Scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. reflects on America at 250

Summary

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Fresh Air — Scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. Reflects on America at 250

Host: Tanya Moseley (NPR/Fresh Air)

Recorded: Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, Seattle

Broadcast Date: June 15, 2026

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Brief Overview

In this engaging, candid episode of Fresh Air, host Tanya Moseley sits down with Princeton professor and public intellectual Eddie Glaude Jr. to discuss his latest book, America: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. Marking the U.S. semiquincentennial (250th anniversary), Glaude offers a somber, critical examination of how America's landmark national celebrations repeatedly gloss over the nation's historical and ongoing racial injustices. Through a mix of personal reflection, rigorous history, and passionate critique, Glaude challenges listeners to confront the realities beneath the surface of American self-congratulation, exploring themes of patriotism, memory, loss, resistance, and stubborn love.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Book’s Opening and Tone Shift

(02:02–06:13)

• Passage Reading & Initial Reflections:
  Glaude opens with a powerful reading from his book, stating, “I do not love America and never have, especially now. It seems to me misplaced or dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious...” He explores the notion that love of country is complicated and, for Black Americans, always “stained by the ugliness of what white people believe about color.”
• He recalls the emotional process of drafting that opening, feeling afraid but ultimately compelled to be “courageous and vulnerable and daring” in naming his disenchantment.
• Tone Compared to Earlier Work:
  Moseley notes a distinct difference in tone from Glaude's earlier, more hopeful work Begin Again, observing that “the optimism of a truth-teller, of a freedom fighter — it was gone” (06:12).
  • Glaude agrees, reflecting on despair after recent political reversals and calls this book “an attempt to get this rage under control, to get my sadness, my melancholia under control” (07:46).

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2. Anniversaries as National Mirrors

(07:46–10:55)

• Why Focus on Anniversaries?
  Glaude chooses national anniversaries (1876, 1926, 1976, and 2026) as historical inflection points when America “has to tell a story about its founding.” Each is a ritual of self-mythology that, beneath the surface, reveals profound contradictions about race and belonging.
• Double Consciousness:
  Invokes W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept — “Black folks see themselves through the eyes of those who despise them” — but Glaude reframes this as “a consequence of the double consciousness of the nation: America imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic.” This contradiction “deposits a kind of madness at the heart of the country” (08:59).
• Title Discussion:
  The book’s title, America, USA, replaces the typical hyphen (as in Italian-American) with a comma, “which signals a break, not connection... a reflection of the divided soul of the country” (10:55).

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3. Patriotism, Myth, and Counter-Narratives

(10:55–14:25)

• Skepticism About Patriotism:
  Glaude critiques how “patriotism to my ear sometimes sounds like a rebel yell” — often weaponized to reinforce exclusion rather than communal belonging (12:04).
  • “Those people who embrace the flag ... are often more than not, folk who think I should be in my place” (12:06).
• Black Counter-Calendars:
  Opposing the Fourth of July narratives, Black Americans have established their own commemorative days: January 1 (1808, end of the transatlantic slave trade), West Indian Emancipation Day, July 5 (abolition of slavery in New York), and Juneteenth, “giving voice to a notion of freedom over and against a country that embraces the idea of freedom but doesn't quite live it in practice” (13:45).

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4. Anniversaries in Depth: 1876 & the Philanthropy of Racial Justice

(14:25–18:59)

• Freedom as Philanthropy:
  Glaude describes how, post-emancipation, “racial justice starts to get treated as philanthropy — a gift that white people can extend and also withdraw, rather than something that is owed” (14:43).
• Enduring Cycle:
  He frames U.S. history as a cycle: “If America imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic ... the finesse is assuming that white people possess freedom to give and to take away... We all bear the burden of racialization” (15:00).
• Frederick Douglass and the 1876 Centennial:
  Douglass, the most famous Black man in America, “was invited to be on the dais with President Grant [but] the officer says, ‘there’s no way an N-word should be on the dais’... If not for a senator, Douglass would have been barred.”
  On stage, Douglass is silent — “the most famous orator ... and he cannot say a word. He’s just there, silent.”
• National Forgetting:
  Glaude: “There’s this disremembering happening as the country tells itself a story about the grandness of the American project” (17:54), even as Black Americans face ongoing violence and white supremacist resurgence.

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5. Modern Reckonings & the Sentimentality Cycle

(22:02–24:49)

• 2020 Parallels to Reconstruction:
  Moseley draws a line from 2020’s racial reckoning to previous cycles of reform and reversal. Glaude: “Just five years ago, we were in the midst of a racial reckoning ... and in the blink of an eye, we’re here [again]. And the only thing I could conclude is: people were lying. You weren’t telling the truth.” (22:37)
• Sentimentality as a ‘Mask of Cruelty’:
  Drawing on James Baldwin and Oscar Wilde, Glaude claims that “sentimentality is really about your own individual feelings ... the mask of cruelty. You cry your crocodile tears ... and when the people who bear the brunt continue to ask for justice, the question becomes: what else do you want? ... and as soon as you hear those questions, we’re on the cusp of the backlash, the rage” (24:44).

