without her. this book have happened. so thank you, hannah. thank you to my husband greg

well, i'm really honored today to talk to you, professor glaude, about this fabulous new book that you've written. we are the leaders. we have been looking for. and i think that the first place to begin this conversation on is the urgency of the moment, because so much about what you write in this book is a look back to examples of leadership. and i'm going to use a word that's a word that you don't necessarily use very often in the book, but it certainly frames the title of the book. so much of what animates this book is about leadership, and you have real concerns about

models of leadership. in the past that seem if i could put words in your mouth to be failing us in this moment. so maybe just start this conversation about what is it in this moment that has caused you to the urgency of the task of writing this particular book? well, first of all, it's such a delight to be in conversation with you. first, mohammed, and let's let's just dispense with the names of professors, and let's brother kahlil and brother eddie. right. so, so so i think, you know, i must admit in so many ways that i'm not quite right of you know, i feel like i feel a little bit broken if that makes sense to you. and so part of my looking back has everything to do with picking up the pieces that i am to use the title of toni morrison's wonderful documentary. and it has something to do with trying to figure out how to find my feet, post all of the death of covid, trying to find my feet in the morass of this political moment. and so i think it's really an effort on my part to write

myself into some kind of stability, as it were, some kind of orientation to now. and so that's just the personal side of it. the political side of it, i think, is that we've outsourced our responsibility for democracy for too long. you know, democracy requires particular kinds of people to work, not folks who are, you know, struggling every single day to make ends meet and keeping their noses above head, above the water, so that they can so so they don't have time to attend to their civic responsibilities, you know? so i'm thinking what i what i'm trying to insist upon in this moment is that politicians aren't going to save us and so that the traditional leaders aren't going to save us. we're going to have to save this. how? i really appreciate how succinct you describe the challenge in this moment. and i think that one of the things that's most striking about the stories that you tell

in this book, which is framed by essentially three towering figures in the black freedom struggle, they are dr. martin luther king jr. malcolm x and lesser known but no less important. ella baker, who helped to not only organize acp chapters in the 1940s, was part of the southern christian leadership conference. dr. king's organization and perhaps most significantly, help the student nonviolent coordinating committee gain its footing and essentially have the wings that it needed to sort in the moment of the black freedom struggle. so let's just talk a little bit about the timing of this book, because i think that's very important. the book opens essentially as a consequence of a series of lectures that you gave in 2011. so let me just set the backdrop to what is the core analysis of this book and why we why you were in particular interested in those three towering black freedom struggle figures during

the obama era? yeah, when i delivered those lectures, michael brown was still alive. you know, sandra bland was still blogging. you know, and sandra speaks. george floyd had moved from houston to minneapolis. yet, you know, the west baltimore wasn't on fire. you know, the writing or the cvs was still there. that that quiktrip in ferguson hadn't been attacked to burn down, you know, in so many ways. i was trying and in 2011 to figure out what how president obama's ascendance had distorted african-american politics, trying to hold back this youthful area where folks were reading the obama administration as the fulfillment of the black freedom, you know, the black freedom tradition and and so when i think about it, kahlil, you know, obama was kind of, you

know, the kind of anchor to those lectures. but looking back on them for books came out of them, you know, democracy in black. i was writing at the same time that i was thinking about those lectures begin again. my my meditation on baldwin as you can see, elements of it in these lectures that's the reflections on religion, on the moral aspect of our politics there in the lectures. and so in so many ways, this is this was the kind of this this was the lab. these you know, these lectures were the lab where i was trying to work something out. and more importantly, i think it was the moment in which i was trying to find my own voice as an intellectual. you know, i was trying to find my own kind of rhythm to kind of distinguish myself from my teachers, like cornel west and others. and so it became a really important, important moment to

to to kind of assess in light of where we stand now and what i found as i returned to the lectures is that much of what i was saying was still still very much salient for our current moment. i just want i just want to say, you two of those books, which i've read, democracy in black and begin again are just fabulous for the ways in which you both address the political and the personal through particularly the life of baldwin and begin again. but also to wrestle with these bigger question about what it means to cede one's capacity for political change, to political elites, which animates much of what democracy and black is about. and of course, you talk about a values gap, but with this particular book, you do two things that i think are really pertinent and interesting in this moment. the first of those things that you do is that you call our attention to the fact that we've

been looking to the civil rights era for a source of inspiration for the kind of mobilized nation around anti-police brutality, for example, or what became known as the black lives matter movement. and you're particularly concerned about the way in which the election of barack obama and his presidency beginning in 2009 seemed to sap much of the democratic spirit of the very period in the 6050s, sixties and seventies, in which those young people took to the streets to make change in america. so just talk a little bit about that tension. it's a word you used to describe people who who pick up on obama's success as the embodiment of that era. you call them black moralists. and so i want i want those watching this conversation to get an appreciation for what what you are particularly concerned about.

