Princeton University professor Eddie Glaude Jr. takes a long view in his new book, “America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries,” arguing that celebrations of the nation’s founding have historically served as vehicles for whitewashing racial violence and that the country now faces an existential choice.
“America suffers from a kind of double consciousness, that it imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic,” Glaude told the Guardian in an interview published June 24. “And you can’t hold those two claims together without contradiction or depositing a kind of madness at the heart of the country.”
The book, released ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4, traces a pattern in which milestone anniversaries — 1876, 1926 — coincided with racial flashpoints. Glaude argues that the sanitized narratives that accompany these celebrations amount to what Toni Morrison called “disremembering,” an active forgetting he said echoes the violence of “dismembering.”
“The mere presence of Black people at the Fourth of July celebrations, acting as if freedom belonged to them, exposed the lie at the heart of this ritual of remembrance by the nation: ours was not a nation committed to liberty and equality,” Glaude writes in the book’s second chapter.
Glaude detailed how the 1876 centennial was accompanied by the Colfax massacre in Louisiana, political violence in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Hamburg, South Carolina, and what he described as a political coup in parts of the occupied South. President Ulysses S. Grant and other leaders, he said, focused on the nation’s business acumen and technological innovation, effectively disappearing Black people from the national narrative.
“Black folks have to be disappeared. We have to be made to play minor bit parts in the story,” Glaude said, parsing James Baldwin’s observation that “the innocence constitutes the crime.”
The professor said the current political moment echoes those historical patterns. He noted that six years after the murder of George Floyd prompted what many called a racial reckoning, the country has witnessed a “simultaneous attack” on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
“Both of them fundamentally changed the trajectory of the nation. They opened up the doors for a genuinely multiracial democracy,” Glaude said. “What we’re experiencing in this moment is a wholesale attack on that vision of the country.”
He described the current cycles of racial progress and backlash as rooted in a pattern of “sentimentality and white rage” — a concept drawn from historian Carol Anderson — in which periods of reform are followed by demands for gratitude and subsequent violent reaction.
“Freedom is seen as the possession of a particular group of folk who can give it and take it away,” Glaude said. “And so when we find ourselves in these moments where we want to live up to our ideals and address racial injustice, we typically do so in a sentimentalized way.”
Glaude said the nation is at “the precipice” and that he does not know what the country will become on the other side of its current political turmoil. He described the Trump administration and the MAGA movement as “literally destroying the foundations of our democracy right in front of us.”
“We’re witnessing the end of the America that made our lives possible,” Glaude said. “It’s going to take generations to get back on our feet.”
Despite the grim assessment, Glaude said he retains a “fundamental faith” that people can change. He called for the nation to “grow up” and honestly confront its past.
“If we grow up finally as a nation, if we don’t remain in this perpetual state of adolescence where we can look at our past and honestly see it for what it is, maybe we can discover who we really are as Americans,” he said. “Either we’re going to be a white republic, or we’re going to be a beacon of freedom. We can’t be both.”