← The Majority Report with Sam Seder
The Majority Report with Sam Seder
3670 - How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries w/ Eddie Glaude, Jr.
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- [00:02]
Sam Seder
Hey folks, today's episode is brought to you by my favorite company and product, sunsetlakesabada.com use the code left is best for 20% off normally, but right now, because it's summertime, our friends from Vermont, these farmers up there@sunsetlakesabade.com they're having a big sale on all of their full spectrum Sabadag gummies. Use the code FS26. You will save 25% on their fan favorites, including their vibe gummies, which has a little bit of T, the more potent Delta 9T gummies and the full spectrum goodnight gummies, which frankly, those goodnight gummies save my life every night. Although on the weekends or when I'm not working, I don't use them. I just let my insomnia freak flag fly. But they are fantastic to help you go to sleep. What is full spectrum, you may ask? Well, it just basically means these gummies contain all the natural good stuff from hemp plant working together, not just pure Saba day. Think of the whole team effort when every ingredient helps the others do their job better. And then if you are just using them alone, I gotta tell you, the vibe gummies are the perfect thing for a guy like me who doesn't like to get too vibed. I can't deal with too much vibe, but the vibe gummies, they vibe for a guy like me makes you know when you're watching Survivor a little bit more intense. And like I say, the good night gummies, I'm. I'm there. The Delta Nah gummies. I may be a little bit much for grandpa here, but you will love them. Hang on over, huh?
- [01:58]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
I take two at night, you take
- [02:00]
Sam Seder
two of the Delta Nah, it's the only way I can get to sleep before one in the morning. Wow, that would keep my head spinning. Nevertheless, no matter where you are on the spectrum of the full spectrum gummy user, head over to sunsetlakesabade.com use the coupon code FS26. You will save 25% on all full spectrum Saba Day Gummies sale ends June 27th at midnight eastern time. June 27th. All right, I got to head over there, see their site for additional terms and restrictions. And now time for the show
- [02:37]
Announcer
the majority report with Sam Cedar. Where every day is casual Friday. That means Monday is casual. Monday, Tuesday casual Tuesday, Wednesday casual hump day, Thursday casual Thurs. That's what we call it. And Friday casual Shabbat. The majority report with Sam Cedar.
- [03:11]
Sam Seder
It is Friday, June 19, 2026. My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five time award winning Majority Report. We are broadcasting live to tape steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, usa. On the program today, it is a special Juneteenth celebration for us because we're off. It's a federal holiday, ladies and gentlemen, and it is time to celebrate. But for you, we have an amazing Juneteenth gift. An interview with the distinguished professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, author of nine books, the writer of A Native sun on Substack and the author of his Latest latest America USA how race shadows the nation's anniversaries. Eddie Cloud Jr. Will be with us today for the interview. And that's going to be it. But it is, it is a super casual Friday.
- [04:21]
Co-host or Producer
Yes, it is so casual that we are not in the office. This is, I mean you say it's a federal holiday. It's the Fed one of the federal holidays we respect. Like we don't take President's Day off, for example.
- [04:31]
Sam Seder
We don't take presidents. Do we not?
- [04:33]
Co-host or Producer
No.
- [04:34]
Sam Seder
Well, maybe we'll read it. But you know, in the past we've done, we've done shows on June 19th and we've had some great guests and you can check out. I would encourage you to just go back on June 19th. In the past, I don't know, five or six years, we've had great guests who've talked about where the holiday came from. This of course, in 1865, the last place in the country to know about the Emancipation Proclamation which was signed two years earlier was in Galveston, Texas. And it became a celebration in Texas and then spread across the country over the, the past couple of centuries or I should say the century 18. Yeah, 1800s would only be one century. And it is a celebration that has meant different things at different times in our history. But just very important to understand,
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Announcer
to
- [05:43]
Sam Seder
place into context how race has formed this country or the question of race, racism really and has dominated this country through the years. In this interview with Eddie Glaud, it's, I think we went about 45 minutes we recorded the other day. I'm like, we got to use this. He is a great writer, a great thinker and has captured sort of these moments from the hundredth birthday of the country in 1876 and then the sequester 150 years in 1926 and then the bicentennial in 1976 and then of course talking about where we are today. It's a fascinating look into our history of race in this country. And it is nuts how it feels like we're in a loop almost. You know, I'm not one of those people who says that, like, time is, you know, everything happens now, future in the past. But it is crazy how similar of a situation we find ourselves in today.
