ve been, squarely in the face.” One that must confront who we are, if we are to be otherwise. … Safety is found in the stories that tell us that America is an example of democracy achieved, that ours is the shining city on the hill.”īut, he added, “there is a different story. Many refuse to acknowledge “the ghosts of our past.” He said that “ours is a moment when many are running away from history. Some are clamoring for the “good old days” when the country looked a certain way, and divisions between various groups of people in the country today are in stark evidence. America is changing, and the substance of that transformation isn’t quite clear.” Many people are afraid of the changing demographics of the nation, what has been described as “the browning of America,” and of cultural transformations they see taking place, he said. 10 event that “ours is a moment shadowed by fear and ghosts. Glaude, a prominent political commentator and author of books including “Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul,” said at the Feb. ![]() Donnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University, invoked King’s memory in an impassioned appeal for confronting the realities of the United States’ history and the country’s racist beliefs and actions, in order to achieve a more just and equitable nation. At this year’s annual MIT celebration of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr, keynote speaker Eddie S.
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