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- [00:01]
Benjamin Boster
Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun.
- [00:06]
Derek Barris
An army hung on her every word.
- [00:08]
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- [00:34]
Benjamin Boster
Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
- [01:36]
Derek Barris
I do not love America and never have. Especially now. With an opening sentence like that, you know you're in for a ride. And Eddie Glaud Jr. Does not disappoint. The James S. McDonnell Distinguished University professor at Princeton University, where he teaches in the departments of African American Studies and Religion, is best known for his television punditry as well as his best selling book, Begin Again. James Baldwin' America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. I love that book. So when America USA How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries was recently published, I hopped onto bookshop.org and ordered a copy. As you can imagine, from that first line, Galaud doesn't mince words or sentiment. He's an elegant orator and eloquent writer, and in his latest work he investigates the very flimsy foundation that American exceptionalism is built upon. Using the nation's 250th anniversary today to track our double consciousness, the America that Americans love to advertise, the free and fair beacon of light for the world to ogle at, contrasted with the double the America built by black people during centuries of chattel slavery, the nation that created institutions that still favor white people as much as many of them refuse to understand why that is. While our country celebrates 250 with the most ludicrous display of confused nationalism at Trump's poorly attended state fair, it's important to remember that slavery lasted for nearly as long 246 years from 1619 to 1865, and it was part of the 400 year legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. Glaud calls the first of the double consciousness storybook democracy, the sanitized, polished America that persists in our national consciousness and tragically and growingly educational system. His book is about the other half, the bundle of contradictions which is this nation, which makes white people uncomfortable. Anything challenging a storybook is to be raged against, as the current administration has proven time and again. Why here's Glaude recently speaking at Politics and Prose, a bookstore in Washington, D.C. i make sure to swing by every time I'm in the city. Fun fact for longtime Conspirituality listeners. The bookstore is located on the same block as Comet Ping Pong, the infamous pizza shop that was supposedly trafficking children in a basement that doesn't actually exist. Thanks, QAnon.
- [04:34]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
Here's Eddie so between 2020 and 2026 I kept saying to myself, they've done this shit again and we have to raise our babies in it. The repetition and the second part is that I'm not okay. The melancholia that overwhelmed between 2020 and now, the rage that threatens to overwhelm. I'm walking around New Jersey looking you voted for him, didn't you? You ain't telling me a kind of deep skepticism about folk around me and trying to account for it.
- [05:17]
Derek Barris
Yeah, we did that shit again. For this episode, I want to share some of the touch points from Glaud's excellent work with a slight diversion into the surging online activism that purports to be about justice for all, yet time and again refuses to acknowledge race as a foundation for our distress, despite black thinkers continually pointing out the obvious. I'm Derek Barris and you're listening to Conspirituality book Club America USA by Eddie Glau Jr. As always, you can find us on Instagram and threads conspiritualitypod as well as individually on bluesky. And if you appreciate the work that we do, you can support us on patreon@patreon.com conspiracy spirituality, where you'll gain access to AD free listening and our Monday bonus episodes, as well as Apple Podcasts where we also post the Monday bonus episodes. Okay, let's dive in. And one thing about the musical interludes moving forward. For this episode, Glaud had classical composer Joel Thompson create an original composition as a soundtrack for the book. It was broken up for each chapter as a bit of sheet music, which represents the lived experience of the country shorn of the comfort of a storybook version of America and its promise. At the beginning of the Politics and Prose event, Dr. Leah Claiborne played the entire piece live on piano. So that's going to carry us through the content and you can watch the entire talk and that performance via the YouTube link in the show notes. Eddie Glaud Jr. Centers America USA in Philadelphia, the city that birthed both the Constitution and the Fugitive slave Act. That 1793 law, which gave legal clarity to a constitutional clause by allowing slave owning states the power to reacquire slaves if they escaped to non slave owning states, was overshadowed 57 years later when the 1850 Fugitive Slave act became a catalyst for the Civil War. Philadelphia is a city of contrasts, cloud writes, the second most residentially segregated city in the country, whose center, Independence Square, seems not Disneyland fake but still somehow contrived. I grew up equidistant from Philadelphia, New York City, not far from the Princeton University where Glaud teaches, and I was among the many youth who traveled