- [06:59]
Co-host or Producer
Well, history rhymes is what they say. At least we don't need to get into these thoughts about what the nature of time is, because that makes my brain hurt a lot.
- [07:09]
Sam Seder
Oh, I'm sorry. That could be because you're hungover from the Nick's Parade. That was yesterday.
- [07:17]
Co-host or Producer
Anticipatory hangover. Yes. Perhaps that's the real reason why we
- [07:22]
Sam Seder
had to take Juneteenth off because I
- [07:25]
Co-host or Producer
couldn't run the show.
- [07:26]
Sam Seder
Yeah, I mean, Emma is. We're actually having to stand vigil by her hospital bed to hope that she recovers. She's got an IV with.
- [07:36]
Co-host or Producer
Well, that's what I'm telling you. It's. At least I got to live to see the Knicks win a championship. Honestly, there's no Penny Light left.
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Sam Seder
Exactly. Exactly. Better. You better take some of that zebiotics.
- [07:50]
Co-host or Producer
I will be taking it from the office.
- [07:53]
Sam Seder
In the meantime, we'll be talking. I'll be doing this interview with Eddie Cloud in just a moment. We will be back live on Monday. And in the event that, like, anything dramatic happens, I may hop on YouTube and just do a quick. A quickie. Quick stream. We'll see. But in the meantime, just a word from our sponsor. Today's sponsor, Zocdoc.com. you know that feeling when you walk out of a doctor's office and think, wow, they made me feel so much better. Well, the right doctor can make you feel lighter, clearer, even more hopeful. And gosh knows we need to hope at this time. I. It was actually Zocdoc that helped me like this when I was on the road. This was now two years ago. I had a dental emergency and I got onto ZocDoc. I found a dentist who helped me, like, and they were great. I almost was like, I wish I could take you home with me. I mean, not to my house, but to. To. To New York. You're a great dentist and you could find doctors like that of all sorts on zocdoc. Zocdoc is a free app and website that helps you find and book high quality in network doctors so you can find somebody you love. We're talking about booking in network appointments for more than 150,000 providers across all 50 states, across all different disciplines. Dermatology, dentistry, primary care, Eye care or one of the other 200 plus specialties that are offered on Zocdoc. You can search by specialty or you can just simply say I got this symptom. Who do I go see? When you're ready, what you can do. And this is amazing. You see their real time appointments availability. So there's no like calling in finding out, do you take my insurance? You don't take my insurance. Are you available? Can I get an appointment on Wednesday? No, we can't do Wednesday. Can you do Tuesday morning? No, I can't do mornings. Well, what about Tuesday afternoon? Like none of that. You click. You can find a doctor usually within 40, 24 to 72 hours of booking. Sometimes you can find same day appointments because they open up when people cancel. Want to thank ZOCDOC for sponsoring today's episode? Stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to Zocdoc.com majority to find instantly and book a doctor you love today. That's z o c doc.com Majority Zocdoc z o c d o c.com Majority Thanks Zocdoc for sponsoring this episode and for the cap I got on my tooth. All right, we're going to take quick break. When we come back, I'll be talking to Eddie Glaud Jr. Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, publisher of A Native sun on sobstack and author of America USA How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. We are back. Sam Seder on the Majority Report. It is a real pleasure to welcome back to the program Professor Eddie Glaud, the author of I think it's now this is your ninth book, if I am counting correct, the most recent one, America USA How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversary, of course, professor at Princeton and Ms. Now contributor. Eddie, thank you so much for joining us. We're right in the thick of it and what you've been writing about. Now, I gotta start. I know many of the interviews you've had have started with those first lines of the book and they, they're poignant. You wrote, I do not love this country. Never have. As a starting point before we get into the notion of anniversaries and what we learned from it. Explain that. I guess, I mean, look, I don't think it's that in some circles and I don't think for this audience it's, it's, it's a hugely controversial thing to say. But certainly for the parts of America that you're speaking to, it is into varying degrees.
