Begin Again, Eddie Glaude, James Baldwin, Trump, Psychoanalysis of Racism, Psychology of Civil Rights
The Reluctant Wife asked that I read Eddie S. Glaude’s Begin
Again because it is rich with psychoanalytic insight about Race and America
without directly referencing psychoanalytic terms or concepts. She thought it might be helpful to me as I
struggle as an analyst to articulate how to understand Race in America. As usual, she was right on the money.
Eddie Glaude is an African American professor at Princeton
who has been puzzling, as many of us have been, over the rise of Trump. He turned to James Baldwin’s path through the
civil rights era and his navigation of those complicated waters as a guide to
thinking about his own reaction to and experience of Trumpism. Because this is a very personal narrative, it
contains some of the perambulations and idiosyncrasies that writings of that
sort, including this very blog, include.
Despite that, or maybe in part because of it, the book is a powerful
reflection that gains momentum and power the deeper you get into it.
The original premise did not feel novel to me – The United
States is founded on The Big Lie. What
is the big lie? It is actually a whole
bunch of lies, many of which are wrapped up in American Exceptionalism – that we
are the land of the free and we are, first and foremost ethical, rule of law
people where all creation is treated equally under the law.
Well, from the perspective of the white male, this may
appear to be the case, but to maintain this lie requires a great deal of
effort. And, much later in the book, as
he is describing James Baldwin’s series of exiles, it requires a kind of out of
body experience. In order to be the
country we imagine ourselves to be, we have to overlook all kinds of things,
like our treatment of African Americans and Indians over the last four or five
hundred years. This parallels the psychological gymnastics we all need to
engage in to maintain a sense of integrity despite our mistreatment of others
(including by, sometimes, being too nice to them – putting women on a pedestal,
for instance). Closer to my home, psychologists
might, for instance, need to interrogate their role in torturing detainees at
Guantanamo Bay.
Glaude makes the case that European Americans (white people)
have been exiled from Europe and have continued to feel dislocated for our
entire existence. We have been fighting
to show that we belong – perhaps. We were,
in the person of Hamilton, trying to create a monarchy, but this time to do it
right. Perhaps, and I will develop this
later, we were trying to prove that we didn’t rely on Europe, but were independent
– something that is an integral component of the Big Lie – that we are ready to
move forward on our own.
Regardless of what is the case, we have dissociated ourselves
from the messy, problematic aspects of our functioning from the very
beginning. The lie becomes that we knew
what we were doing from the beginning, that we have always acted with integrity,
and that we are continuing to do so today.
In the psychological world, the problem with self-analysis
is that we can’t trust ourselves. We
necessarily tell the story in such a way that we are the heroes. We did everything right. And so we keep crashing ahead in our lives
blindly assuming that we are doing things correctly, and that the world is
messed up and not responding appropriately to our actions when it rejects us or
tries to give us the message that we are not all that we have cracked ourselves
up to be.
It takes a lot for us to go see someone else to help put
ourselves right. Trusting someone else
to give us feedback about ourselves is a scary thing to do – are they really
going to have our best interests in mind?
Can they accurately understand us?
In psychotherapy, we talk about this as the precontemplation stage of
psychotherapy. We aren’t even thinking
about starting psychotherapy – why would we?
We are perfectly competent and able to manage things just fine, thank
you very much.
The contemplation stage starts when cracks appear in that façade
of self-righteous certainty. We start to
feel that maybe we aren’t so certain about the correct course of action to
take. Maybe we begin to realize that we
are injuring people that we love. We begin
to question ourselves. This is a
critical moment that precipitates the contemplation stage. Maybe we should do something differently.
Glaude doesn’t spend much time on this important
developmental aspect of the civil rights movement. The Brown vs. Board of Education decision
(1954), the Civil Rights act (1964), and the Voting Rights Act (1965) were all
responses to the realization that we had a flawed system. Glaude references Baldwin as seeing that
these were not going to be enough. These
were fix ups – in my therapy analogy, they were ways of staving off actually
going into therapy and doing the work that we needed to do to undo the
lie. These were actions that allowed us
to remain dissociated.
We have integrated our schools, we have made amends for past
wrongs, and we have empowered the disempowered.
See, we are self-correcting! We
can be proud of ourselves for adhering to our values – for moving forward with
integrity – as we have always done. We
fold the actions that we have taken in reaction to the big lie to actually
reinforce that very same lie.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s non-violent movement was based on
helping the white man see that he was violating his own principles in
segregating blacks and then beating them and shooting fire hoses at them. This movement was founded on the principle
that the white man is, in fact, a moral person who wants to act in moral
ways. When we can illustrate his
immorality, he will be appalled and work with us to fix that.
