Is America worth fighting for?
In Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.'s provocative "America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries," the Princeton professor and bestselling author probes our divided soul
Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. opens his harrowing new work, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, with this declaration: “I do not love America, and never have, especially now.” And yet the emotion and scholarship with which he pokes and prods his subject suggests a deep caring.
In advance of America’s 250th this July 4th, Glaude interrogates the meaning of “this supposed day of freedom,” what it might mean to “those who bore the brunt of the country’s refusal to live up to its promise.” He invokes Frederick Douglass: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?...To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license.” The words of W.E.B. DuBois, John Dos Passos, James Baldwin, Herman Melville also enrich throughout.
The book’s thesis is that “Like the celebrations before it, the Semiquincentennial reaches back to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.” He observes that there is a “doubleness,” a “paradox” that rests at our nation’s heart, and taints its founding. Glaude doesn’t mince words: The backlash to “wokeness,” DEI, and Black Lives Matter “has been swift and harsh…Mirrors shattered, people who claimed to be allies now worried about the overreach…the celebration of 250 years since founding hides the broken glass beneath our feet.” And: “The ugliness of what white people believe about color—that somehow, in some inscrutable way, the color of one’s skin determines your value.” For those who proclaimed the death of racism: “The country has given us Donald Trump, and we have to deal with the madness again. The pounding in the skull returns as we struggle to beat back the ‘intolerable bitterness of spirit,’ because these people have done this shit again.”
There is an electricity, a visceral quality to this work that discomfits, provokes, disturbs. And yet there is a musicality to the prose, which is amplified by the bars of original music written for the book by classical composer Joel Thompson.
We hope you’ll join the Ink Book Club for a Substack live conversation with Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. Monday, June 1 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern. The bestselling author of Begin Again—a James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton—will be with us to discuss his “elegy that mourns the country we thought we knew,” and how we can reclaim hope, which is “shadowed by ambivalence at the crossroads.”
In the book’s acknowledgments, the author writes: “This has been one of the most difficult books I have ever written…thinking about Donald Trump and this perilous moment in the nation’s 250th year has brought me to the brink of madness.”
And yet Glaude concludes that “America is possible if we imagine it so, if we tell ourselves better stories and follow the signs, like those on the quilts of the enslaved, that direct us to the path of freedom.” He warns against letting Trump and his supporters achieve their aim—to “occupy our imaginations.”
In this deeply felt, deeply researched book, Glaude leaves it all on the page. Join us for what will no doubt be an enlightening, engaged conversation.
And if you’re not already a subscriber to Glaude’s Substack, “A Native Son,” check it out!
Below, you’ll find some discussion and reflection prompts to consider. The Ink Book Club’s events are open to all paid subscribers to The Ink. If you haven’t yet become part of our community, join today. And if you’re already a member, consider giving a gift or group subscription.