- [12:27]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
I would imagine, yeah, It's a provocation, a deliberate one. And I thought I had to say it, Sam, for the folks who feel like they can't. But it works on three different registers. One, I'm signaling a disagreement with James Baldwin. Baldwin, in Notes of a Native Son, says, I love my country, you know, and because of that love, I reserved the right to criticize it perpetually. To paraphrase in there. Well, I grew up in Mississippi. I don't begin there. Right. So the first thing is to kind of announce this disagreement. The second thing, and this is not in any order of importance, is that I'm really skeptical of state idolatry. What does it mean to love something so abstract and so morally dubious? Which is the second sentence. Right. And so oftentimes what happens is that we make these distinctions, these scholarly distinctions between good nationalisms and bad nationalisms. The good nationalism is the patriotism of the United States. The bad nationalism is what led to the implosion of Europe. It resulted in Nazism and the like. And so that distinction lets off the hook some of the ugliness of US Patriotism, as it were. So I'm trying to resist the idolatry of the state. And then the third thing is, how could you not believe that? Why would you believe that I would love the country? And this is much more interior. And I talk about the story, and I wrote about this in Democracy and black, of my dad as the second African American hired at the post office in Pascagoula. He moves us in Moss Point. He moves us to one side of town to the other. I'm playing with my Tonka truck and I imagine the kid as either blond haired, blue eyed, or red haired and green eyed. And his dad comes out and says, stop playing with that N word. And I grab my truck and I go inside. So America told me what it thought of me outside. And then my parents had to go to work to keep me from believing. So why would you expect me to love her? What does that say about you? And so that sentence is really aimed at trying to recalibrate how we think about love and country. Not love of country, but love and country.
- [14:46]
Sam Seder
And the, the. The. I guess there, you know, in terms of that nationalism, it's a slippery slope. And the, and, and I get too often like the. I guess the idea of that abstraction can be appropriated in some very, very bad ways and in ways that just are, you know, motocross on the White House lawn and basically the Roman Colosseum on the White House lawn can be Appropriated in service of the notion of patriotism.
- [15:28]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
Absolutely, absolutely. You know, I, I, I, I wish somebody would have been playing, would have played on very loud speakers blaring the music during the UFC fight on the White House lawn. You know, men in tights, you know, because this is manly men kind of thing happening here, so. Absolutely. I think there's a certain. How can I put this, Sam? And I've said it before, a certain kind of American patriotism. Sounds like a rebel yell to me. To my ear, it invokes. Why are you wrapping yourself in the flag in this way? What are you doing? What are you. Because oftentimes it's aimed at demarcating who's, you know, us and them, right inside, outside. And so, you know, I'm much more interested in love close to the ground. These people can love the flag and despise everyday, ordinary Americans. And so I'm not interested in the idolatry of nationalisms. I'm more interested in loving people on the ground because I think that's the heart of the nation.
- [16:37]
Sam Seder
It just reminds me, as we're speaking, like, living in New York city prior to 911 and after 9 11. I mean, the virulent disdain of New York City from various parts of the country and frankly, you know, like an ilk of people who then just simply use New York in service of their patriotism. I think it was like. Was it Rocker, John Rocker coming up for, from the, from the Braves, I think, and heading up to play the Mets and was like, I would never go into one of those subways with. And just listed off, you know, black people, immigrants, gay people. And it is fascinating how someone can love that the flag or these symbols and, but have disdain for a significant portion of the people who are ostensibly represented by it. But let's, let's talk about the notion of anniversaries. You use anniversaries as a way of, of checking in, I guess, on some level on the, the American project. What, what is it about anniversaries that it provides a good opportunity for assessment?
- [18:05]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
Yeah, I mean, I think these are occasions, particularly the milestone anniversaries, the centennial, the sesquicentennial, the bicentennial, and now and the 250th, they provide these telescoped moments where the country has to tell a story about itself. It has to render the particulars of its founding. And in each of these moments, because I was going to, I'm thinking about how I'm trying to figure out, because I'm pissed, because we have to Deal with this now. 250 years they're gutting the Voting Rights Act. 250 years later, they're redrawing districts. People have to raise their babies in this shit, Sam. Right. The very thing that my father had to do for me to keep me from believing what the world said about me. People are having to do that with their children right now in the 250th year of the country. So instead of writing a 250 year history, I'm not Jill Lepore, I'm not going to write we the people. I thought, let's look at these anniversaries because these are telescoped moments where the country has to tell a story about itself. And lo and behold, in each of these moments, the contradiction, the divided soul of the nation is in full view. So the hundredth year anniversary of the country, the centennial is 1876. Reconstruction is being murdered. Colfax, Louisiana, Vicksburg, Mississippi, Hamburg, South Carolina. There are literal coups going on across the South. Right? 20, 19, 26, that's the decade of the Klan. Yep, 1976. I mean this is Watergate, this is Vietnam, this is black power. You know, deep seated skepticism, anti bussing. Right. All of this is, you know, corporate takeover. All of this stuff is happening. So the anniversaries become these really kind of concentrated moments where the, the contradiction, the double consciousness of the nation is in full view. That's why I decided to focus on each of them.