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6. Memory, Erasure, and Historical Ghosts

(25:03–30:52)

• Frederick Douglass, 1875–76:
  Douglass anticipated a whitewashed centennial, warning: “We gained our freedom through the falling out of white men. Now we must brace ourselves for what will happen now that they’ve reconciled.” (25:31–26:29)
• Personal Encounter with National Myth:
  Glaude describes visiting Independence Hall for the first time in adulthood. The official tour glides over slavery, rendering conflict as “they didn’t know how to shake hands.” Glaude: “I saw ghosts all around Congress Hall ... pursed lip ghosts” — an example of “storybook America” erasing uncomfortable truths (27:21–29:02).
• Story of Moses Gordon:
  Gordon was freed, re-enslaved, escaped, but captured due to fugitive laws, and died by suicide rather than return to bondage. “He was a thief because he stole himself,” and his tale “becomes a through line” about the recurring theft of Black freedom (29:08–30:52).

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7. Shifting Questions (1976, Bicentennial): Inclusion or Absorption?

(32:07–36:41)

• 1976 Bicentennial — Black Participation Debated:
  Glaude recalls the period as both a kitschy celebration of “white ethnics” and a moment of changing Black engagement.
  • “This is a celebration of white ethnics in 1976... Immigrants have the ability to become white. They have a choice to make. As Black people, we sit very squarely in that because we are representative of what the journey of the country is” (32:51–33:36).
• Absorbing Black History:
  Black History Month is recognized federally, but “instead of disappearing black history, black history is being absorbed into the story of America to affirm America’s inherent goodness” (35:09).
• Reagan and Colorblindness:
  Glaude critiques the “sorting” of Black history under Reagan, where it “fits into this fairy tale... but we’re still kind of off to the side. It’s not integrated into the full story.”
  • “What makes this moment so crazy, is that they don’t even accept the redacted version ... The MAGA folk don’t even want that to be a part of the story” (35:28).

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8. The Elegy, the Blues, and Growing Up as a Nation

(36:41–38:58)

• An Elegy in the Blues Key:
  Moseley notes the book is “pitched in the note of the blues.” Glaude: “America has to grow up. It can no longer hide in its adolescence... what the blues does — it takes you to the heart of the problem. It offers a tragic sense of the world... The devil and the angel are in us. We need to grow up. Because if you don’t, you can become complicit with evil because you are by definition innocent. So the country has to sing the blues. And you know what? We’ve deposited it there since we got here” (37:01–38:27).
• Black Americans' Central Role:
  “We aren’t just a part of history, American history. We are interwoven into the very meaning of what this country is... We, in the fullness of our diversity, make this place swing. So on July 4th and July 5th, we need to show the full diversity of America and claim the country as our own” (38:37–38:58).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “I do not love America and never have, especially now. It seems to me misplaced or dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious… But in America, those feelings and experiences have always been stained by the ugliness of what white people believe about color.”
  — Eddie Glaude Jr., reading from America: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries (02:02)
• “Patriotism, to my ear, sometimes sounds like a rebel yell... usually when I hear a robust, visceral embrace of love of country, my head goes on a swivel: who’s saying it and for what ends and for what purposes.”
  — Eddie Glaude Jr. (12:04)
• “Those people believe that they possess freedom to give and to take away. ... So 1876 is this moment... [of] these freedom snatchers, these people who believe that they can give freedom—and to take away.”
  — Eddie Glaude Jr. (15:00)
• “Sentimentality is really ... about your own individual feelings. Baldwin says, it’s the mask of cruelty. ... When people who bear the brunt continue to ask for justice, the question becomes: what else do you want?... as soon as you hear those questions, we’re on the cusp of the backlash, the rage.”
  — Eddie Glaude Jr. (22:37–24:44)
• “[America] keeps telling itself this story that affirms its innocence and what the blues does—the blues takes you to the heart of the problem... The devil and the angel are in us. ... We need to grow up.”
  — Eddie Glaude Jr. (37:01)
• “Actually, this book is a love letter to America.”
  — Tanya Moseley to Eddie Glaude Jr. (39:09)
  “Oh, you got me.” — Eddie Glaude Jr.

