The throughline of American history is the “value gap,” or the belief that white people matter more than others, argues Eddie S. Glaude Jr, and this belief disfigures our character and distorts who we purport to be.

Today, Dr. Glaude joins Allen on the show to talk about our current racial and political moment and the need for a moral reckoning through the lens of his new book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.

From the interview: “Every generation has to deal with this ritual of grief and suffering and Black death, and now it’s on loop with this video footage. You think about George Floyd’s children. Some people have the luxury of watching those 8 minutes and 46 seconds clutching their pearls, saying how terrible it is, and then going about their day. We have to then look at our children, look at our sons and daughters, look at our loved ones, worry about them, carry that strength in our bodies. And then we have to go to work.”

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is a professor of African American studies at Princeton University. He is the author of many books, including In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (Broadway Books, 2016), and Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (Crown, 2020).