This led, in Baldwin and Glaude’s minds, to characterizing
King and others in that generation as Uncle Toms. White men are not, in essence, simply
moral. They are complex critters, as we
all are. They, no more than we, do not
have to be perfect to be loved. But neither
they, nor we (as we imagine King), know that.
We are seeking a more perfect
union. And this perfection is likely to
be the death of us all!
Glaude’s position, following Baldwin, is that we need to
leave the country to really see it. When
we are inside of it, even if we are feeling alienated, we cannot see the source
of the alienation. We need to enact our
alienation by travelling elsewhere – we need to become exiles. For Baldwin, this meant travelling to Paris,
but also to Istanbul – to being in an entirely alien place where the language
is unfamiliar and we can be isolated, from our own country and the country we
are living in.
I think that what Glaude helped me see about Trump is that
he has created the sense of isolation – the sense of being a foreigner in one’s
own country. We can’t believe that he
was elected. We can’t believe he is
being nominated again after he made such a mess of things and led an insurrection. He is a felon, for God’s sake, and sees
himself as the anointed one. What kind
of country do I live in?
Glaude sees Trump as the second wave of defense against the
reformation of our country that the Civil Rights movement promised. When the Civil Rights movement collapsed,
when Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated, when the younger,
more radical members of the movement were chased off or imprisoned by the FBI,
when the faith in government was brought into question by Nixon’s actions,
Glaude sees our choice to replace Carter with Reagan as the death knell to the
possibility of having made the needed transition.
Electing Obama provided the possibility of moving in the
direction of the transition, but instead it put into place our wish to return
to the way things were, and Trumpism – the three nominations of the man, the
first nomination of a convicted felon (something Glaude could not have foreseen when this
book was published in 2020), clarify that a huge portion of our population
endorses an abhorrent individual with abhorrent beliefs – but because of the
popular support, they are not aberrant beliefs; they are widely held ones.
I have observed, by the way, in years of watching faculty
votes on various issues that we generally act based on consensus. Most of the time, when we vote on something,
we all agree. When we vote on something
about which we are torn, this generally does not represent a true division
among us, but the actual vote ends up being a measure of the aggregate
individual ambivalence. That is, if the
vote is 6 to 4, we are, on average, leaning towards the measure with 60% of
ourselves. Of course, there is some
variance – 4 of us were at least 51% opposed – but we are generally not
divided.
The watch word currently is that our politics are very divided. What this book is helping me see is that we
are not as divided as we imagine. We are
torn. Individually and collectively. If Trump stands for the Big Lie, we are enticed
by that lie – we want to believe it – and we recoil against it to varying degrees.
We want to believe that we have pulled ourselves up by our
bootstraps (and don’t remember that MLK told us that it is cruel to expect
someone without boots to do just that). We want to believe that we are rugged
individualists – and we don’t want to acknowledge that we are also needy and
want and need the nurturance and care of those (women and POC) who we say are dependent on us, to care for us.
Were we the essential workers? Some of us, yes, but many of us were
non-essential. We want to get rid of the
safety net, and are afraid to admit that without that net we will work
ourselves to death out of fear that if we don’t have enough to last three
lifetimes, no one will care for us.
Trump speaks to our insecurities in highly coded language. We fear the outsider – the one who will come
and take what we have away from us. Of
course, at the moment that I am writing this, Joe Biden is enacting that same fear. He appears to no longer be as competent as he
once was, and yet he believes that no one else can defeat Trump. More to the point, he believes that he
embodies the antithesis to Trump rather than being a participant in the Big
Lie. His position that he is the ONLY
ONE that can beat Trump is a participation in this lie – though so was his
handling of Anita Hill when she was testifying against Clarence Thomas’s
Supreme Court hearings. It was painful
to hear him try to articulate how a proper woman could possibly have heard the
words “Long Dong Silver” by any other manner than to have Clarence Thomas utter
them.
Anita Hill was a woman in addition to being Black, part of
what made her hard for Biden to manage. James
Baldwin was gay as well as Black. Baldwin
was arguing against identities, and I don’t mean to be pigeon holing him by
articulating this identity, but clarifying that being this and that affords
multiple perspectives from which to see things.
Glaude did not say this explicitly, and I am not familiar enough with
Baldwin to know this, but the prejudice of blacks against homosexuality must
have helped Baldwin see that Blacks participate in the big lie too – we all do.
In the book Don Quixote, the broken-down old man riding a broken-down
nag with a dimwitted sidekick atop a donkey while simultaneously pining for a
bartending prostitute imagines himself to be a young Knight Errant with a sprightly
page by his side, fighting dragons on chivalrous behalf of his royal lady. He is not defeated by the windmills he
imagines to be the dragons, but by the knight of the mirrors. Seeing himself as he actually is turns out to
be more than he can bear.