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Timestamps of Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-----------|--------------| | 02:02 | Glaude reads from the book: "I do not love America..." | | 04:18 | The choice to begin with "I do not love America" — vulnerability in writing | | 07:46 | The role and ritual of anniversaries in American mythmaking | | 08:59 | Du Bois’ “double consciousness” & the national split | | 10:55 | Meaning of the coma in "America, USA"—divided soul| | 12:04 | Critique of patriotism and its role in exclusion | | 13:45 | Black commemorative calendar: Jan 1, July 5, Juneteenth | | 14:43 | 1876 — Racial justice as philanthropy, Douglass’s frustration | | 17:54 | Douglass denied entry, silence at the centennial, "disremembering" | | 22:37 | Parallels: 2020, the cycle of sentimentality and rage | | 24:44 | Sentimentality as the mask of cruelty; the pattern of backlash | | 26:29 | Douglass’s 1875 warning: “Now we must brace ourselves...” | | 27:21 | Glaude’s disillusioning Independence Hall tour | | 29:08 | The story of Moses Gordon and the cycle of freedom denied | | 32:07 | 1976 Bicentennial, inclusion of black history, absorption vs. critique | | 35:13 | Colorblindness, redaction of black history under Reagan, modern rejection| | 36:41 | Why the blues? America’s need to “grow up” and “sing the blues”| | 38:37 | Claiming the “full diversity of America” on July 4 and 5 | | 39:09 | Closing exchange—“this book is a love letter to America.”|

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Final Thoughts

Glaude’s conversation with Moseley is a bracing, honest and deeply necessary account of how America’s anniversaries function as both stages for national self-congratulation and mirrors reflecting unresolved racial wounds. The episode’s standout moments—Glaude’s opening reading, his analysis of sentimentality and backlash, his storytelling about Douglass and Moses Gordon, his blues elegy—make this conversation both rigorous and affective. For those seeking a fresh lens on the country’s milestone birthday, Glaude’s perspective is both indictment and invitation: to reckon, to remember, and, perhaps, begin anew.

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Transcript

[Announcer]

This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel, that's your drive for more. Capella University's flexpath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn [e-mail].

[Tanya Moseley]

this is FRESH AIR. I'm Tanya Moseley, and my guest today is Eddie Glaude Jr. He's a professor at Princeton and a familiar voice on the country's hardest conversations about race and democracy. He's the author of Begin Lessons from the Late James Baldwin and We Are the leaders we've been looking for. Those books look clearly at this country's failures, but still held onto something hopeful. But his latest book sets sentimentality aside. It's called America How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. In it, Glott takes us to the country's big birthdays and 1876, 1926, 1976 and now the 250th and shows us the same ritual each time the nation throws itself a party and quietly edits out the parts of the story it cannot bear to face. He goes back to 1876, the centennial, with Frederick Douglass watching the promise of emancipation come undone, and he argues that what happened then is happening again now. It's a book written in grief and rage and underneath both, a stubborn kind of love of country. We spoke earlier this month in Seattle on stage at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival, a day long gathering of journalists and thinkers hosted by Seattle's public media station. Here's our conversation.

[Interviewer]

I am so honored to be in conversation with you for so many reasons. I've had the pleasure of talking with you many times, our first time, though, in person, with each other. And I think a great way to start is to actually have you read a passage from the book. Let's start with the very first page.

[Technician/Producer]

Sure.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

But before I start reading, I want to just say how honored I am to be in conversation with you. To have an opportunity to talk about this book in this moment with you is so meaningful to me. So here it is, bitterness at the bottom of the cup. I do not love America and never have, especially now. It seems to me misplaced or dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious. Love is most often felt and experienced close to the ground, in the life lived in a particular place in time and in memories that take up residence in the heart. I suspect love of country is shorthand for the heartfelt relationships and experiences that make us who we are, things that happen in the place we call home, no matter how complicated that Place may be James Baldwin was right. Whoever's part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it and some of the people in it. And I suppose that is why, in part, we are willing to risk our lives in defense of this place and of what it might become. But in America, those feelings and experiences have always been stained by the ugliness of what white people believe about color. That somehow or in some inscrutable way, the color of one's skin determines your value. You end up spending much of your life trying to prove to others and to yourself much not because you are obsessed with white people, but because you want to live that you are not a N word. Some Americans may believe that this view is a relic of a past that we have long left behind. After all, they might say, we elected a black president and vice president. Look how far we've come. Stop complaining. I hear them say you teach at Princeton University. You are not a victim. But I speak from the experience of a life lived in this country, and I trust what I know, what I've seen, and what now sits in the pit of my stomach.

[Interviewer]

When did that sentence, I do not love America become true to you? When did you consciously realize that that was a truth for you?

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

I had written some version of the introduction, and it didn't land. I thought I was holding something back. And so, you know, writing is mostly about revision. And so I returned to that first paragraph, and suddenly this sentence just came on the page. And I got up, and I started walking around my study, and I was afraid of what this would mean if I left it there. And then almost as if, you know, something inside of my head just simply said, but this is what you have to. To say. You have to begin here, and then you can explain it. So I left it there, and I decided, you know, in this time, you have to be courageous and vulnerable and daring, and I couldn't.

[Tanya Moseley]

And truthful.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Yeah, exactly.

