On Sept. 29 in Knott Auditorium,
the fall semester Ducharme Lecture took place featuring Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr. delivering an impassioned speech to hundreds of Mount
St. Mary’s students.
The Ducharme Lecture is an event that
happens twice a year featuring two speakers, one not affiliated with the Mount and one Mount Professor. The last couple of lectures with the Mount’s own featured Dr. Jamie Gianoutsos in the spring of 2022 and Drs. Paige Hochschild, Gregory Murry and Stephen McGinley.
This semester’s lecture starred Dr.
Glaude, Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University and is a New York Times best-selling author. Dr. Kalfani Ture, Assistant Professor of African American Studies at
the Mount had great words to say about
Glaude.
Ture describes him as a “sobering perspective” when it comes to democracy in
America. Ture says Glaude talked about
dueling sides of democracy in America,
how a country so committed to this idea
of freedom and democracy fails so badly when these ideas are tested in society.
Ture states that Glaude “calls us to be better citizens, better human beings,” that his work invites us to examine ourselves and
if we are truly the human beings we are
meant to be.
Glaude’s lecture: “Race & Democracy:
America is Always Changing, but America Never Changes” was powerful and
an eye-opener for the students and faculty at
the Mount. It's easy to feel secluded from
the social world in the small town of Emmitsburg, but Glaude pulled the campus back to the modern world with his speech.
Glaude attacked the systematic racism
today, the violence, the abuse and the prejudice. He described today as “what Abraham Lincoln believed as fever dreams.”
If modern America is what the man who
freed American slaves feels is a fever
dream, then America is in a dark place,
no matter how much we’d like to admit
it. While laws have changed, amendments
written, “race sits at the heart of it all.”
Glaude’s speech was very well received by the Mount. When Criminal Justice major Sam Cheyne (C’24) was asked how the lecture had impacted him, he said how he was called to take Glaude’s words into his future field,
and how he’s learned “how we can do better as a country” in the efforts against
racial injustice.
Senior and new mother Sarabeth Queale
saw Glaude’s lecture as a refresher on her
ideas on this subject in order not to “pass
on something destructive” to her child.
Racism is not a genetic disorder, nor a
the natural state of mind, it is learned through
one’s environment. It is important for us
all to be aware of this and to pass on the
right values and ideals to the generation
after us in order to change this century's
long injustice that is racism.
When asked how, how students at a
university of less than 3,000 change the
world, Glaude gave this response. Glaude
called us to “Imagine a new America and
fight like hell for it” because it is truly up
to us to make change. What will happen
will happen, but Glaude told the crowd
that “through you God will make His
kingdom.” The kingdom won’t make itself; we must work to build it up, brick by
brick.