Greensboro's African American Community Newspaper since 1967
“We are witnessing, I believe, the dismantling of the world that made our lives possible,” distinguished author, commentator and professor, Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., told the Black lawyers and Black doctors attending last weekend’s 2026 Annual Continuing Legal/Medical Educational Conference in Wilmington.
“Everything that was put in place to allow you to be in this room today, they are destroying,” Glaude continued, making veiled reference to the Trump Administration’s elimination of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policies, and destruction of established civil rights laws in the public and private sectors across the country.
“Of course there’s the attack on American history itself. They want to tell themselves a story [that] this nation has absolved them of responsibility and accountability.”
“They want to be White … without judgement!” Dr. Glaude declared, to applause.
The popular MS NOW political television analyst continued to rattle off the various ways the Trump Administration has allegedly violated the rule of law, sought to deprive American citizens of their constitutional rights, and monetize governance into extraordinary wealth while a nation suffers from higher prices and few cogent public policies.
“W.E.B. Dubois once said if you really want to know what White supremacy really means, in our day, all you need to know is who is more susceptible to early death,” Dr. Glaude, author of the current bestseller, “America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries” [Penguin Random House], said to even more applause.
“In short, our democracy is in deep trouble, and I say this not as a partisan, but to offer a description of a hard reality we all must confront in the 250th year of this fragile experiment. We find ourselves standing on the precipice. In the 250th year of this country, we have to deal with this sh-t again!”
“I’m wondering if this democracy can survive. And the present question, at least to me, is, ‘What will we do about it?’”
Dr. Glaude reminded attendees of what happened after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, and how there was a deep “racial reckoning” throughout the nation, so much so that leading corporations began pushing DEI policies within their ranks as a sort of “apology” for the racist act.
Many in the Black Lives Matter movement didn’t buy it, Glaude said, demanding accountability for past acts of discrimination.
But that so-called “apology” didn’t last very long, because it was followed by a swift backlash to any establishing of equal opportunity, Dr. Glaude recalled, exposing what the true feeling of the American hierarchy is.
“The only thing one can conclude given the swiftness of the backlash, is that folk were lying.” Dr. Glaude said. “They weren’t telling the truth.”
The current “storybook” celebration of the nation’s 250th year “requires a banishment of Black people from view, or a reduction of our role in the country’s history to affirm America’s quest to be a more perfect union,” he continued.
“But what might it mean to confront honestly that [America is] not a beacon of freedom?” Glaude rhetorically asked, noting that the nation continues to grasp the legacy of slavery without honestly acknowledging the evil that it caused.
“[To them], our story has to affirm the “innocence” of the nation,” allowing people like those in the Trump Administration to be “comfortable” in their hatred,” Dr. Glaude maintained.
“History calls us in this moment, and we will answer with courage and conviction. Did folks struggle for us to be in this room?” Glaude rhetorically asked, “…so you can claim that you put your feet under White folks’ tables? Did folk die for that?”
“Ours is the moment of reckoning. You must rise to the occasion. We hold the responsibility of getting our babies to the other side.”
Glaude called for a reinvigoration of Black civil society and Black institutions in order to help save the Black community against the current onslaught by the Trump Administration and others to destroy any vestige of Black progress and history.
“Are we going to betray the tradition that made us who we are?” Dr. Glaude asked? “We cannot wait for these people to come to their senses!”
“What are you going to do?”
The Carolina Peacemaker is a founding member of the North Carolina Black Publishers Association (NCBPA).
For more on the Joint Annual Conference of the North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers (NCABL) and the Old North State Medical Society see page 4A for a second story.