you know, part of what i'm trying to work my way through in that moment, kahlil, and thank you for for pointing it out. is this kind of relationship we have to what i take to be the greatest generation america ever produced? what i think about those persons who risked everything in the mid-twentieth century to bring about the second reconstruction to to to tear down the walls of jim crow, to open up possibilities to make you and me possible. they are i mean, they are stunningly courageous, extraordinary examples of what it means to to commit one's life to a more just world. now, i happen to be a gen xer, so that means i'm born in the immediate aftermath of these folks. too young to have participated in in the civil rights and black power movements and too old to be considered a millennial in the like. so, you know, i came of age under the shadow of of the civil rights movement in the greatest generation america produced. and i came of age in the age of

reagan. so what are the political languages available to me? so that's one question that's animating this analysis. another is that oftentimes, particularly in our current moment, the movement of the mid 20th century is often invoked to discipline forms of political dissent. in our current moment. so, you know, when you heard the mayor, the former mayor of atlanta, saying to black lives matter activist dr. king would not take over highway, you just kind of go, what in the hell is that? right. how is the movement being invoked in order to narrow the range of what constitutes legitimate forms of political dissent? and so there's a particular story being told of the black freedom struggle of the mid 20th century. it's a story that begins, as you know, with 1954 and brown v board, the montgomery march in 1955. you know, the students it ends in 1960. you know, the organization of snick in 62, the march on washington in 63, selma 65. king 68. that's the narrative.

and then it's a story of of decline or declension. black power emerges in 66. and then, you know, that's where we lost our way. president obama actually used that formulation. and the 50th anniversary of the march on washington. right. and so part of what i've been trying to do is to disrupt the way in which the story of our struggle justify as a particular leadership class on the one hand. right. and denies right. the legitimacy of other forms of political engagement that are not in so many ways co-opted and absorbed by the democratic party. now, this is just. just to be quick, just to be clear, this is just a kind of story is not an insular story about black politics alone. it's about it's just an example of what happens when ordinary people hand over their responsibility to political elites. yeah, i want to dwell on this for a moment, because i think

this is a really important point. and i know that, you know, some people in the black community most certainly, they get their backs up. they are uncomfortable with criticisms of president obama. but one of the things that i think illustrates the point you just made very clearly, i remember the one of his last speeches to the graduating class at morehouse college, the famous hbcu all men school. that, of course, counts amongst its alumni. martin luther king jr himself. so this is probably in 2014 or 15. i've lost track of time. but i remember him saying to that year's graduating class that no matter what struggles that they see in front of them. and he was making particular reference to the killings of unarmed black people, which were animating a racial justice movement at this moment. he said, your lives are

infinitely better than those who came before you, that the sacrifice faces of those who fought against slavery in the sacrifices and blood and tears of those of the civil rights era, far outweigh any struggle that you have today. and so all you have to do is essentially to stay the course, work hard, and the future is yours. and i remember her personally, personally feeling very dis satisfied with what the president said at that moment, because to illustrate your point, it was disabling. it essentially told these young graduate it's that essentially their problems were not as big as those who had come before. and so they had no excuses to complain about anything. and that probably the most important thing they should do is just go out and be successful in the world that they worked. they didn't have the requirement it of engaging in a kind of democratic practice.

do i have that right in terms of your own critique of obama, just so that people watching this conversation should have a have a granular sense of what the what the criticism is? i think so. that speech particularly annoyed me because i'm a morehouse alum. and, you know, before he got to that particular point that you made, he also talked about absent fathers. and in that moment, you like, he's not talking to those young men. he's actually talking to a broader audience that have that has a host of assumptions about who black men are. but i think you're absolutely right. in that moment, there's a reason why occupy wall street emerged during the obama years. there's a reason why black lives matter emerged in the obama years. remember, obama in some ways became the object of a lot of the grassroots organizing izing that happened before he became the president of the united states. there was organizing on the ground around police brutality in los angeles and new york and chicago. and there was also this mass of

anti-iraq movement and obama emerged. and then people green screened it. they made him this progressive of candidate. and when he got into office, you know, he did what he had to do symbolically, we can never take away the significance of the first black presidency. you can never deny the importance of that. but in these moments, he became this kind of arc. how can one put it this kind of containing voice? right. you know what happens if obama doesn't tell the nba players to go back to the court, right. to play basketball? how how far do they push the matter? in so many ways. and so part of what i'm trying to suggest early on in the book, but again, it gets beyond it goes beyond obama. right. is that, you know, we can't read him as the fulfillment of the black freedom struggle, because when you do so, you you narrow the complexity of that struggle. that struggle is not just simply a black liberal ambition.