Donald Trump’s mirror is not a funhouse distorting mirror, it
is veridical picture of the aspects of ourselves that are (at least slightly
uncomfortably) owned and acknowledged by half of us and but they are present
(to some extent) but disowned by the other half who would distance themselves
from Trump. Glaude’s prescription – based
on Baldwin – is that we should acknowledge that Trump is accurately portraying aspects
of ourselves, and that when we come to own that vision as an aspect of ourselves
we will have begun to be able to acknowledge the big lie and to have a more realistic
self-appraisal.
I think the question is, how close have we come to a tipping
point? I don’t think that we are ready
to acknowledge the disavowed aspects of ourselves – those of us who are
slightly on the Trump side of the divide disavow their attachment to the basic
principles that Glaude and Baldwin would have us embrace – that we love all
people because of their basic and shared humanity.
Those of us who are never Trumpers – who feel alienated in
our own country and are contemplating self-imposed exile if he is elected again
- are defending against their disowned prejudice – but expressing it in their
hatred and mistrust of Trump and his legions.
We are still in the contemplation stage. We are not ready to acknowledge that we are
imperfect – and loveable in spite of that imperfection. We are not ready to love one another despite,
or maybe even because of our differences.
We are not ready to remember what we have endured – the pain of being beaten,
but also the pain of beating – and we are not yet ready to take to heart
Baldwin’s message that the only value of that pain is to connect with the pain
of the other so that we are not alone.
We are not yet ready to realize that, no matter how far away
we get from this country, we carry it within ourselves. That, at the end of the analysis, whether it
is a psychoanalysis or a truth and reconciliation commission process, we are
more like ourselves than not, but that we are more capable of accepting ourselves
and others when we are able to acknowledge and bear our pain and use it is a
conduit to be in contact with and care for others, while being open to being
cared for ourselves.
In closing, I should acknowledge that when I talked through a
version of this thesis with the Reluctant Wife, we switched roles. She agreed with my belief (only after reading
this book – I did not hold this before) that Trump is doing us a service by
exposing our disavowed selves, but she does not imagine that we are ready to
engage in the painful and difficult paradigm shift that this realization might
precipitate.
Realistically, I agree with her. Nevertheless, I think that realizing that we
need therapy – realizing that there is a significant problem – and realizing
that WE need therapy – not that they need therapy – is a huge step. I am, I suppose, a bit giddy at this
realization, and, like the pageant queen’s promise to achieve world peace (or
Trump’s platform plank plan to End Crime), I believe that, if I can see this,
other’s can to. A guy can dream…
If that dream is to become a reality, we have to realize
that the leadership that will lead to the solution is unlikely to come from a
nationally acting leader – at least initially.
LBJ knew that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were the
right things to do (and the latter was certainly self serving), but he needed
MLK to push him. Could someone like
Oprah push an agenda that would be palatable?
I’m not sure who is going to help the white man see himself – and help
him realize that, despite the ugliness that is necessarily part of the picture,
he is still lovable – more so for acknowledging the ways in which he is
fallible, needy and aggressive. Perhaps
it will take a white man, one who is secure in his masculinity and aware of its
limits as a means of engaging with and shaping the world.
After thinking about this overnight, I realized that while a leader or a group of leaders would be important, the important work has been done - curricula have been developed, books have been written. Trumpers have tried to ban some of these books - sometimes successfully. In my experience there is no more effective way to get someone curious about a book than to ban it. I think that Trump's (or the 2025 project's - I'm not sure which) plan to do away with the Department of Education indicates just what a threat education is to repressing/suppressing/denying our history.
Education is what is making our individual psyches cringe at a world that is and/or is not run by Trump. Our ambivalence is fueled by what we are coming to know about ourselves - and would rather not, thank you very much. Ultimately the changes that Glaude and Baldwin (and I) would hope for and aspire to will come not because a few leaders have convinced a few people, but because leaders have embedded leaders throughout the system, including in elementary school and junior high school and high school class rooms that espouse different approaches to the world - approaches that are more inclusive, less shaming, and more accepting of others, but also of ourselves. These individuals go on to take government jobs, corporate jobs, and to move from the suburbs back to the city and to do so, we hope, with the intention of living with rather than displacing those who remained there (not always the case, I know, but someday we can hope that our children will be sitting in classrooms together connecting with each other, not because of a court mandate - which has not worked - but because we want them to).
The changes that are being talked about are both on a large political level, and, for them to succeed, they need to take place on the small individual level. We need to wrestle with our racism, homophobia, and etc. on a global, but also on a very local level. One of the revelations to me was that George Wallace, the racist governor of Alabama who was shot and paralyzed while running for president, had a personal transformation after he was shot. He apologized for his racist past, ran for governor on a reform ticket, and was elected and placed qualified blacks in positions of leadership in his cabinet. He was positively eulogized by leaders in the Civil Rights Movement. This is an important part of Civil Rights story that should be more broadly known - we can reform ourselves!
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