Calling for a “revolution in values,” in support of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Princeton Professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. told a standing-room-only audience on Monday that white supremacy, in the form of a belief that white lives are worth more than others, prevails in this country. 

Religion professor and African American Studies Department Chair, Mr. Glaude, in his keynote address to Princeton’s 10th Annual Humanities Colloquium in Aaron Burr Hall, described an enduring “legacy of the value gap,” and said that #BlackLivesMatter bravely and directly challenges this belief.

“Young people all around the country are challenging the underlying assumptions of white supremacy,” Mr. Glaude asserted. “They’re putting their bodies on the line, disturbing the peace С let’s call it the politics of disruption С and asking hard questions.”

Mr. Glaude, author of Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul and an increasingly visible presence in the media with appearances on PBS News Hour, the Majority Report, CNN, C-Span, MSNBC and articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Huffington Post and elsewhere, has been outspoken in his criticism of current politics, including sharp condemnations of President Obama and both major political candidates.

Noting the “tragic irony of democracy,” Mr. Glaude stated that “the contradictions of our present moment have created an opportunity to do serious work in calling attention to the value gap.”

He praised the young people who marched in the streets and challenged the Ferguson, Missouri police, and further voiced his support for #BlackLivesMatter. “These young folks are daring to break free,” he said. “They’re asserting the uniqueness and distinctiveness of their own voices in the name of a more expansive idea of democratic life.” In quoting from James Baldwin, Mr. Glaude argued that “the times demand that one be outrageous, independent, anarchical, that one resist the fearful pressures placed upon one to lie.”

Despite his disappointment with the current situation in national politics, Mr. Glaude pointed out cause for optimism in working toward local political goals at this moment of opportunity.

In answering a student’s question about prospects for the future, Mr. Glaude said that #BlackLivesMatter “can move us toward a more expansive vision, a broader politics — beyond the question of police brutality — to invest in communities, to think about liberation in a broader sense, to reassert a radical black imagination.”

Citing effective local campaigns in Chicago, Cleveland, Oakland, and Miami, he noted “a a shift in the center of gravity of African American politics. And it’s happening in a moment when we have these two terrible choices of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump for president.”

#Black Lives Matter, Mr. Glaude stated, has bravely resisted Mr. Obama’s attempts to limit black radical politics.

In commenting on issues of racism and the value gap at Princeton University, Mr. Glaude stated, “We’ve got to stop sweet-talking each other. We have to start telling the truth.” He noted that “Princeton just got into the game in the 1960s [when the first African American students were admitted], and we think that we’ve already arrived.”

Reasserting that the value gap remains, that “racism is actually happening — it happens every day,” Mr. Glaude, again echoing both James Baldwin and Malcolm X, concluded, “I just want to be — and I don’t want to be on anyone else’s terms. I want to bring the fullness of who I am into these spaces and I think that is a revolutionary act, and part of that involves to stop sweet-talking.”