you know, you think about the politics. you're historian, kahlil. you think about the politics of the turn of the 20th century. you know, the 1920s. you got black marxists running around black nationalists running around, you know, black liberals running around, black internationalists running around. you have this complex landscape that's international in its in its in its in its in its focus and and the like. that gives the vibrancy of black politics. that sets the stage for what pops off in the mid 20th century. and so part of what i'm trying to do in this moment is to open up our understanding so that when people when elites invoke that movement to disrupt in our political imaginations, that we have resources to fight back. we have resources to imagine ourselves and to imagine our politics in more expansive terms. so so you just said something about obama embodying kings legacy as a fulfillment of the dream. and i just want to share this litany that emerged shortly after he was elected president.

and i'm going to paraphrase it, but essentially that rosa said so martin could march and obama could run. and and so that all the children could fly. this this was a litany attributed to jay-z in the moment. and so, as i said to start this conversation, you you make this criticism about the narrow wing of black politics. and in the big sense of the word, i'm too looking at the way that we understand and or have evoked the legacies of three black freedom struggle figures. so let's start with dr. king himself and to open this up, i just want to mention a brief account of attending a martin luther king breakfast celebration. i was teaching at indiana university beginning in 2005. i think it was the first year that i attended. and the theme that year was the power of one. and i remember then thinking to

myself, this is not the right message for dr. king's legacy, because essentially it tells everyone that unless you are that one, there's no role for you to play. now, i think that the organizers and so many others who have taken the similar theme is that each one of us can become a leader. but you see that something in dr. king's exceptionalism, what you call a kind of prophetic tradition that positions black preachers as particularly in doubt with with the power of either god's sanction or message as part of this narrow wing of black politics. so tell us particularly about how to understand dr. king's legacy and how we might actually be misreading him in terms of how we are to understand leadership. well, you know, when you read the mid-twentieth century as a great many a great man's story,

let's put it that way. you lose sight of all of the heroic work and prophetic energies of everyday, ordinary people when the movement becomes in effect, a story of dr. king's witnessing courage. he becomes a larger than life figure. and then we are supposed to sit in supplication in relation to it. i just fundamentally disagree with that view. i think, a, the movement was more complex and b, that dr. king was more complex. that's the first thing. he is a decidedly human, all too human, just like we are. and so part of what i'm doing in that moment, khalil, is trying to open up space for myself. and of course, that has implications for what i'm commending to the reader, to to approach dr. king, not with a posture of supplication, but to see him as an example that the that the prophetic is not some, you know, authorized, you know, person who has been sanctioned or authorized by a force divine

force apart from our living, whose voice has been given the authority by god, for example, who's come to deliver a message. but the prophetic is really evidence in our decisions of conduct. when you and i decide to look beyond the arrangements of now to imagine a future that's different and use that imagining as a way of critiquing the current arrangements. so we all can do that. we all have prophetic capacity. and so this is my way of of reading. dr. king, as someone who's calling all of us to be prophetic, you know, when he gives that that sermon in 1957 of remaining awake during a revolution. right. he's not asking us to drop our shovels and follow him. right. he's asking us to to understand what we're capable of ourself. each of us individually and together, what we're capable of in fighting and imagining a new world.

and i think this is really important in terms of this side of this part of the argument of the book. you know, if we are the leaders that we've been looking for, kahlil, it seems to me that we got to become better people. it sounds cliche, but it's true. if i want to say that everyday, ordinary folk are actually the leaders. we got to do the hard work of actually working on ourselves to become the kinds of people that can make those hard choices. and when the moment calls us and we have examples of folk who've done it. those examples, again, shouldn't force us to just simply bow down and wish for them. they should force us to see what's what we're actually capable of. now, i want to unpack this just a little bit further, particularly on the better people part of it, because i think that that is clearer when you start talking about ella baker. i think one of the things that would be helpful, at least in sharing the insights of the book, is the degree to which dr. king himself empowered people in

the movement. that's one issue. the second would be the degree to which the misreading of king's success erases the community that that supported the work that he essentially became the titular head of. i mean, one of the things that, you know, having read many biographies of dr. king was his profound and easiness with what what you might say in a prophetic sense of his calling that that that he in many ways wanted to reject it. he wanted to lay that burden down. and maybe even more particularly, he wanted to share it with others so that it would diminish the weight that fell on his shoulders. absolutely. and, you know, i mean, and we see that over the course of his of his witness. right. but, you know, you've got to talk about folks like in montgomery, eddie nixon and julianne robinson. you got to talk about, you know, in mississippi, for example, not with dr. king, but with sneak.

