Hello and Happy New Year to our viewers and our readership, I am Dr. Nicole Gipson, Associate Editor of the Journal of American Studies, bringing you a new episode of our interview series “The Talk.” We are very fortunate to have a distinguished scholar, author, political commentator, and public intellectual, Prof. Eddie Glaude Jr., who is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. He is author of such works as Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, the New York Times best seller Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, and his most recent publication We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For at Harvard University Press. Welcome, Prof. Glaude.

Today is 6 January 2025, and it has been four years to the day since a mob of President Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election, so the question I have for you to kick us off, Prof. Glaude, is this: what is the historical and political significance of 6 January 2021?

Prof. Glaude: Well, it’s an extraordinary moment in the history of the country. Where the kind of cold war, the cold Civil War that has defined our politics. And you know we’ve used different kinds of language or descriptions of that cold Civil War, or you know deep extreme partisanship and the deep political division. But the cold Civil War became hot on January 6th. Donald Trump declaring that if the people who attended the march, if they did not act, that they would lose their country. To see the battle flag of the Confederacy marched around the capital; to see this mob of white voters, it was mixed with white Christian nationalists, white-supremacist discourse. This kind of gaggle of grievance and fear and hatred mobilized to overturn an election, right, gave the nation a sense of the fact of the reality that we were standing on the precipice. That the deep divisions in the country were more than just simply disagreements, political disagreements. That they cut to the bone, actually through the bone, to the marrow of the bone.

I was on television. I think I was talking to Christine Amanpour at the time it happened. And we were struck by the nature of the violence, by the response of the Congressmen and -women. You heard Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell condemn Trump. But in a matter of weeks, they began to retell the story. So historically, it represented this kind of … the Cold War became hot for a moment. But then, almost immediately, there was an effort to rewrite what happened, to disremember, to use Toni Morrison’s language. And here, four years later, this combination of active forgetting and wilful lies or wilful ignorance in this regard, has brought us to this moment, where Trump is about to be inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States, which is just mind-blowing.

For the rest of the interview go to: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Prof.+Eddie+Glaude+Jr+reflects+on+the+fourth+anniversary+of+January+6th+%26+the+US+political+landscape

Prof. Eddie Glaude Jr reflects on the fourth anniversary of January 6th & the US political landscape