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Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul

In this book, Eddie Glaude describes the state of black America that savages the idea of a post-racial society. Glaude talks about America’s great promise of equality and how it has always “rung hollow” in the ears of African Americans. The situation of equality has become more severe due to the murders of black youth by the police, the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, and the disaster visited upon poor and middle-class black families by the Great Recession. Glaude claims it is clear that black America faces an emergency—at the very moment the election of the first black president has prompted many to believe we’ve solved America’s race problem. However, African-Americans have lost more than 50 percent of their wealth by 2011. They lost homes, savings, and jobs, with national black unemployment reaching 16 percent in 2010. In his book, Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s impassioned response argues that we live in a country founded on a “value gap”—with white lives valued more than others—that still distorts our politics today. Whether discussing why all Americans have racial habits that reinforce inequality, why black politics based on the civil-rights era have reached a dead end or why only remaking democracy from the ground up can bring real change, Glaude crystallizes the untenable position of black America–and offers thoughts on a better way forward. Forceful in ideas and unsettling in its candor, Democracy In Black is a landmark book on race in America, one that promises to spark wide discussion as we move toward the end of our first black presidency.

In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America

Eddie Glaude defines racial identity through his book “Shades of Blue” by using African American stories and novels, specifically Toni Morisson’s book “Beloved” and ethnographies from John Dewey. Through the use of Morisson’s and Dewey’s work, Glaude develops the concept of the term black publics; which is the opinion of black individuals and culture by black individuals and of black individuals by white supremacists in the past, present, and future. Glaude discusses the history of Apartheid in South Africa in the late 1900s, which is where institutionalized racism was built on the fact that the white minority was the only land owners and farmers by law. While using the past of both slavery and white dominance in the United States refers to how African Americans were labeled as "nameless nobodies" whose status could only be altered by recreating themselves into the concept of "somebodies.” The definition of black power continues to be an essential foundation throughout Glaude’s writing and is represented in two main aspects. Thus, Glaude emphasizes when an individual has black power, this is merged with having an identity as a Christian and that one needs to portray both a vision and the concept of black power to make what they believe a reality.

'''Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America:'''

Eddie Glaude’s first publication. In his first book, Glaude illustrates the key role Black religious life played in the emergence and conceptualizing of a Black national identity. Biblical narratives were used to conceptualize race and imbued with moral and ethical mandates. References to the Exodus aided explicitly in the crafting of a national identity reflecting the unique experience of African Americans. Throughout the novel, Glaude mainly focuses on the distinct narrative interpretations of the biblical Exodus story. Black and white Americans offered distinctive interpretations of the Exodus story, which respectively aided in the construction of differing visions of American nationalism. Black interpretations of the Exodus story framed African Americans as a separate community of people, thus necessitating a call for racial solidarity rather than a complete rejection of the United States. Within a racist nation sense of closeness. Beyond interpretations of the Exodus story, grounds this analysis of the linkage between Black religion in the workings of political organizations of Black Americans. The challenge of obtaining freedom generated a diversity in responses that collectively highlighted the ambivalence negotiating emancipation was fraught with. Overall, Glaude’s novel is praised for its expansion of racial and religious discourse in the context of the antebellum period and for offering an alternative vocabulary for discussing Black religion in public spaces. Exodus reveals the linkages between religion and politicians as being grounded in imagination, as well as the intersection between racial and national formation in the antebellum period.