you know, people like amc, moore and others, there were folk on the ground doing ordinary work everyday, ordinary people. kahlil. and i think when we tell the story of the civil rights movement in such a way where it just simply focuses on dr. king, his faults and foibles, his his power, his courage, his witness. we lose sight of the capacities of everyday folk. and in some ways, it might be purposeful that we tell the story in that way. for some. right. because some people don't want us to see what we're capable of, you know? and so they want us to outsource our responsibility. they want us to outsource our are our courage to others. right. but, you know, democracies can't survive if we're doing that constantly. and and i think more importantly, our our politics are just distorted and disfigured when the great man or woman is at the center of gravity. right. and so i think it's important to

understand how all too human. dr. king was right. and and once we make that clear, then his exam bill becomes all the more powerful for us. yeah. yeah. you you do a move here, and let me just say so there's a lot of close readings of various philosophers and political theorists, including john dewey of ralph waldo emerson, thoreau gets a shout out and many, many others. wendy brown, who is a contemporary of ours at nyu, a professor. so i want to talk a little bit about the context in which you treat this problem of individualism. so if i evoked this early experience i had with king sort of being captured in this idea of the power of one. there's a passage in the book where you talk about the trappings of neo liberalism. and i'm going to paraphrase here that insists that individuals

are only responsible for themselves. and in an essentially saying that individuals are only responsible for themselves. you write, this is a contraction of the public view of the public good. it's an anemic view, your words of mutual obligation, and ultimately, at least to selfishness as virtue and narcissism, as standard practice. yeah. let's talk a little bit about the way in which the distortion of king's legacy leaves us in this present moment, with the notion of individualism that is itself fundamental to this anti-death socratic problem that we're trying that you are trying to solve for. yeah. you know, i should say a word about all of the philosophers and writers that i that i invoke in these this this book. you know, i've been introduced, kahlil, to the broader public as as a historian of sorts, as a pundit, as an african-american studies scholar. most folk don't know that i was trained in the philosophy of religion, that i'm a john dewey scholar. and so part of what i've been

trying to do is to bring to bridge my world, to ask my reader, i'm asking a lot of my reader with this book to stretch. i think my readers have come to understand that that's what i do. right. so i'm doing the a different side of my bibliography is at work in this text is more philosophical than historical in some ways. and that that is, you know, my momma said this is a hard one. so, you know, that's okay. that's okay. but she's still reading it. i think part of what i'm trying to do with with regards to this, the context of neoliberalism and in the way in which individualism gets just kind of warped by its logics or its internalized objects. right. is i have to make that move in light of what i'm calling for. i want to say that we've got to become better people right. and if we're going to become better people, we have to reach for higher forms of excellences in our individual lives.

but we have to do so in pursuit of a more just world. and here i use i invoke the, you know, james pennington's, the fugitive blacksmith. pennington was the first african-american to a ten yale. he didn't they wouldn't let him in class. he had to sit outside the classroom. the first african-american to receive an honorary degree from heidelberg university in 1849. and he wrote in the you know, i'm paraphrasing here, but he wrote in the fugitive blacksmith. he said, this describes slavery as this vile monster. he said, what i will never forgive slavery for is that it robbed me of my education. it robbed me of my ability to kind of engage in it. ongoing self-development in some ways, right? he says. he says, i've spent a lifetime trying to read my tongue of the sound of slavery, but there are certain things that i cannot recoup because i just i wasn't exposed to it, he says. all i tried to do is to make myself more efficient for good. and so here pennington expresses

what you know emerson and others might describe as that self-loathing, that sense of shame that a certain self is inadequate. as he tries to reach for a higher self. but he can't because the world is organized in such a way that blocks him from becoming the kind of human being he imagines himself to be. so self cultivation can't be a narcissistic enterprise. at least it ought not to be. it can't be as enterprise that its soul, the self-interest it it has to in some way be self cultivation in pursuit of a more just world, because the world, as it is, gets in the way of us being better people. hmm. now, how does king fit into this? when we give over to ourselves, to a leader, we stop the work of self cultivation. mm hmm. we just engage in imitation. hmm. you see, so when we. when we follow a leader, as opposed to work with people, as

opposed to doing the work close to the ground, we actually arrest the hard work of becoming better people. hmm. if that makes sense. and so i don't want to. i don't. so i don't want to. i'm not demonizing dr. king or i'm definitely not demonizing malcolm x and ella baker. what i'm trying to do is to get us to stand in right relation with our exemplars so that we can continue to find our voices because when we stop to follow them, we stop the hard work of reaching for higher forms of excellence. well, i want to i want to take this point one step further and apply something you don't actually write about. but i think it's so relevant to what you just said about being better people and there's a term you use in the book called critical intelligence, and you use this term in the chapter on dr. king. how do you understand or how

would you interpret the backlash against the humanities, the backlash against the truth telling of american history, the backlash against books as the context in which the work of being better people is actually on their full scale assault? abso lutely. absolutely. you know, richard slotkin has a new book that's coming out and he describes this moment as a second lost cause. hmm. and, you know, we know what the lost cause and redemption was all about, right? we know about the violence on the ground. and right from colfax to wilmington and across the south. right. we understand that. but it was also right in our. everyone, these are posts. slavery. instances of a massacre as a black people who were standing up for their democratic rights and freedoms that they had earned.

