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Eddie glaude1/31/2024 I said I wish he was seven, because I thought he would be safe at home again, and he reminded me that Tamir was 12, and he’s gone. And in my son’s usual way, he corrected me. And so I wrote him, and he wrote me back. ![]() And so, part of the difficulty of this conversation around race is that we often deal with abstractions, and we don’t know and we often don’t realize that there are real human beings, real lives, real relationships underneath all of the abstractions. And combine that with Diamond Reynolds’s four-year-old daughter finding the maturity and courage to try to console her mother in that moment, and it led me to think about my own son and his own experiences. NERMEEN SHAIKH: So could you say something, Eddie, about what prompted your decision to make an exchange like this public?ĮDDIE GLAUDE: You know, I was really grappling with that 15-year-old boy crying, weeping at the loss of his father. The struggle must continue, for our future’s sake. And I remember my own experiences with police officers as a kid. I look at the faces of countless black bodies piling in our streets. I remember Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Aiyana Jones. The world seemed so much simpler back then. LANGSTON GLAUDE: “Funny, I too find myself wishing that I were a kid again. I just say it because I feel that you would be safer at home, with us.”ĪMY GOODMAN: And, Langston, your letter that you responded to your father. But I say this not because I find having an empty nest unbearable, although at times I do, or that I long to raise a teenager again-and eventually you would be that maddening teenager again. The vexations of the teenage years were far off, and you still liked me. Well, “I find myself more often than not, and upon reflection this is an astonishing thing to say no less think, wishing you were seven years old again. Can you start by reading your letter to Langston, an excerpt?ĪMY GOODMAN: And then, Langston, we’d like you to share yours.ĮDDIE GLAUDE: Well, thanks for having us. It’s great to have you both here with us. They recently published their letters to each other in Time magazine. We are also joined by his son Langston, a student at Brown University. Joining us now, Princeton professor Eddie Glaude, author of Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. He had to watch this, as this was put all over the outlets, and everything that was possible to be shown.ĪMY GOODMAN: That is 15-year-old Cameron, the son of Alton Sterling, as he’s being comforted by supporters at the news conference where his mother was speaking. QUINYETTA McMILLON: The individuals involved in his murder took away a man with children, who depended upon their daddy on a daily basis. At the beginning of the news confernce, Cameron consoled his mother as she spoke, but after a few minutes, he broke down into the arms of supporters standing behind the two of them. This is Quinyetta McMillon, the mother of Sterling’s 15-year-old son Cameron. Eddie Glaude was referencing video from the moment when Alton Sterling’s family addressed the media. His cries made me think of you.”ĪMY GOODMAN: Those are the words of Princeton professor Eddie Glaude to his son Langston in the wake of last week’s police killings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. The police had killed another black person. It was the latest of a string of haunting public rituals of grief. NERMEEN SHAIKH: “Dear Langston, I thought of you when I saw the son of Alton Sterling weeping at a press conference.
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