[Interviewer]

One of the things that struck me from the very beginning of this book was that I realized I wasn't reading from the same man who wrote Begin Again. Because in Begin Again, which is a previous book of yours, you use James Baldwin's work to kind of beat back despair. And in this book in particular, I felt that optimism of a truth teller of a freedom fighter. It was gone.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Am I. Am I right in that feeling? In the same way that Langston Hughes we felt in his later writings and in James Baldwin.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Yeah. So in so many ways, I'm arguing with. With Jimmy in Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin Says, you know, I love my country more than anything, and it's with. Because of that love, I reserve the right to criticize it relentlessly. To paraphrase him, I never begin there. I didn't begin there. Maybe it's because I'm from Mississippi, you know, but unrageful. There are moments when I'm battling depression because the country has done this again. At the end of begin again, I said, well, you know, we can. We have to make a choice, right? Will we do this or that? And we have a choice to put this moment behind us. And. And look what we did. And now people have to raise their children in the midst of this. They've gutted the Voting Rights Act. They're redrawing districts. We're in the midst of what could very well be described as a second redemption, a second lost cause. And, you know, the last sentence of the book speaks that emotion. And so what I was trying to do with this book was kind of write some security underneath my feet, right, so that I could actually get this rage under control, to get my sadness, my melancholia under control.

[Interviewer]

Why? Anniversaries is a way to look at this country's relationship with race. You could have chosen court cases. You could have chosen lots of different ways. What is it about our nation's anniversaries that allow us to see the problem so clearly?

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

So at each of these moments, the country has to tell a story about itself. It has to tell a story about its founding. And so here we are in the 250th, and look at the kinds of. The contours of the story. Just don't look at the UFC arena or the Great American Fair or the garden of Statues of Heroes. But they're going to tell a story. It's going to be a particular story. We're the greatest nation in the history of the world. It's going to be a story about the, you know, the saintliness of our. Of the founders, a story about the sacredness of this grand experiment. And each of these anniversaries, the nation has to tell a story about itself, about its founding. And in each of these moments, Tanya, the country is struggling and grappling with its contradiction. In each of these moments, the divided soul of the nation is in full view. Du Bois, in 1903, wrote the Souls of Black Folk. And in the Souls of Black Folk, he says that black folks see themselves through the eyes of those who despise them. This is what he called double consciousness. But I believe that double consciousness is Actually a consequence of the double consciousness of the nation that America imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And to hold those two things together with you can't really without contradiction. And it deposits a kind of madness at the heart of the country. And we see it evidenced every single milestone anniversary. 1876, 1926, 1976, and by God, 250 years later, 2026.

[Interviewer]

I want to talk with you in particular about two moments, 1926, 1976. But I'm very curious about the title, America comma, USA. Why? Why both of those in the title?

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Yeah. You know, usually it's not a comma, it's a hyphen.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

The Italian American, the Irish American, you know, the black African American. The hyphen gives us a sense of the kind of the idea of America best represented by Ellis Island. Yes, we need to remind the Trump administration about Ellis Island. Right. But the comma signals a break, not connection. And so American USA actually reflects the divided soul of the country. And so part of what I'm doing is signifying on these attempts to tell the story of America and trying to capture in the title, by way of the comma, the divided soul, the double consciousness that haunts this place.

[Interviewer]

When you're talking about the anniversaries and all of the pomp and circumstance, as I'm reading your book, don't laugh at this, but that song, God Bless the usa, Proud to be an American, because at least I know I'm free. And as I'm reading the words in your book for the first time, those words, at least I know I'm free, kept coming back up for me. And I wonder, what's your relationship to patriotism overall and to that idea of us holding such reverence and such pride in this myth and this idea of. Of freedom being something that could be bestowed upon us?

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Yeah, patriotism, you know, the first sentence, what it's trying to do is hold off idolatry. The idolatry of the state. Right. Something so morally dubious and so abstract. Right. And sometimes, and I'll say this, and I wonder what you think about this, but sometimes patriotism, to my ear, sounds like a rebel yellow.

[Interviewer]

Say more.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Those people who embrace the flag, who wrap themselves up in the piety of the country, are often more than not, folk who think I should be in my place, folk who are behind the assault on voting rights, folk who want to deny the specificity of the experience that shaped how I see this place. So usually when I hear a robust Visceral embrace of love, of country. You know, my head goes on a swivel who's saying it and for what ends and for what purposes. You see, we've always served as a kind of counter to the myth, to the illusion that this place is a beacon of freedom.

[Interviewer]

That's meaning black folks. Yes.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Yes, John. Just think about John Adams. This is an apocryphal story, but John Adams supposedly said to King George, we will not be your Negroes. At the very moment in which he's giving voice to a notion of freedom. It's based on an intimate understanding of unfreedom. Us in the early days of July 4th, if we showed up to the July 4th celebrations, like the July days of 1834 in New York, we would literally be physically attacked because our bodies represented the contradiction of what was being said. We have a counter calendar, what I call a counter alternative commemorative calendar around freedom. While the nation is celebrating itself as the embodiment of freedom, we are celebrating January 1st.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Why?