and as a result, the 13th, 14th, 15th amendment right. so we know about that. but we also know about the the the all out assault on the way. we told the story of reconstruction. right. and the lies that became a part of, you know, instruction in schools, primary school, the histories that are being read. the william dunning school out of columbia, and the kinds of first hits, the first histories around reconstruction that called into question black folks capacity to bear the burden of citizenship. that talked about, you know, the carpetbaggers and black folk as inherently corrupt and corrupt in the democratic process. and you know what's interesting to me, khalil, is that when we think about the first lost cause and the first redemption and we think about all of those children educated in that lie, they turned out to be the adults. in the 1940s and fifties. they were the ones who were

shouting racial epithets. they were the ones who were lynching. they were the ones who were engaged in the violent is in the face of the of the attempt at the second reconstruction. so what we see now is this this this all out assault on the story that we tell ourselves to produce particular kinds of people. right. and, you know, at the heart of of we are the leaders we were looking for at the heart of my work is the moral question. it is the beating heart of my work is the moral question. what kind of human being do you aspire to be? what kind of human being are you? and so i think this is a second lost cause, and we're seeing it at the level of knowledge production and we're seeing at the level of our politics more broadly. yeah, absolutely. so on one hand, if this is a second loss, cause i also want to say that the attack on learning, the freedom to learn, to read, to speak, to study and ultimately the broader attack on the humanities also means that

that we are destroying the infrastructure that makes possible a certain kind of knowledge which is required for the kind of betterment of the social good, of the public good, of the commitment that we are all in this together. and just to put a finer point on this, you know, we're constantly reading in the newspaper that the humanities are a waste of time and money. people ought to focus on on job ready skills. but if you extend the argument that you make to this point, it essentially the concentrated power or the monopoly power, the kind of power that produced the occupy movement, the kind of power of the gilded and robber baron age, that animated dewey's own work philosophy that you write about it is absolutely essential so that our

philosophers, our historians, our thinkers, our poets are empowered with the ability to educate those, to ask the questions, what is the meaning of life? what are we here for? what do we owe each other? and i just i would emphasize that because i think that's the point that you are really hammering when you talk about critical intelligence and you really emphasize the degree to which people have this capacity. but that capacity has to be nurtured and nourished. absolutely not. i mean, how can one put it if we you know, democracies require certain kinds of people to work? madison talked about this in the federalist papers, right? there's a reason why he wants us to to to to focus on virtue. we have this is a particular kind of human being necessary for this thing to work. but what we have always witnessed since the founding and it's not about black folk being,

you know, slavery being original sin, because it's not quite the original sin, the original sin is the belief, the practice that some people, because of the color of their skin, are superior to others of more value than others. and then you build a world based upon that, that lie. but you know, it seems to me that if we're going to become better people, we got to address that that, you know, ripped as you know, what did douglass it in july 5th 1852 in his address it at the old corinthian hall in rochester, new york. he called it this this dirty reptile in the nation's bosom, this horrible reptile in the nation's bosom. right. which is slavery and its aftermath. right. we got to address the set of beliefs and practices that lead us to try to throw the democracy into the trash bin repeatedly. we got to address those assumptions that destroy and disfigure our characters. what gets in the way of us

becoming better people? and i think asking that question right takes us to the heart of the conundrum, because, you know, america is a riddle after all. you know, and if we figure that out, maybe we can open ourselves up to a different future. yeah. so speaking of a different future, you certainly made future than the moss point. mississippi path that you come from. and you spent time in chapter two talking a bit about your father, your relationship to him, someone who you deeply admired. so maybe tell us a little bit about why you opened chapter to a chapter that is in many ways about malcolm x as a hero of yours with a story about your father. you know, i think i learned this lesson from baldwin carlyle that the messiness of the world is actually a reflection of the messiness of our interior lives. and if we're going to change the world, we have to deal with

ourselves. we have to deal with the wounds. and, you know, my father is the most important man in my life. he's the most responsible human being i've ever met. but he scared the living daylights out of me. mm hmm. and he deposited a kind of fear in my gut that led me to believe at least in the quiet of night, that i wasn't. i wasn't quite courageous. i was afraid. and i had been trying to prove to myself that i wasn't a coward. and so what you see in the book. right, is in that chapter is my reaching for this heroic figure. it used to be that, you know, i would read the norse, you know, i played dungeons and dragons. i was a nerd. right. so, you know, the norse gods. thor was my guy, right? reading the comic. comic books. and then as i transition, as i aged, i transitioned to the heroes of the mid-twentieth century. you know, malcolm and the black planet, you know, oh, my god, i wish i could be. and then when i got to morehouse

and i read the autobiography of malcolm x, suddenly everything made sense. i had a language for my father's. i had a language for what i was feeling inside. and i could construct a notion of what it meant to be a black man right by way of this adoption of malcolm's polls, of his posture. so, you know, i had this my first conversion experience, really. i got my goatee. you know, this is this is in honor of malcolm. i would never shave it off right. and so but also, it's also the way in which i'm reaching for a notion of manhood that's bound up with this sense of gold. and so the book, though, the chapter then says, but what does it mean to think of malcolm as someone a part from my own wounds, as someone who's not wounded himself? mm hmm.