- [20:10]
Sam Seder
Let's start with 1876. Yeah, like you say, this is literally, scholars will debate over the specific year that Reconstruction essentially is dead. But we have seen in the wake of, at the beginning of reconstruction, 10, 11 years earlier, at the end of the Civil War, we see an ascendance of, well, in addition of course to the freeing of the slaves, we see an ascendance of black political power, particularly in the places that you mentioned, I mean, not coincidentally, places like South Carolina where you have a full on political, black, black political class. You have, you know, starting the semblance of, of, of a black middle class perhaps. And it's literally so little of our education deals with the literal programs that took place. The murders of these black politicians, the driving them out of town. We're waiting for the feds to come and they never show what was, what was the myth. I mean that's the reality of what's going on. The, like a, a, a brief shining moment of a missed opportunity for the country to reset on some level. And in it, in what many consider its second founding, the 13th 14th and 15th, 14th in particular. Amendments are. Much of what happens in this country now are a function of that. But what was the story that Americans are trying to tell themselves? And by that I mean largely white Americans trying to tell themselves about the country at that time?
- [21:55]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
Well, I mean, I think this is a moment where the elements of reunion are taking place, right? 600,000 plus left dead on land and sea. How might we think of the country as a single entity in light of this regional fratricide? You know, Thomas Carlyle writes about the carnage among these white men over these barbarians, as it were. So how can loyalty overcome these sectional divides? So there's this voice. So, you know, Grant speaks at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876. He doesn't mention a word, doesn't talk about the Civil War. Custer gets defeated. No talk about that at all. Right. The violence that's happening across the south, no mention at all. He's gotten a lot of blowback for sending federal troops, Union soldiers into Louisiana after the Colfax riots. So instead what we get is this story, Sam, of American innovation, of our technological prowess, that we finally fulfilled Emerson's demand that we no longer be apprenticed to Europe. It's the Gilded Age. It's the beginning of the guild. So it's talking about American prosperity and our ingenuity and the like. And so this is a really fascinating convergence historically, the Gilded Age, American imperial ambition, and the consolidation of Jim Crow. It's all beginning to happen in this period. And we have to see the echo, right? We have to see the echo in our own current time. So we're telling a story about the country that in effect disappears the reason for the Civil War altogether. But black folk have to be pushed to the side. Frederick Douglass was invited to be on the dais with President Grant. He had his ticket to enter because the exposition was wildly successful in 1876. And as he was trying to enter, a Philadelphia police officer said, there's no way an N word is supposed to be on this dais. And if it wasn't for a senator who saw the big hairy, you know, the white haired Maine of Douglas he was, would have never gotten in. So they allow him to come in. He sits on the dais, but he cannot speak. The most famous order in the United States is forced to be silent during this ritual of what, as I call it, this massive ritual of disremembering at this moment.
- [24:44]
Sam Seder
This is 25 years after his July 5th speech. 24. 25 years. And still it's almost as if he Sat up there just to sort of confirm what he had said decades earlier
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Eddie Glaude Jr.
in the year before, in 1875. He speaks on July 5, 1875. He describes the country as full of apostles of forgetfulness. He calls them the apostles of forgetfulness. And he has this wonderful line, and I'm paraphrasing it here. He says, by a stroke of luck, we gained our freedom through a falling out between white men. Now we must brace ourselves for what will follow from their reunion, from their reconciliation. So here's a man who was born in slavery, escaped the fugitive slave clause of the Fugitive slave law in 1850, forced him to be a fugitive. He had to leave. He came back, lived long enough to see the Emancipation Proclamation signed, the Civil War amendments, 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, and he lived long enough to see the first Jim Crow laws signed. He lived in the context of what I'm calling following Gwendolyn Brooks, the whip of the whirlwind.
