“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.” So goes the second chapter of the author Eddie S Glaude Jr’s latest book America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries.
The Princeton University professor’s new text illustrates how political turmoil has historically reached a boiling point around celebrations of the nation’s founding on the Fourth of July. The text is especially relevant now as the United States approaches its 250th birthday. Throughout the book, Glaude argues that since the very beginning, Black Americans have played a vital role in establishing this country. Their presence is a constant reminder that the mythological America – one of a white republic – does not exist. Celebrations of the nation’s founding, he says, reinforce myth-making at the expense of the truth. They’re treated as sacrosanct events, thus justifying the sanitization of the nation’s brutal history.
Against today’s backdrop, the 250th celebrations come with the normalizing of white supremacist rhetoric, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the threatening of birthright citizenship.
The Guardian spoke with Glaude about his book and how it explains America’s current political moment. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
You juxtapose past racist violence against Black people with current-day violence against them. What do you make of the cyclical nature of race relations in this country, in which progress is typically marred by these attacks?
I think it’s rooted in the chapter “Freedom is the white man’s gift”, which flows out of the divided soul of the nation. I make a claim that America suffers from a kind of double consciousness, that it imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And you can’t hold those two claims together without contradiction or depositing a kind of madness at the heart of the country. Freedom is seen as the possession of a particular group of folk who can give it and take it away. 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: “What can we do for you?”
But that charity runs dry, such as at the end of Reconstruction, where people said: “We are done with the issue of slavery, but we don’t want Black folk to have full citizenship rights.” Folks who were anti-slavery suddenly were deeply suspicious about extending the franchise to Black people. Or we have these other moments where folks are asking the question, “What else do you want? We’ve given you so much. Show some gratitude.” We find ourselves in these cycles of sentimentality and white rage, as Carol Anderson talks about. So we find ourselves, over and over again, in these moments of backlash and then a desire for absolution.
To that point, with so many of these anniversaries, there seems to be a racial flashpoint. What do you think of 250 years coinciding with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act?
Six years ago, folks were saying that we were experiencing a racial reckoning after we witnessed the murder of George Floyd, and people risked their lives to protest as Covid-19 raged. In a blink of an eye, we’ve witnessed a simultaneous attack on two major pieces of legislation: 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 by changing the national quotas around who can immigrate here, in effect overturning the Nationality and Immigration Act of 1924, which was basically written by the Klan. The Voting Rights Act expanded Black political power and our participation in the political process. What we’re experiencing in this moment is a wholesale attack on that vision of the country.
Much has been made of the Trump administration’s whitewashing of the country’s history ahead of the 250th anniversary. But you point out that that’s par for the course, highlighting the 1876 anniversary and the 1926 anniversary as other times when Americans decided to whitewash history to preserve a specific idea of Americanness. What can people do to push back on the distortion of history?
“Disremembering” is so important, right? That’s Toni Morrison’s language, this active forgetting that echoes “dismembering”. There’s a violence that attends this.
In 1876, after the carnage of the civil war, over 600,000 people dead on land and sea, President [Ulysses S] Grant and others focused on talking about the business acumen of the country, its technological fortitude, its innovation. Black folks are effectively disappearing because our presence reveals the lie of that narrative.
Just think about the backdrop of 1876: you have the Colfax massacre in Louisiana. You have Vicksburg, Mississippi. You have Hamburg, South Carolina. There is literally a political coup going on in some parts of the occupied south.
What has to happen here in order to protect the innocence of the country? Black folks have to be disappeared. We have to be made to play minor bit parts in the story. This is one way that I’m trying to parse [James] Baldwin’s sentence in The Fire Next Time. He says the innocence constitutes the crime. It’s a way of preserving American innocence by redacting the historical record.
Do you think it’s possible for Americans to be anything other than, as Frederick Douglass said, “destitute of political memory”?
I think so. I don’t want to say we’re fated to be this, that the country can never change. I’m attached to people on the ground, and I have a fundamental faith in the fact that people can be otherwise. It’s not my place to throw away people. 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. That’s what I’m calling for at the end of the book. I don’t put forward any policy agendas. I don’t want to participate in the ongoing ritual of behaving like we’re actually trying.
I simply say it’s clear. We have to make a choice. Either we’re going to be a white republic, or we’re going to be a beacon of freedom. We can’t be both. That requires of us a kind of tragic sense, a blue-soaked sensibility torecognize and acknowledge the horrors and the joys, the triumphs and the defeats that make us who we are as Americans.
Where do you think the country is headed, given this volleying back and forth – yet another anniversary, yet more tragedy?
Right now, we’re on the precipice. I don’t know who we’re going to be on the other side of this. [Donald] Trump and Maga are 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. It’s going to take generations to get back on our feet. It’s a dark hour. But, you know, midnight is the beginning of a new day. It’s the darkest of hours, but it’s also the beginning of a new period, a new day. We have an opportunity, if we are mature enough as a people, to actually try to build a country in the aftermath of the ruins left behind by Trump and his people.