and so here i move from the notion of the heroic to emerson's notion of the representative man and woman. and what does it mean to think of malcolm as my good friend imani perry says after we read manny marvel's biography of malcolm together, she said, oh my god, when you read him, he's like, after he leaves the nation, he's flailing and, failing. mm hmm. and so suddenly malcolm becomes this wounded witness, not the shining black prince. i bring him down to the ground, and i'm able to be critical of the hypermasculine politics that that black nationalism presented me. if that makes sense to you. no, it makes perfect sense. you know, it's interesting that for malcolm, you are able to position yourself in ways that you're not with dr. king, at least to some degree, do you? dr. king, perhaps more because of your training as a philosopher, religion through a prophetic tradition that surrounds both your own experience as a as a student of

cornel west, but also the towering figure of james cone. and so much of the way in which king has loomed large and how we even developed an understanding of a black liberation theology, for example. mm hmm. in this case, the story of malcolm's failings give license to a kind of appreciation for the fact that any one of us, as you write, can make the impossible possible. and you criticize yourself essentially, that by looking to malcolm as a surrogate father, that you almost swallowed up your self and degenerated into a kind of idolatry. yeah. and i wanted you to, too. so if we critique the prophetic by giving over our power to a single a singular, exceptional individual, and now we're concerned, at least in the way that you're telling us, challenging us to understand leadership, that heroes also can

disable us and narrow our politics. aren't we rubbing up against kind of the oldest traditions of human condition, which is to is to tell stories with protagonists in antagonists, with heroes and villains? i mean, at what? right at what point do we lose our bearings in terms of even what psychologists might say? like our brains are wired for these stories? yeah. i mean, but our brains aren't just wired for melodrama, though, right? and melodrama is defined by, you know, clear cut villains and clear cut heroes and the like. right. i mean, there's also tragedy. there's also the tragic comic. there's a comedy, right. in the highest sense of the word. there's there's epic. i mean, we can we can talk about the variety of ways of thinking about how human beings inhabit story, inhabit narrative. right. and so part of what i'm trying to do is to kind of disrupt the melodrama. right. i don't we don't need heroes in that, because as a person who's

committed to democracy, small d heroes can be dangerous because again, the hero comes in, resolves matters and and the like, and then folk give over their responsibility to them and the hero can a tyrant in the blink of an eye and right. that's all you got to do is think about mugabe. mm hmm. right. the context of zimbabwe. right. and so. so the point i'm trying to make here is that for me, i don't want the hero. the hero. i want heroic acts. you know, and this is why i went to emerson in this moment. and i got a very vexed i have a very vexed relationship with with the man from concord. but but i think, you know, part of what i'm trying to do here is to say, you know, when you read representative men, emerson is looking to get he's looking to shakespeare, he's looking to montaigne, and he's looking to these folks, but he's not looking to the to to to give

himself over to them to become a sycophant. right. he says, we must not become sex and stomachs. you know, emerson says imitation is suicide. well, what does he mean there? right. he's, you know, i don't want to read self-reliance in this adolescent way where we're just free to be who we are with no responsibilities to others. that's silly to me, but i am convinced, though, right, that emerson is right when he says great people, come into our lives such that they make possible even greater people, they become examples of what we're capable of. sometimes we and most human beings don't see it. but that's okay. but what malcolm's courage can be my own. not that he's some unique figure. right. that has some quality that i can't approximate in my own life. why? right. so part of what i'm trying suggest here is that the man that meant so much to me and king did as well. you know. i remember in eighth grade

reciting, i had the i have a dream speech in miss mitchell's history class verbatim. you know, and going to morehouse, dr. king's statue is pointing at us from king's chapel. right. i mean, we're we're baptized in king's waters, as it were. so he's important, critical to. my own self formation. but what does it mean to engage in the search for my own voice? and i say that not in a narcissistic way, but i'm trying to commend it to my fellows. what does it mean for you to search for your own voice? yeah. and what are the examples in your life that mean so much to you that oftentimes quell your voice? i'm sorry. good. no, no. you have this this very simple line in reference to what your journey through malcolm means to you today and what you're passing on to. to us, the reader is that malcolm compels us to think for ourselves, and i think it's a

very powerful, again, connecting back to critical intelligence. yeah, that, you know, there's a kind of a drug, a sedative, and you use the term sedative at some point in the way in which so much of the black political class has played a part in anesthetizing people to to look to it, to solve its problems and, of course, the most extreme form of this, which which you can talk a little bit about in this final chapter discussion, is the democratic party itself. but there's one person in this book who actually disrupts this this problem of if the prophet, on one hand, is a problem, the hero is the problem on the other. then ella baker's like helps to demonstrate a leadership that cultivates leadership in people or as you say, that people have the ability not to be saved by elites or moralists or