- [26:04]
Sam Seder
And he was absolutely right to hoist a warning of that reconciliation. The next 50 years are essentially white America clawing back any gains that were made by black folk in the wake
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Musical Guest or Performer
of
- [26:34]
Sam Seder
the Civil War. All of the political stuff and even the. This is when we have the reemergence of the clan. And what's fascinating about coming in 15 years, 50 years later, in 1926, is we have just gone through a period of 10 or 15 years of building all these statues to Confederate soldiers. Like all the statues that we have taken down or took down in the, the. The past five or ten years glorifying the Confederacy were in fact not built until 40, till 50, 50 some odd years after the Civil War, when this sort of backlash from emancipation takes us even further to a. Like a codified KKK. And they make an appearance in 1926.
- [27:44]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
Yeah, you know, Sam, I think it's really important, man, for us to, you know, there's a historiographical dispute in the book. C. Van Woodward in the Strange Career of Jim Crow makes a really important point to say that Jim Crow doesn't just simply emerge full, you know, and fully grown, fully mature right after the collapse of Reconstruction. There's a kind of period of ambivalence. What I argue instead of that point, I think he's right. Jim Crow doesn't come out of the death of Reconstruction as if Athena came out of Zeus's head. That's not the point. But there's something that makes reunion possible, and that is the voicing of the white American. It allows for a kind of camaraderie. That can, that can subvert sectional differences. Yes, you're from the South, I'm from the north, but we're white.
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Sam Seder
Right. And redraw the lines of where the other is.
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Eddie Glaude Jr.
Exactly. Now what happens as that's being consolidated? This is something important as we get to the 20th century. End of the 19th century. Robert Smalls, who was a Civil War hero from South Carolina, documents that over 53,000 Black people are murdered between the end of Reconstruction and the turn of the century. And we're not just talking about random violence. We're talking about. They're attacking black political leaders, they're attacking black poll workers, they're attacking anyone who's interested in exercising the responsibility of citizenship. 53,000 people he documents have been are murdered. Now the Klan comes into existence. It's reborn in 1915. Right. Ironically, the anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg. And all of this stuff is happening at the same time, disappearing again. The presence of black union soldiers nowhere to be found. Black folk, not the reason whatsoever. But what's interesting about the Klan is that the Klan is also responding to these folk coming from s hole countries out of Europe, Italian, swarthy white folk. They're not white yet. Irish Catholics, Jews. Right. The Klan in its second iteration is as anti clerical and it's so vicious in its hatred of Catholicism. Right. So what you get is this pressure on the very meaning of who is white by virtue of this massive influx of Europeans into the country. And so what you see in the 1920s is this, you know, the Immigration Act, Immigration Nationality act of 1924, which these people are trying to come back to return to, which was basically written by the Klan. 1926 is so important. I just want to say this really quickly at the Philadelphia Exposition in South Philly. And it was a disaster. It was corrupt in so many different ways. The Klan was initially approved, Sam, to hold its annual convention on the grounds of the exposition. They were going to celebrate the flag and burn a cross at the same time. To give us a sense of what was happening in that moment. And what we see is that eventually the notion of the white American expands to include this new category of white ethnics. And that's going to be really important for how we understand 1976 in the
- [31:22]
Sam Seder
bicentennial was that, I mean, there's two things that people should be aware of. One, that by 1920, I think there were something like 6 million card carrying members of the Klan. You're talking about 6% of the population who were like proud of their clanness, you know, the, the hood came in for a reason at different times because you are ostensibly supposed to be like, we got to be quiet about this. But they are card carrying members. Do you think the inclusion, like, what was behind that? Sort of. Because at that time they're talking like, we got to return to our Nordic roots, like super white, northern, northern white Europeans. What was it that broadened that inclusion? Was it just time and just people calm down? Was it the need for people to fight in the war for that matter? Or was it also just sort of some calculation that we're going to need to have more of these folks over here if we want to maintain the other other from black people? I mean, because there was a time in, towards the end of Reconstruction where South, North Carolina white politicians were trying to get poor white Appalachians to sort of become more racist, to dislodge this black political power. And they couldn't quite do it. So that's why they ended up with the violence. Was there a concern like, we're gonna need more, we're gonna need some more troops essentially on our side?