to Philly to learn about America's history on school trips. Growing up in a nearly all white school district, I was taught the Disneyland version, the storybook democracy where slavery was an unfortunate but brief stain on an otherwise impeccable history, where Indians and pilgrims broke bread, where white heroes tamed the uncivilized and brought forth this great nation. It wouldn't be until living on a racially diverse college campus at Rutgers and studying under the likes of Ivan Van Sertima and Miguel Agarin that that spell begin to break for me, until I would question my own seemingly unquestionable love for America. Such transformations don't come quickly or easily. Instead of grappling with our racist past and chronically racist present, Glaud writes that white America seems to desire freedom from the judgment that says with contempt and pity, you are not who you say you are. Grappling with that accusation lives at the heart of the continual white supremacy project that was given new political power with the first Trump administration, and even more with the second. Yeah, we did that shit again, though it's not like that project was ever abandoned. Glaud writes about the white rage that handed the keys to a real estate and reality TV hack whose track record of bankruptcies should have given everyone pause. Freedom, Glaud writes, remains white America's possession to give. And it's no surprise that some of Trump's first orders of business upon reassuming power, was to remove any hint of DEI and critical race theory from government websites and documents. Glaud continues, quote it is not enough to remember the details of slavery or of the past more generally, but to confront its meaning for who we are as a nation today. But that simply won't do, especially with this administration, which has heavily scrutinized the Smithsonian Institution, for example, citing exhibits as overly negative regarding US History and critical of the institution's focus on slavery. How dare they. That's why Trump's executive order called Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, and I'm pretty sure it was authored by AI with the help of Stephen Miller. It demanded that the Smithsonian remove divisive narratives and celebrate American exceptionalism ahead of the 250th birthday. Here's part of the order Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has in recent years come under the influence of a divisive race centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive. For example, the Smithsonian American Art Museum today features the Shape of Stories of Race and American Sculpture, an exhibit representing that societies, including the United States, have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege and disenfranchisement. The exhibit further claims that sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality, but a social construct, stating race is a human invention. Oh God. Slavery isn't mentioned once in the Order, by the way. Race, in fact is a social construct, as is gender. But white America would rather treat them as self evident biological truths, which gives new meaning to the administration's absolute gutting of scientific research. That war, by the way, isn't over. The Office of Management and Budget recently issued a 412 page proposal to revise federal financial assistance. Within the endless barrage of legalese is a rule change that would effectively end all scientific research that the ruling party doesn't deem worth studying by giving legislators the power to rule over about a trillion dollars of federal funding across 42 different agencies. Here's how reporting in the Verge frames it. All federal grants must align with the president's policy priorities, and all mentions of DEI or gender ideology are immediate, immediately off the table. People applying for research funding who can't fulfill these demands, the rule change says, are welcome to get funding elsewhere. If you don't like it, the document implies, leave. This is part of the administration's maniacal desire to perpetuate storybook America, a facade that falls apart upon the slightest prodding. What happens, Glaud writes, When the 4th of July is not seen as a moment of celebration but is exposed as a repository of buried anguish and lies that allow our national sense of identity to cohere? Trump and crew have been working hard to ensure that question is never asked. Thankfully, we can ask it now with books like America usa. But that too isn't a given if this authoritarian reign is allowed to continue Continue its forward march. The Voting Rights act of 1965 is a landmark statute designed to prohibit racial discrimination in voting. Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law. Congress amended it five times over the following decades to expand its protections. Then came Donald Trump and friends at the Heritage foundation who love to swear we live in a post racial society, that the structures and institutions are made for everyone. We all have a shot. And of course we have to include Trump's Supreme Court, which in April effectively gutted the act to render it nearly powerless by allowing redistricting that disfavors black residents. The act said you can't discriminate against voters based on their race and must provide proportional representation. And then the court basically said, ah, it's fine, go ahead. While that decision was bad enough, I was shocked by the silence that followed. I follow all sorts of people and topics on social media