preachers, but to save themselves. yeah. yeah. ms. baker, man, you know, she's she's everything. me and and i think it has something to do with what it means to have a puissent a focus as opposed to a pulpit centered focus. know what does it mean to be focused on the people as opposed to these these so-called great men, the leaders themselves? you know, you mentioned earlier she's without her. the 20th century. mid-20th century doesn't make sense politically for black america. she's organizing. she's a field in the forties for the naacp. those connections matter because if it wasn't for those connections, bob moses would not find way. bob moses of student nonviolent coordinating committee would not find his way to emcee more in mississippi. her connections make that happen. right. you know, first executive director of schools. there's a reason why snick organizes itself as a university as miss baker's alma mater. and, you know, there's this

insistence on affirming the capacities of everyday, ordinary people. she she has this wonderful formulation of strong people. don't need strong leaders. mm hmm. right. and she would tell the young organizers of snick shut up. and you might learn something. right. and it's that model of leadership that gave us a you need a black well, that gave us a fannie lou hamer. right. that produced the conditions under which sharecroppers that folk were dismissing. right. even as laborers. right. found themselves. right. really pushing what? who mattered in the demos. and so, ms. baker, for me and this is really important to kalu. so you come out of the hyper masculinist politics of black nationalism. king malcolm. these men, as my heroes and then i end up in the lap of the politics of tending a politics of care and love. right. a politics that really isn't about a certain kind of performance of courage, but a

performance. but but. but in enactment of love. mm hmm. and so now you see the arc of the move, right? and so it's in this context that ms. baker, for me, becomes a resource to imagine the kind of politics i think we need. so because i'm sure that fewer people are actually familiar with ella baker, let's just talk a little bit more about actually what she's what role she's playing for. snick and so i'll just start off you, you have a line that you say she engaged in a kind of militant egalitarianism that that teaches that each individual has the capacity to do good in the world shot through with ugliness. now some of our viewers will, of course, recognize the role of john lewis as part of snick, perhaps the most famous them who went on to serve as a congressman from from georgia for many years until his passing not too long ago. so what does militant egalitarianism actually mean? right. especially in organizing.

right. so it's not, you know, kind of helicopter approach where you have, you know some event that happens. jimmy lee jackson is murdered, slc comes in, organizes a march or tries to organize a march, selma. and then you have three successive marches and they try to bring pressure to bear. now it's really about organizing within the community. what's the context around. the these these efforts? right. these spectacular moments of marches. what's happening before you see it? right. how do we create the conditions under which local people become the leadership within that particular community? so you know, stokely carmichael, who became kwame turei, courtland cox, dorie ladner and others. these are critical young folk who are in the bowels of the south and their approach is not to come in as saviors. carlyle, but to come in and create the conditions or help create the conditions with

others for the indigenous leadership to emerge. give you a story, bob moses who who was the famed leader of mississippi freedom democratic, mississippi freedom summer, and a critical partner of personality in snick. he told me this story when he was at princeton. he said, we were driving the bus to go register voters in sunflower county and folk knew what they were driving into. they knew violence awaited them. and he said this one person was in the back of the bus singing every him in the hymnal. just sing. it wouldn't stop singing, just would not stop saying it. and folk were like, what is going on here? and then somebody, somebody mentioned, oh, she's trying to fortify the spirit. i understand what she's doing. they didn't know who the woman was. it turned out to be fannie lou hamer. right. context leadership emerges. not just simply a sharecropper, not someone who doesn't have education, but someone who's willing to put their body, their

mind, their heart, their soul on the line for freedom and justice. do you think that the way that a lot of advocates, organizers, activists today use the language of people who are closest to the problem, closest to the solution is a contemporary manifestation of baker's militant, egalitarian ism. absolutely. absolutely. i think, you know, throughout the throughout the book, i keep using the phrase close to ground, close to the ground. and that is this kind of insistence on the importance of a kind of local indigenous leadership. and right now, you know, we all know that the local isn't local anymore, is local in some ways. so absolutely. kahlil it makes all the sense in the world for those folks who want to create the conditions under which indigenous leadership is doing their work, networked with other resources right, other other folks in other locales doing their work.

you know, we have to snick was called the student nonviolent coordinating committee. right. had everything to do with those wildfire sit ins, whether it was in nashville or atlanta or in in north carolina or or and in washington, d.c. right. young folk trying to coordinate their activism. and we can see that networked localism as, a key part of the politics i'm commending. yes, absolutely. one of the things that i think is striking in sort of revisiting baker and snick through the lens of your book is the degree to which the work itself under baker was as much about the process of create of democracy as it was the outcome. and we often think today about outcomes only. yeah. is it in the direction of an electoral outcome? is it in the direction of a referendum? is it in the direction of the removal of a police chief or the

prosecution of a police officer who killed an unarmed black person? but one of the things that you emphasize under baker's leadership is that the work wasn't just outcomes directed. the work was process as well. it was about building something sustainable where people would feel at the local level to understand, to come together and to have a sustained, able way of living that would improve their own lives. you got me about to jump out of this sink a little because that's such an important point. i mean, it is critical, actually. you know, if you try to achieve democracy ends by way of undemocratic means, you undermine your effort by told me one time he said, and, you know, god rest his soul, he said, you know, we came to realize he was talking about the mississippi freedom democratic party at this point, that when elections are