- [33:09]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
Absolutely. There's this worry, you know, you read Stoddard's book. There's this worry among eugenicists and the like that that the white race is going to disappear because of the black and brown world. There is this. It's in this period, the 1910s, right, and the 1920s, that we see not only eugenicists from the earlier period, but we see that the roots of great replacement theory driving a lot of things. And what's interesting is that from Woodrow Wilson to Teddy Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson to Calvin Coolidge, all of them are speaking to this nativism, trying desperately to hold off what they see as the discriminatory practices vis a vis a certain portion of Europe, the Italian and the Irish, and they're calling for a kind of egalitarianism, a kind of openness, and they're referencing it during these celebrations. But it has nothing to do with black people. It has everything to do with these European immigrants that they're trying to in so many ways incorporate into an understanding of the white American. Now, it's important too for us to understand this too, because remember, white Anglo Saxonism is an ideology that's driving American imperial ambition. It's connecting America to England and other European countries, right? That there's, there's and, and that Anglo Saxonism becomes, you know. How can I put this, Sam? Baseball isn't the only American export, right? So at the very moment in which we're consolidating Jim Crow in the South. We're literally incorporating millions of brown people under US Rule in the Philippines, in Cuba, in Haiti and the like. And so we see the relationship here. But this is really important because by the 1930s, remember, the Catholics in the 1920s are danger because their loyalties are to the papacy. By the 1930s, you get father Coughlin.
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Sam Seder
He's creating another set of others. Yes.
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Eddie Glaude Jr.
And this is happening 105th. This is happening in the decade that we describe as the Roaring Twenties, as the age of Jazz, as the decade of the Charleston. Right? When in fact, what we're seeing is extraordinary racial violence and in so many ways, a conception of the state that is rooted in blood and soil. That's why Hitler looks to us for an example. We don't look to him. He looks to us for an example of the Herren Vogue state.
- [35:53]
Co-host or Producer
Right?
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Eddie Glaude Jr.
Not. Not us looking the other way. Madison Square Garden full of Nazis supporting Hitler before Hitler becomes Hitler.
- [36:04]
Sam Seder
The. Just as we talk about this, the echoes of the past couple of years are just like, you know, trying to structure an interview without sort of like acknowledging like, holy crap. We are really. We are really have returned in a myriad of ways to that period. But before we get.
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Announcer
Hold up.
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Eddie Glaude Jr.
But I got to tell you this one, though, saying in the North American Review, the grand wizard of the kkk. The North American Review now, the grand wizard of the kkk, Hiram Wesley Evans, was invited to write a piece. And they invited scholars from around the country, synagogues, universities, Princeton, and W.E.B. du Bois to respond to him. And in his article, not Du Bois, but Evans's article, he talks about America first. He talks about how they can't. How education is warping the minds of his children, of their children. He translates the KKK's ideology into a broad mainstream idiom. And Du Bois responds to his piece with an article entitled the Shape of Fear. And at the end of it, he talks about we are awash in lies and democracy dies as lies smothers.
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Co-host or Producer
Right.
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Eddie Glaude Jr.
Our capacity to engage in X, Y and Z. So that's just another example of the damn echoes to our current moment.
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Sam Seder
I want to hop to 76, but. But as a interlude, is you included in your book, the. That concept of. Of lies? Earlier in this week on. On the show, we had a guy on who trains activists and go and helps activist organizations deal with their internal issues and become more strategic and whatnot. And he, he was talking about, you know, truthfulness being the fundamental thing that, that in all of these cases, people have to practice Truthfulness about their, their themselves as individuals, as to what their agenda is, truthfulness about their abilities as an organization and what you truthful to those causes that they need to say like, we can't help you because to be effective, we need to do this. And your book reminded me that dynamic of the failure to be truthful with ourselves is the fundamental problem that we have in escaping as we go through these 50 year segments of the country. There's not enough that's different, frankly. And that notion that you talk about in your book about truth being like our inability to sort of look in the mirror on our birthday and it's like, I got no crow's feet, I got no gray hair, I'm looking great, like everything's fine. That seems to be like. I know that just. It struck me because we had been on that this week and that is in all of these anniversaries, what is quintessential is that we're hiding from the truth and using these other things as a distraction almost of ourselves.
