As the United States prepares to mark a quarter-millennium of independence, Princeton University professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. argues the nation faces a stark choice: it cannot simultaneously be both a white republic and a beacon of freedom.
Glaude's new book, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries, traces how major political crises have historically erupted around Fourth of July celebrations. The pattern, he contends, exposes a fundamental contradiction embedded in American self-mythology.
The second chapter opens with a loaded proposition: when Black Americans showed up to Fourth of July events claiming freedom as their own, they shattered the fiction that this was a nation truly committed to liberty and equality. That presence, Glaude argues, has always threatened the sanitized narrative Americans prefer to tell about themselves.
The 250th anniversary arrives amid what he views as a coordinated assault on the multiracial democracy the nation briefly began building in the 1960s. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and attacks on birthright citizenship, paired with the normalization of white supremacist rhetoric, form a coherent project in his reading: the reversal of hard-won gains.
Glaude traces this cycle backward through American history. He points to 1876, when President Ulysses S. Grant and other leaders, in the shadow of Civil War carnage and the Colfax massacre, chose to celebrate American business acumen and technological innovation. Black Americans were deliberately erased from that narrative because their presence would expose its lies. The same dynamic played out again in 1926.
This is what Glaude calls the nation's divided soul: it holds two irreconcilable images of itself and manages the contradiction through what he terms disremembering, an active forgetting that carries real violence. When Americans want to address racial injustice, they do so only sentimentally, offering charity they later resent. The backlash inevitably follows.
But Glaude stops short of declaring the country doomed. He rejects fatalism, insisting people can choose differently. The path forward requires what he calls a tragic sense: the maturity to look at American history honestly, to acknowledge both horrors and triumphs, and to finally decide which nation Americans actually want to be.
The current moment, he said in an interview, is darker than most. The Trump administration and MAGA movement are destroying democratic foundations in real time. Yet Glaude offers a sliver of hope: midnight is the beginning of a new day. What comes next will take generations to build, but the choice remains in American hands.
Author James Rodriguez: "Glaude's diagnosis is bleak, but his refusal to surrender to historical inevitability is what makes this book urgent reading at exactly this moment."
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