ranging from liberal to leftist, with plenty of right leaning content thrown in due to my work tracking it for this podcast. I expected fury to dominate my feed in the days and weeks following the Court's decision. Instead, barely a whimper ensued except for black threads. That's where I expected the conversation to start. I just didn't realize it would end there. Given how vocal the American left has become, and given the DSA platform specifically calls for anti racism, though unlike other topics, there's no specifics about what that entails. Anti racism appears to be a slogan they use to give themselves cover while going into great detail about policy changes and international issues. When it comes to the foundational issue of this country, however, they seem content to brush it aside, which has created a lot of pushback from black activists and thinkers about the construction construction of the DSA, which is currently 85% white and only 4% hold blue collar jobs, with 6% working in retail or service industries, even though the working class is the demographic they claim to be at the core of their belief system. And let me be clear on this, I agree with a number of DSA platform issues. It's probably the closest political party that I personally align with on a number of topics. The Democratic Party, while more progressive than the online left often claims, is still not living up to this moment in our national politics. I take issue with certain beliefs and posturing from some DSA activists and candidates, but I also don't think trying to silence them now is doing the Democratic Party any favors. A big tent, which is what is sorely needed right now needs to include a lot of ideas and as I've long said, we need need a lot more socialized services and safety nets, all under the foundation of socialism in this country. We already have some of it and we can continue to add to that. Yet as much as the left claims to be diverse, it's the Democratic Party that remains far more so 56% white, 18% black, 16% Hispanic, and it is black voters that drive many Democratic victories. So specifically black women. They should have a seat front and center in this tent. Which is how I found African American scholar N.A. dove's 2008 article and African centered critique of Marx's logic in leftist spaces. The idea that all war is class war is a popular slogan. Black scholars have long pushed back on this notion even as some have embraced the ideology. And that brings us to the heart of Dove's critique. While Marxism has been popular among some African revolutionaries, her reading of his text has found it to be fundamentally Eurocentric and incompatible with African liberation. Marx, she claims, flipped the reality Inequality doesn't start with class, but with race and culture. Here's her own words quote the racism of European culture in the ideological and institutional manifestations of capitalism prevents a revolutionary class alliance between black and white workers, male and female, either locally or globally. Thus, it is possible to view a class alliance as subordinated to any racial or cultural alliance. Dove argues that the sequence of modes of production and the idea of historical states stages is derived from a specifically European set of social institutions dressed up as a theory of all human development. This makes sense given Mark's entire critique is predominantly rooted in England. Dove writes that applying this sort of logic to African societies whose social organization was often completely different, distorts them while treating them as regressive. And this leads to her key argument. Marx frames slavery and primitive accumulation as a necessary stage on the road to capitalism. Dove argues this dehumanizes the enslaved, making the MAFA or African Holocaust a mere stepping stone toward an idealized European future, while validating genocide in the name of advancement. She points out Marx's failure for not making white supremacy central to his analysis and points to his forays into racism and assumptions about slaves that he had no contact with. Class, she writes, is the wrong primary category. Culture and race are more fundamental. She does find utility in Marx's work, calling it a useful theoretical framework for analyzing capitalism as a generator of class based inequality and an alternative model of social organization, though she closes by writing that socialism is actually African by nature, noting that trying to pass through capitalism first is like, quote, trying to become culturally European in order to become culturally African. It's great, great idea there. The journalist Corey Richardson put it even more succinctly on threads he wrote, race supersedes class because race is caste. Dove echoes many historians in this critique, as nationalism, religion and tribalism have all been shown to be more powerful motivators for war with others than class. But her analysis could help explain the silence I heard when one of the most important pieces of legislation for civil rights in America was gutted. It is, as Glaud writes, white people who decide who gets freedom and when. And if an existential issue for black people isn't deemed worthy of fighting for, then that freedom dies.
- [21:35]
Gil Scott-Heron
America has got the blues and it's a bicentennial edition. It's got the blues because of partial deification, of partial accomplishments over partial periods of time. Halfway justice, halfway liberty, halfway equality. It's a half assed year.