- [39:38]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
Yeah, I know we got to get to 1976. But this is such an important point because our evasion of the mirror, our evasion of telling the truth is rooted in our refusal to grow up. The country stuck in adolescence, it refuses to be responsible. It refuses to hold itself to account. And you know, how can I put this? You know, that adult that refuses to grow up, you know, the one who thinks that, you know, it's a kid.
- [40:09]
Sam Seder
Yep.
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Eddie Glaude Jr.
They're always on the borderline of being monstrous. So you can bomb Iran and close the Strait of Hormuz and then tell the world to fix it. You end up electing a cowboy as your president who fundamentally changes everything. And then you elect a reality television show. B list actor, C list actor. And so I think the refusal to tell ourselves the truth is rooted in our, in our insistence that we're innocent. And it makes the country monstrous at times.
- [40:48]
Sam Seder
Yeah, let's go to 76. But I want to, I want to sort of like put a, you know, come back to that notion because just to, to remind myself, the what? You know, when we say we're a country that refuses to grow up, we're talking about an abstraction that's not growing up. And so I want to, when we get to 2025, we can talk about 2026, we can talk about sort of that fundamental difference, but let's talk about 1976, because it was, it was fun for me to read your memories of that because I was nine. Just, we're about the same age. And I remember the bicentennial train came through, and, you know, obviously I was more naive as a nine year old, but there was a lot of, like, there was a lot of marketing of. Of that in a way that I don't even see today. You know, maybe that was because it was 200 years as opposed to 250, but a lot of people aren't gonna be around for 300, so you would imagine. But there doesn't seem to be the same. It's almost as if it's the opposite. Instead of people sort of, like, commercializing the.
- [42:02]
Musical Guest or Performer
The.
- [42:03]
Sam Seder
The. The anniversary. It's almost just like the anniversary is an excuse to provide commerce.
- [42:11]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
Yeah. So remember, the bicentennial bears a particular kind of burden because all hell is broken loose in the. In the 1960s and early 70s. So much. So, in 1970, the Panther Party, along with other movement organizers, convened a constitutional convention to write another constitution at Temple University. Nothing came of it, but that gives you a sense of the depth of skepticism. You got Watergate, you got Saigon, Vietnam. You have black power. You have black women's movement. You have. I mean, the women's movement, liberation movement, the LGBTQ gay liberation movement. The country is coming apart at the seams. And so the bicentennial bears the burden of positing a kind of consensus. And this is the first major milestone anniversary with television.
- [43:02]
Sam Seder
Right.
- [43:03]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
So you don't have to gather in Philadelphia. You don't have to gather in Philadelphia. And so, you know, I remember as a kid trying to figure out what the hell the Mormon Tabernacle Choir was singing, you know, and Bob Hope special and all of that stuff, I got a picture of me in red, white, and blue pants and stuff. But, you know, it's a moment that is really overrun by corporate interest because it's very much decentralized, even though there are these moments like the train, the freedom train, the ships that float come into New York and the like. But it's really happening at the local level. And so. But the idea which is really important. Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian, told me this. He said, in so many ways, the bicentennial was really focused on white ethnics. It was the kind of embrace of this vast Ellis island story to kind of bring about unity. Because in the book, I'm trying to argue, wherever you see this insistence on consistency, it's in response on consensus. It's in response to the experience of deep division. So the more forceful the consensus narrative, the more likely divisions are threatening to overwhelm the country. So the grandchildren, the children and grandchildren of the people who were considered infestations in the 1920s are now claiming the revolution in 1976 as their own. They are the ones who are the true revolutionaries or inheritors of the revolutionary legacy. And you see this most clearly in the debates around anti busing in Boston. And so we get a counter narrative, not just simply black people speaking back. You get the pbc, you get the people's Bicentennial campaign. And they are responding to the corporate takeover of America. How corporations have overwhelmed the good, how they. They're responding to a kind of conservative rendering of the revolutionary era. They're claiming Tom Paine right. As their resource. And you see these are some of the folks who come out of SDS and the like trying to give voice to and 30,000 plus people show up and conquer as they offer an alternative vision to, to the bicentennial celebration. But the contradiction divided soul of the nation is still in full view as we get with that iconic Stanley Forman photographs the soil and Old Glory, right as this young teenager with the American flag attacks Ted Landmark right in Boston. So here we are again in the midst of the contradiction as corporate money overwhelms and America's racism is in full view.
