EDDIE GLAUDE:

Well, I think it's significant on its face. I hope it will play itself out in a substantive way.

But let's be very clear. We can talk about public-private partnerships as being at the heart of the housing crisis. We can think about the 1968 HUD Act. And part of what that act involved was public-private relationships designed to increase homeownership among black folk, black Americans.

What was the result? The creation of an emerging market with predatory lending, right, behaviors and practices that led to billions of dollars of loss within black communities in the 1970s, predating, right, the housing crisis of 2008.

So, part of what I'm suggesting here is that we believe in this country that public-private partnerships can be responsible for maintaining the public good, securing the public good. But we see what public-private partnerships are doing with regards to public education.

And I think we need to understand that this crisis, this crisis that has everything to do with unemployment, that has everything to do with the failure of the education system, that has everything to do with structural, systemic racism in terms of the criminal justice system requires a robust response from the government.

But we are living in times — and we have lived over a few decades — and I don't want to take too much time here, but for the last few decades, we have lived in a moment where the conception of government being an active — playing an active role in ensuring — ensuring the public good has been under a relentless assault.

And part of what I hoped with this initiative — but it was a hope against hope, to invoke Du Bois — was that we would somehow break out of the frame. But, instead, the frame has limited the scope and in some ways limited our imagination.