the of your struggle, you have built in demobilization. because if you win, you demobilize. and if you lose, you end up disheartened and demobilized. right. so how? yes, please. i want to hear more. yes. and so. so part of what we have to understand is that elections are important, but they're not the endgame. mm hmm. we have to become particular kinds of people. and how we struggle, right, is, in effect, part of that work. it seems to me process matters as much as ends. if you don't, then you're going to end up with tyrants who claim to be revolutionaries. it has to be democratic all the way down. it seems to me. and that's the lesson i've learned from her. and again, it's about not just simply ends, but about who do we take ourselves to be as human

beings? how we manifest the relationship with other in our struggle for more just world. and as we manifest that relation with each other, we become better people. yeah, you see. and that's the key. that's the key to me. it's such a powerful insight and i want to share a moment that came on the heels of election. it was a kind of closed door gathering where i won't say everyone that was in the room, but the late great harry belafonte, whose artistry activism shaped half a decade or more of of all the people we've talked about and who had a very capacious vision of of democracy. he was in a room with people talking about what had just occurred in the election of donald trump. and one of the insights that emerged in this conversation was the way in which democratic consultants and strategists swooped into red states and

purple states trying to mobilize and get out the vote and then go home. i mean, it was a it was a crystallization of what you just described, which is the failure of investment in infrastructure, the lack of commitment to encouraging people to have ownership through their own diagnosis of what ails them in their local spaces, even if those local spaces connect us both to the national and the global. and it was a kind of predatory politics that ultimately only wanted from these people a ballot in a box and nothing more. right. and i'm afraid that there's so little evidence right now with the resounding exception of the work of black voters matter with latosha brown and of course stacey abrams work out of georgia going into the 2024 election that i'm not sure that the democratic party has learned this lesson or that local

leaders are themselves challenging this practice in ways that will foretell a different future. yeah, i would add i would add bishop barber poor people's campaign as well to that list. and there are others that we're not mentioning, but i think you're right. you know, but you know, every moment of crisis, as you know, is a conjuncture, a moment. it's a moment of where are collapsing around us in the moment of possibility. and so what it does, it frees us up to imagine the world differently. you know, imagination as shelly as shelly put it, is, you know, is is a species of the good, right. and so i think it's important for us to be able to understand that the conflicts we've we confront today is they're not going to be resolved by the political leaders who hold positions of power in this moment. there's right now, kahlil, i don't know if you would agree. our politics is soaked with nostalgia. oh, yeah. a longing for something, whether

it's a longing for the 1950s or the lost cause in the you know, in the at the end of the 19th century or it's a long thing for, you know, the height of the democratic leadership council or something. i don't know. you know, there's a longing for something in the past when in fact, what is required of us is a kind of imaginative to put democracy, american democracy, on a new footing, on new ground, to turn the over. what other metaphor could i use right? or image i could call forward? right. yeah. so we're in that moment. i'm sorry. go ahead. yeah. as as we. as we finish this conversation, which i've just tremendously enjoyed, i've been in those same conversations to answer your question, if i agree where so many people have said to me, you know, who are our leaders today? and i think to end this conversation, it will be a mistake, not to mention how many young people, not gen, but millennials and younger, who

have learned so many of these lessons, particularly from ella baker, who dissented leadership, who sometimes in their own queer sexual ity chose queer pathways of leadership. and i think in so many ways, eddie, we we gen-xers and baby boomers have failed them by not nurturing and giving them the space to fail. whereas, you know, business leaders were say literally to fail up, right. in so many ways that we are our own worst enemies on this point of leadership by not empowering those young people. they're still out there and i think we have a lot of possibilities that, as you write in the end for your own optimism. but i just wanted to to make sure that we didn't leave this conversation without recognizing that we actually have some of those leaders that as you write, we have been waiting for right. and absolutely. you know, we first of all, thank you so much for this wonderful conversation. thank you for taking the time out to to read the book so

carefully. but, you know, young are reaching. they know the world is broken. they know the old vocabularies aren't working. they know that the languages that try to describe their experiences are no longer applicable in the same way. and they're reaching for something different, something new. some of them are. some of them are reaching for old languages. you know, dylann roof wasn't a baby boomer, a gen xer. you know. that's right. and so we need to understand and that the future that is in front of us is actually in our hands, all of us. and if we're going to build a future where everyone can have the can experience the dignity and standing, that will allow them to pursue their dreams and to make that dream a reality, if that's going to happen, we all have to do the hard of self cultivation in pursuit of a more just world. and at the end of the day, that that leads us to the conclusion that if the world is going to be a better place, we're going to have to be the leaders to make it happen. i love it. all right. well, eddie, brother eddie, this