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Because January 1st, 1808, was the day that they ended the transatlantic slave trade. We're celebrating in August, West Indian Emancipation Day. Why? Because it's the end of slavery. We celebrate the most important of all of those days in the early 19th century is July 5th. Douglass famous July 5th, 1852 oration stands in a tradition. Why July 5th is the abolition of slavery in the state of New York. Juneteenth stands in that tradition where we're giving voice to a notion of freedom over and against a country that embraces the idea of freedom but doesn't quite live it in practice.

[Interviewer]

I want to spend some real time on two of the anniversaries that sit on top of each other. So 1876 in 1976. So 1876 is where you note that racial justice starts to get treated as philanthropy.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

It's a gift that white people can extend and also withdraw rather than something that is owed. Can you talk more about that and why this reframe of understanding this is so important as we read through your book and your ideas?

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Yeah. Well, I'm trying to figure out this cycle. Why is it that we're always returning to this, what's going on? And one of the ways I've resolved it is that or haven't resolved the cycle of the way in which I describe it is okay. If America imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic, and if you can't hold those things without contradiction, how do you finesse it? Well, you finesse it by Assuming that white people possess freedom to give and to take away. Oh, let me be clear now before people get uncomfortable, when I say white people, I'm talking at a certain level of generality. This is my reading of James Baldwin. Baldwin will say, I happen to love, and I say this, I happen to love a lot of people who happen to be white and then they're white people. The point is that we're all, we all bear the burden of racialization. We're all socialized in this way in which these categories matter to how we see ourselves and understand ourselves, right? So those people believe that they possess freedom to give and to take away. And so what we see is anti slavery movement, right? Folk are fighting against slavery and they are arguing that this contradicts their commitment to principles of equality and liberty and democracy and the like. And then once the. The Civil War amendments are passed, particularly the one that ends slavery, the 13th amendment, what do we get this debate about whether or not these folk can bear the burden and responsibility of citizenship. So you see, folk who were once right anti slavery suddenly become right folk who are arguing against extending citizenship to black folk. So 1876 is this moment Douglass is, is. Frederick Douglass is grappling with this. He's an example of these freedom snatchers, these people who believe that they can give freedom and to take away. He was born in slavery. He, you know, he escaped. He witnessed Lincoln sign the Emancipation Proclamation, the ratification of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. And he lived long enough to see Jim Crow. He called these folk the apostles of forgetfulness.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Right?

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

And then he would say, and he said in 1875, I don't want your alms. I want justice. He's skeptical of people who want to do something for us as opposed to with us. And so 1876 is this extraordinary moment, Tanya, when the country engages for the first time after the carnage of the Civil War in a national remembrance of his founding. And it engages in this horrific act at scale of disremembering. Frederick Douglass was actually invited to be on the dais with President Grant. He's trying to get in. This is in Philadelphia. Not in Philadelphia, Mississippi, but Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

He's trying to get in. He shows the Philadelphia police officer his ticket, which puts him on the dais. The officer says, there's no way an N word should be on the dais with President Grant. He would not allow him in if it wasn't for a senator who sees him, Senator Conklin, I believe, who sees him and then escorts him in. Frederick Douglass would not have been able to even enter the exposition. Then they sit him on the stage, the most famous orator in the United States at the time. They sit him on the stage and he cannot say a word. He's just there, silent, silent. So there's this disremembering that's happening as the country barrels towards the end of the 19th century with the violence of these coups that are taking place, political coups that are taking place in Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia. Against the backdrop of the horror that will leave over 53,000 black people dead by the end of the 19th century, the country tells itself a story about the grandness of the American project.

[Tanya Moseley]

My Mama My guest is Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude Jr. To accompany his new book, Glaude worked with classical composer Joel Thompson to create music to capture what Glaude sees as the spirit of the nation. Here's pianist Leah Claiborne performing the piece called Anne Blue.

[Interviewer]

Sa. Sam that was leah claiborne performing anne blue.

[Tanya Moseley]

More of our conversation with scholar eddie glaude jr. After a break. I'm tonya moseley, and this is fresh air.

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[Interviewer]

