Glaude, a professor at Princeton University, said in an interview with NPR that he wrote the book — “America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries” — to “write some security underneath my feet” and bring “this rage under control, to get my sadness, my melancholy under control.” The book examines the country through the lens of its previous anniversaries and centennials, arguing that today “the divided soul of the nation is in full view.”
“I had written some version of the introduction and it didn’t land,” Glaude said of the opening sentence. “I thought I was holding something back. … And so I returned to that first paragraph, and suddenly this sentence just came on the page.” After writing it, he said he walked around his study “afraid of what this would mean if I left it there” before deciding to keep it.
The historian cited the Supreme Court’s decisions dismantling the Voting Rights Act and ongoing redistricting efforts that he said threaten to limit Black representation in Congress as contemporary evidence of the country’s failure to fulfill its founding ideals.
Glaude said the 250th anniversary is a moment when “the country has to tell a story about itself” and about its founding. He predicted the official narrative would be one of “the saintliness of the founders” and “the sacredness of this grand experiment,” ignoring the role of slavery and racial oppression.
He described a 2024 visit to Congress Hall in Philadelphia where a tour guide described conflicts between Northern and Southern representatives — but when Glaude expected slavery to be raised as the central division, the guide instead noted that “they didn’t know how to shake hands” — bowing versus handshakes. “I was like, that’s it?” Glaude said. “And then I just saw ghosts. I saw ghosts all around Congress Hall.” He called the experience a “startling example of the storybook version of the country.”
On patriotism, Glaude said that “sometimes patriotism, to my ear, sounds like a rebel yell.” He said the people who “wrap themselves up in the piety of the country are often, more than not, folk who think I should be in my place” and who support policies such as the assault on voting rights. “So usually when I hear a robust, visceral embrace of love of country, you know, my head goes on a swivel,” he said. “Who sang it, and for what ends and for what purposes?”
Glaude rejected the idea that the nation can continue celebrating its founding story without confronting its contradictions. “America has to grow up. It can no longer hide in its adolescence,” he said. “America imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And to hold those two things together … deposits the kind of madness at the heart of the country.”