- [21:54]
Derek Barris
Besides offering an original score for his book, Eddie Glaude Jones Jr. Includes a number of quotes, including that one from the legendary poet Gil Scott Haran. I recall many evenings in the 90s showing up at sobs in Tribeca for Gil's 9pm show, sometimes with a band, sometimes just him and piano, the configuration where he thrived most. I don't think he ever showed up before 11, usually closer to midnight. Gil was struggling with addiction in those years as he struggled for so much of his life. Regardless of how late he was and how mad I grew at how late he was, knowing I would have to trudge back to Jersey City on the PATH train that only ran twice an hour, I quickly became transfixed whenever he hit the stage. One man, one voice, so many poems, so much wisdom. I love that Glaude chose Bicentennial Blues to highlight America's double consciousness. But I can't keep my favorite album, Winter in America, released in 1974 alongside longtime collaborator Brian Jackson out of my head. There's H2O gate blues or Watergate Blues, from which Bicentennial Blues borrows some lines from Two Years later, the upbeat Back Home about Gil returning to his people, followed by an equally funky the Bottle about the addictions that he would, knowingly or not, battle for decades. And then there's this absolute beauty about reclaiming a homeland that only exists in the imagination and more powerfully for black people in their DNA.
- [23:43]
Gil Scott-Heron
Let me lay down by a stream. Miles. From everything. Rivers of my father has. Could you carry me home, Carry me home.
- [24:31]
Derek Barris
Gil repeats Miles from Everything three times in the song but it's only that one time he doubles up his voice to give it this larger than life reverb. No matter how many times I hear it, that moment lifts something in me as I'm carried along by Gil's piano, his story of seeking something he knows he'll never find, yet it never stops him from his quest. Like Gilgamesh dropping the plan of immortality mere miles from home, the journey is always the destination. But what about those who can never find a home, even at home? The Experience of so Many Black People in America Glaud repeats a question invoked by the late historian Vincent Harding. Is America possible? It is a question that has always been at the heart of our struggle for democracy, and a question that needs to be asked in the country's 250th year. Unlike the certainties invoked by Trump and Vance for those who have borne the brunt of America's hubris, this country has never been an example of democracy achieved. Its victory was not secured in its beginnings. How could it have been with those suffering in chains and living unfree? Rather, a tragic course was set for the nation from the start. Is America possible? It is not easily answerable. What is required is an imaginative leap to look beyond the ugliness of our days, to see past the venom of those who hate, and to reach for the power of the imagination and of what is possible. I believe Eddie would agree with me when adding how our imagination can help to pass legislation that helps to heal those wounds, that binds that double consciousness together. We need the collective will, but we also need politicians willing to fight the chronic racism, the redlining, gerrymandering institutions that keep true equality out of reach for non white people in this nation. Slogans are not enough. I get criticized for my views on this podcast and in my writing, and that is fair, well designed. Tension creates strength and and if you're not grappling with your thoughts and considering where you might be wrong, I'm not sure how deeply you're actually thinking. Recently though, one comment gave me pause in response to my critique of Hasan Piker saying Crimea should have been annexed by Russia. Crimea river is how he framed it, as up to 30,000 Crimean Tatars were displaced during the latest wave of Russian aggression. This commenter called me pro American as a slur. I had to stop for a moment. I am American here, thanks to four tendrils of ancestors fleeing former Soviet territories for the very reason I would not agree with the annexation of Crimea for. I don't really think of it as being pro or con American. Of course I want my country to succeed and ideally keep inching, or dare I say leaping closer to the promises of its storybook democracy. I don't want to live in a failed state, which is sadly within range due to the white supremacist and ethno religious thrust embodied by this administration. So in some ways, sure, I'm pro the thing that I am love. However, by default, I've never experienced the kind of innate biases and gruesome violence that black people have endured and continue to endure here. I don't love an America that would do that, that continues to perpetuate that against any human being. And that is America as It is today. July 4, 2026, 250 years in the making. Until we grapple with the fact that storybooks are not reality, no anniversary is really worth celebrating. At least not if we're being honest about what this this nation actually represents. Sam.