I'm thinking about 2020, when we all seem to be coming to this same realization in the same way that we found during Reconstruction where, oh, we understand the ills, we want to right the wrongs, and the white allies are in our corner and they believe us and they're speaking truth to power as well. And then something happens like the idea of it being a philanthropic effort. This Idea that you can put it on the shelf and then you can take it off the shelf when it comes to racial equality.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Yeah, yeah. Sentimentality. At the heart of this idea that certain people think that they possess freedom to give and to take away is the cycle of sentimentality and rage. You cry your crocodile tears. I remember writing this passage, trying to figure it out. Just five years ago, six years ago, we were in the midst of a racial reckoning. I was crying on national television about George Floyd and the like. And in the blink of an eye. We're here in the blink of an eye. And the only thing I could conclude is that people were lying. You weren't telling the truth, or you didn't have anywhere else to land, and you just returned back. Returned to the status quo. And so I was trying to describe it in a way, drawing on Baldwin's notion of sentimentality and Oscar Wilde and others. Right. That sentimentality is really just, you know, about your own individual feelings. Baldwin says it's the mask of cruelty. Right. You cry your crocodile tears for us. Oh, we want to do this for you. We're going to make sure we're going to resolve our sin. We're going to absolve ourselves of our sins by actually engaging in this effort. We're going to tell the truth about what we've done. And then when the people who bear the brunt of what we've done continue to ask for justice, then the question becomes, what else do you want? We've given you enough overreach. How much more are you going to ask? And as soon as you hear those questions, we're on the cusp of the backlash, the rage. And here we are. Because sentimentality carries with it rage. Uncle Tom. You know who's the flip side of Uncle Tom? Nat Turner.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Tanya Moseley]

Yes.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Same side of the same coin in our imaginations.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

I'm thinking we're being too hard. Y' all all right? You sure? I was checking on this.

[Interviewer]

Is Seattle okay?

[Technician/Producer]

Okay.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

I'm just checking on.

[Interviewer]

It's not. We can go there. We can go there with Seattleites.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

I'm just checking on him. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

I want to go back to Frederick Douglass, though. 1876. It's the centennial, as you said, it's the nation's hundredth birthday. He is turned away initially, and he is the most famous black man in America at the time. He's watching it all collapse around him. Take me in particular, though, to July 5th.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

1875. What was he contending with as he's preparing to speak yeah.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

You know, usually we talk about July 5, 1852, when he delivers that famous July 5 address in Corinthian hall in Rochester, New York. But in 1875, the old man has to figure out what he's going to say to the country, what he's going to say to these people in Metropolitan Church. And he knew exactly what was going to happen come 1876. They would tell the story of the grandness of the American project, and it so mirrors our day. But here's that moment. Douglass says, and I always get choked up when I say it. We gained our freedom through the falling out of white men. Now we must brace ourselves. I'm paraphrasing. For what will happen now that they've reconciled. What? We must brace ourselves for what's to come.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

And it's a powerful speech. So. So much so that I try to pull it forward by the time I get to 2025, and I'm trying to write to the 2026 celebration.

[Interviewer]

Yes. I was surprised to know that you went to school in Philadelphia, but you had never really taken tours of all of the landmarks. But you decide to take a tour of Independence Hall. What was it, like, 2024? So not that long ago. And you're on this tour, and you're hearing this tour guy tell a story. And what's interesting about that time period is there was a lot of effort that went into making it diverse to kind of show a more perfect union. And you're noticing something very specific as you're going through this tour. What did you find?

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Well, it was a storybook version of America, right? Yes. And he's talking. He's taking us through the Congress Hall, Right. And I've never been a tourist. I go overseas, and I stay in my hotel and read books my wife hates. So I'm in Philly. I never go to the Liberty Bell or any of that stuff. But here I wanted to return to it. And he's telling the story, and he looks like a. He's cosplaying, a kind of drill sergeant. He has his, you know, forestry outfit on. And he's walking us through the. The. The.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

The.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

The. The House and then the Senate, and he's telling us these stories. And finally he talks about the conflict between. That they weren't divided according to party, but a re. You know, region and whatnot. And said the biggest conflict is that they came from the south and the North. And I was like, okay, here we go. We're gonna start talking about slavery.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Got it. And Then he says they didn't know how to shake hands. That was the example of the conflict that was the conflict between the congresspersons that they didn't one would bow and one would and I was like, that's it. We're not gonna. And so and then I just saw ghosts. I saw ghosts all around Congress Hall. You know, pursed lip ghosts. Right. But it was an example for me, a startling example of the storybook version of the country because in that very building, Congress decided by only one person, voted decided to maintain the Fugitive Slave Law.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

And Moses Gordon's story is located right in that moment.

[Interviewer]

Talk a little bit about Moses Gordon.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Moses Gordon was you see how good she is. Moses Gordon was enslaved and manumitted in 1776, just three months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in North Carolina. His slave master was Caleb Trueblood, a Quaker. And for two years, Moses Gordon lived as a free man. But the colony or the, you know, South North Carolina had passed a statute saying that you could not manument your slaves unless for meritorious service, unless they fought in the Revolutionary War. So Moses Gordon was captured two years later and sold back into slavery. And he freedom dreamed. And then he escaped. And he escaped to Philadelphia. And for 10 years he lived as a free man. But because of the fugitive slave clause in the Constitution and the Fugitive slave Act of 1793, Moses Gordon was a thief because he stole himself. He belonged to the man to whom he was sold, Brigadier General William Skinner. And 10 years later he was captured, put in shackles and was to be sent back to North Carolina. In the papers of John Parrish, a Quaker abolitionist at Haverford College, reside are the manumission papers of Moses Gordon. And on the back John Parrish wrote, instead of returning to slavery, Moses Gordon committed suicide. And that becomes a story of Freedom Snatcher. He was freed, enslaved, escaped, captured, death. And it becomes a through line.

