“Race & Democracy: America is Always Changing, But America Never Changes” with Professor Eddie Glaude, Princeton

Center for Philosophy, Politics and Economics and the Democracy Project
, DeCiccio

The newly launched Democracy Project is pleased to announce a lecture with Professor Eddie Glaude. One of the nation’s most prominent scholars, Dr. Eddie Glaude, Jr. is an author, political commentator, public intellectual and passionate educator who examines the complex dynamics of the American experience. His writings, including Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, and his most recent, the New York Times bestseller, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for our Own, takes a wide look at Black communities, the difficulties of race in the United States and the challenges we face as a democracy. In his writing and speaking, Glaude is an American critic in the tradition of James Baldwin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, confronting history and bringing our nation’s complexities, vulnerabilities and hope into full view. Hope that is, in one of his favorite quotes from W.E.B. Du Bois, “not hopeless, but a bit unhopeful.”

Race & Democracy: America is Always Changing, But America Never Changes

America’s great promise of equality has always rung hollow in in the ears of Black Americans. Today, more than 60 years after the civil rights movement, Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr. says the situation is equally dire — and yet, the promise still lives. Drawing from his landmark book, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul and his New York Times bestseller Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, Dr. Glaude presents a picture of race and democracy that is colored by current events and framed by African American history. Bearing witness to the difficult truth in our country today, Dr. Glaude lays bare the tangled web of race, trauma and memory, and what we all must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.

The Democracy Project studies democratic values, norms, cultures, institutions, and practices around the world with a focus on representative government, participatory action, citizenship, and rule of law, all oriented by values of equality and fairness.