A challenge: can we learn to value all of us?

“Race isn’t about black people, necessarily,” says Eddie Glaude Jr. “It’s about the way whiteness works to disfigure and distort our democracy, and the ideals that animate our democracy.”

Ezra Klein podcast

The assumptions and material consequences of unconstrained white supremacy are the subject of this 2016 book by a Princeton professor of Religion and African American Studies. Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul is a hell of an indictment of our broken core.

Dr. Glaude spells out why the national financial implosion of 2008 should properly be labeled the "Great Black Depression." Black homeowners were defrauded of the little stake they had in US prosperity though mass foreclosure on mortgages designed to fail -- profitably -- by and for the bankers. He insists this ugly outcome and government's failure to protect black victims arose from the "value gap."

We talk about the achievement gap in education or the wealth gap between white Americans and other groups, but the value gap reflects something more basic: no matter our stated principles or how much progress we think we've made, white people are valued more than others in this country, and that fact continues to shape the life chances of millions of Americans. The value gap is in our national DNA.

One of the debilitating consequences of the value gap is that black public commentators like Professor Glaude learn to modulate what they'll say.

The fear of white fear distorts black political behavior. ... I can't call Bill O'Reilly a dumbass (at least not in public or on television). No matter the horror of the moment, our anger must be overcome ...

The history of blackness in America since the civil rights struggles of the 1960s as Glaude lays it out consists of a series of destructive circumstances by which black people have been muzzled and muzzled themselves -- through hagiography that has neutered Dr. King, through cooptation by Democrats including President Obama, through neglect and destruction of black institutions including colleges and churches.

Yet Glaude comes away from this sad catalogue still hoping for a "revolution of values." The young people who rose up in Ferguson, Missouri when a white police department let Michael Brown's murdered body lie in the sun for four hours, all the Black Lives Matter eruptions, and Rev. William Barber's Forward Together "moral movement" -- these still inspire him.

A revolution of value should change what constitutes success and individual initiative. The value of human beings should never be diminished in the pursuit of profit or in the name of some ideology. ...

... Americans have to live together, in the deepest sense of the phrase -- to make a life together that affords everyone (and I do mean everyone) a real chance. This can happen only when we experience genuine connectedness, when the well-being of African Americans is bound up with any consideration the well-being of the nation. When we are not asked to disappear, and instead have the space to reach for our best selves. ...

We have to say, without qualification, BlackLivesMatter! Obviously, we know we matter. The phrase isn't about asserting our humanity to folks who deny it. The voices of our mighty dead shout back that the price of the ticket has been paid already. No. BlackLivesMatter reminds white people that their lives do not matter more than others. It is a direct challenge to white supremacy.

...In 2019, this reads as a very 2016 book, written to help black people move on from the disappointments of the Obama era into yet more US politics as usual, black erasure as usual, by white supremacy as usual. Some of it reads off center as African Americans found themselves confronting not another neoliberal, but instead a neo-Confederate Attorney General and a neo-Nazi President. (Dr. Glaude discussed some of this in the podcast quoted abve.) But the core holds. The only path forward for American democracy remains eradicating the value gap.