[Tanya Moseley]

We're listening to the conversation I had on stage with Eddie Glaude Jr. At the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival. Glaude's new book is America usa. More of our conversation after a break. This is FRESH air.

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[Interviewer]

I want to take us now to 1976, because this is a time period where you and I are alive. We're coming of age. How old were you in 1976?

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Eight.

[Interviewer]

You were eight years old? Yeah. It's the bicentennial, and the question has shifted by then. This is the apex of white flight, the thick of desegregation fights. And it's the first time, as you write in your book, that the nation is forced to kind of acknowledge black history. But the question isn't whether black freedom should be retracted. It's whether we should participate at all in the bicentennial. Can you talk briefly about that?

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Sure. You know, it's just I remember as well. I have a photo. I have a vague memory of me being in red, white and blue pants. How kitschy the 76 bicentennial celebration was. You know, from red, white and blue whoopee cushions to a range of things. But this is. This is a celebration, really, of white ethnics in 1976. Remember, 1926, there is this real intense debate around immigration.

[Interviewer]

And this is such an interesting point in history because this is where immigrants have the ability to become white. They have a choice to make. And as black people, we sit very squarely in that because we are representative

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

of what the journey of the country itself. But, you know, 1926, you know, if you're from Italy, you're from Ireland, you're Jewish, you're from the s hole countries of Europe. Right. The Klan can't stand. They are as much against Irish Catholics, Catholicism in particular, as they are against black people in the 1920s. But by 1976, their children are claiming the revolution as their own. Black folk are still arguing. We're in this moment of deep dissensions. Tanya Watergate, Vietnam, Black power, the Black student sds. There's all of this deep suspicion and skepticism about the country. And so the bicentennial is supposed to be this ritual that's going to bring us together over and against all of this conflict and discord that's defined the decade of the 60s and the early part of the 70s. And is this the first year? Because in 1926 is the first. First time Negro History Week is celebrated in 1926. 1976, Negro History Week becomes Black History Month. President Ford recognizes and acknowledges Negro History Week and then Black History Month. But there's this debate because black folk are still struggling. Ought we to celebrate this? Because what's happening is that instead of disappearing black history, black history is being absorbed into the story of America to affirm America's inherent goodness.

[Interviewer]

So you write about the Reagan years.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

This is the time period where we start talking about, like, colorblindness. It's a sorting. It parts black history to fit into this fairy tale, but it. But we're still kind of off to the side. It's not integrated into the full story.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

What so makes this moment so crazy is that they don't even accept the redacted version of our story. So Reagan signs MLK Holiday into law. Barack Obama becomes the kind of culmination of that. Right. Even so much so, he can tell the story of the March on Washington in such a way that, you know, affirms the possibility of American life. We lost our way with black power, but no, no, no, no. This is what we're doing. The MAGA folk don't even want that to be a part of the story. But what we see in this moment is this absorption of black history as an affirmation of the inherent goodness of the country. So our story is blunted. It doesn't provide a critique. Right. Instead. Right. The country can tell our story and pat itself on the back. Look at you, look at me.

[Interviewer]

Exceptionalism.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Look how far we've come. Look how decent we are. Right. And then in the blink of an eye, we find ourselves here.

[Interviewer]

You call this book an elegy. It's pitched in the note of the blues. But I want to know very quickly why the blues is the right form of the story of America at this 250th anniversary. And I'm going to double this question as well, to ask you what you will be doing on July 4th or July 5th.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Um, why the blues? And what am I going to be doing? America has to grow up. It can't. It can no longer hide in its adolescence. You know, when grown folk act like kids, they're monstrous more often than not. And so it keeps telling itself this story that affirms its innocence and what the blues does. The. The blues. Right takes you to the heart of the problem. BB Kings Nobody loves you but my mother, and she can be jiving too. It offers a tragic sense of the world, Right? We don't have to be all angels, right? The devil and the angel is in us. So all we need to do is to look in the mirror. So we need to grow up. Because if you don't grow up, you can bomb Iran and then tell somebody else to fix it. If you don't grow up, you can do all of this evil in these detention centers, in these black sites and not hold anybody responsible. Right? You can become complicit with evil because you are by definition innocent. So the country has to sing the blues. And you know what? We've deposited it there since we got here.

[Interviewer]

That's the thing you talk about, too, is like we aren't just a part of history, American history. We are interwoven into the very meaning of what this country is.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

It's on our tongue. It's in our food. We have your country. No, no. We, in the fullness of our diversity, make this place swing. So on July 4th and July 5th, we need to show the full diversity of America and claim the country as our own.

[Interviewer]

Eddie Glaude, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for this conversation. When you say I do not love this country, actually, this book is a love letter to America.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Oh, you got me.

[Interviewer]

Yes. Thank you.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Absolutely.

[Tanya Moseley]

Eddie Glaud, Jr. Author of America How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. After a short break, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews some spring releases on her summer reading list. This is FRESH air.

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[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

Teams take the field. Their nation's histories take the field alongside

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[Tanya Moseley]

For our book critic Maureen Corrigan, summer reading sometimes means catching up on the book she missed earlier in the year. Here's her short roundup of some spring books.

[Technician/Producer]

I love reviewing books, but sometimes the pace of reading them can feel like that classic I Love Lucy episode at the chocolate factory. The conveyor belt speeds up and the books keep coming along faster than they can be wrapped in a review. Summer gives me a chance to catch up with some good books that whizzed by in spring. James Lasdon the Family man came out the first week of May, which is when I read it. This nonfiction book, which grew out of a piece Lasdon wrote for the New Yorker, is about the investigation and conviction of prominent South Carolina lawyer Alec Murdoch for the 2021 murders of his wife and adult son. Then came the real life plot twist. A little over a week after Lasdin's book was published, Murdoch's conviction was overturned. Because of jury tambour, a retrial is being scheduled. Rather than rendering the Family man obsolete, this new twist intensifies the miasma of stories that swirl around the Murdoch case, including suspicious deaths and embezzlement. Lasdon is a true crime writer in the reflective mold of his late New Yorker colleague Janet Malcolm. Although investigating the double murder case drives this narrative, Lasdon is most interested in exploring the ultimate unsolvable mystery, the mystery of evil. Harriet Clark's debut novel, the Hill, which came out in May, has been getting tons of deserved praise. The novel draws explicitly from Clark's own background. Born in 1980, Clark was 11 months old when her mother, a member of the radical Weather Underground, was arrested and sentenced for her involvement in a Brinks armored truck robbery that resulted in the deaths of three men. Clark's maternal grandparents got custody, and she visited her mother in prison for almost 40 years before she was paroled in 2019. Clark's main character, Susanna, is eight when the story begins and living with her grandparents, former members of the American Communist Party. The plot here is a marvel of sustained claustrophobic stasis. Every week Susanna is taken first by her grandfather, then by a nun, then on her own to visit her mother in the children's center in Hillcrest Prison. Susanna's voice charges this novel with intelligence listen, each week my mother fixed and refixed my hair. I slept and didn't sleep around us women counted down to release. But my mother and I had been released from countdowns. No reason to look forward, no interest in looking back. We were, as I saw it, free of the past and free of the future. Carnival Day, Friendship Day, Birthday Day, the holidays followed their own lilting rhythms, and eventually we submitted again to the lull and pleasures of our timeless life. All the while I was reading the Hill, I kept thinking of E.L. doctorow's The Book of Daniel, inspired by the Rosenberg case. The two novels differ in scope, but like Doctorow, Clark interrogates the cost of parents radical commitment on their children, as well as how the world itself shifts radically from generation to generation. Sometimes I put aside a good book for a bad reason. Mary Costello's slim novel A Beautiful Loan, touted as a devastating story about relationships, came out in March. No, I thought back then, not another Erzatz Sally Rooney in time for St. Patrick's Day. But one empty afternoon I picked it up and kept reading, mostly because the present tense narration of the main character, Anna, struck me as so weird in tone. Her deadened voice was at odds with her emotional turbulence. Here's 19 year old Anna summarizing how Paul, an elusive older man she'll eventually marry, keeps her enthralled to what she calls this oscillating life. In the middle of the night, he rises on one elbow in the bed beside me and in an urgent, desperate voice says, I love you in the morning. He makes no reference to this, and I think he must have spoken in his sleep. Never again in our lives together will he say those three words. A beautiful loan spans 25 years and Anna's obsessive devotion to two men, one dog, the writings of Camus and Young and the Practice of Islam. Like the other two books I've caught up with here, it may not be the ideal beach read, but it would be perfect for a washout of a summer weekend.

[Tanya Moseley]

Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed the Family man by James Laston, the Hill by Harriet Clarke and A Beautiful Loan by Mary Costello. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, as we approach America's 250th birthday, writer Jesse Wegman tells the forgotten story of James Wilson, a brilliant 18th century lawyer who played a critical role in crafting the Constitution, pushing for a strong federal government and the direct election of lawmakers. Wegman's book is the Lost Founder. I hope you can join us to keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews. Follow us on Instagram at nprfreshair. FRESH air's executive producer is Sam Brigger Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Annmarie Baldonado, Lorne Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly CV Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show with Terry Gross. I'm Tanya Moseley.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

This is Ira Glass. On this American Life One thing we like is a good mystery sometimes about really big things. But most times the little mysteries are the best. Our lost and found is currently filled with pants.

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I don't know.

[Eddie Glaude Jr.]

I've never seen this happen. This is true. This is true. Mysteries of every size each week. This American Life. Wherever you get your podcasts, support for

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