- [45:50]
Sam Seder
And that takes us to 2026, where the irony is it feels like there's no attempt at the consensus thing. It's almost like all of the institutionalists who are desperately trying to hold it together with the consensus in these past years and it's easiest to defer to consensus by make sure we have an other, otherwise we wouldn't know who us is. In this instance, there's no attempt whatsoever to do that. It's almost as if we've just seized all the means of expression. And so therefore we don't need to pretend that there's consensus because we're just going to pretend that we just rule it.
- [46:41]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
I think that's absolutely right. You know, MAGA has no interest whatsoever and make, you know, the more perfect union talk that more perfect union talk for them is an affront. It's scandalous. It's like J.D. vance's response to Mamdani's then mayor candidate Mamdani's claim that he loved America. But America has a long way to go. And in that July 5 address at the Claremont Institute, Van says, who the hell does he think he is? He should show gratitude. We made his life possible. Because for Vance and others, America's perfection was secured in its founding. America's perfection was secured in its Founding. This is Calvin Coolidge in 1926. He says, Because Coolidge, in response to the Russian Revolution, is telling people, no, our revolution wasn't radical. Our revolution was just an expression of enduring metaphysical principles that had nothing to do with the American project necessarily. They are universal in their meaning and import. All we need to do is to remember and restore. He renders the revolution in conservative terms. MAGA gives that an evangelical twist.
- [47:51]
Sam Seder
Right.
- [47:51]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
The Claremont Institute. Right. The nationalist conservatives. These folk who are post liberal, they don't care about democracy as such. Many of them are. Cesare.
- [48:02]
Announcer
Right.
- [48:02]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
Conservative Catholics. There's this kind. I would urge everyone to read Laura Fields extraordinary book, the Furious Minds that give us a sense of the intellectual scaffolding of maga. Right. You see all of these. Straussian. Sam.
- [48:17]
Sam Seder
Yep.
- [48:17]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
Doing all of this work. It's. It's mind blowing, actually. And so what you see with MAGA is no interest in consensus because they made the choice America. For them, America is a white republic, and white people possess freedom. So it's not a beacon of freedom or a white republic. No, it's a white republic where white people, as they understand, or the possessors of freedom itself. And that's what we're facing in this current moment, which is consistent with the white nationalist project, in my view.
- [48:54]
Sam Seder
And you write about the idea of white people sort of gifting freedom at various times, obviously in the wake of the Civil War, but consistently throughout our history. The idea that there is that freedom is a commodity that white people control. And we see it now with attacks on people who write about Palestine. These people are not. They don't deserve what theoretically has been our universal rights that we're obligated to provide people by the Constitution. The idea of denaturalization, the. The idea of Hegseth going in, pulling no promotions for black people, no promotions for women. All this theoretically anti DEI stuff is really just a purification. We just got to make things more white.
- [49:55]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
Absolutely. That's why we can say we're in the midst of two things. You know, redemption and lost cause are not the same thing. Redemption is the violent overthrow of reconstruction. It involved the disenfranchisement of black folk, political coups, coercive violence, and the like. The Mississippi Plan became the blueprint. Oh, no,
- [50:20]
Sam Seder
I'm here.
- [50:21]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
Oh, okay. I'm just wondering what happened. The Mississippi Blue. The Mississippi plan became the blueprint. The blueprint for. For. For. I don't know what I. I don't know what happened. Just happened. I'm sorry.
- [50:33]
Sam Seder
No worries. I mean, we we were talking about the, the, essentially the, the difference between redemption and the lost cause. Yeah, and the lost cause was good.
- [50:44]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
So the Mississippi plan became the blueprint for redemption. But the lost cause was a different kind of violence. It was epistemic violence. It was a violence directed at what we know, how we come to know what we see. This is the Dunning School out of Columbia University writing the stories of Reconstruction. Why am I bringing it up? Because we see aspects of redemption now with the gutting of the Voting Rights act, the redrawing of districts and the like. But so there's a second redemption happening, but there's also a second lost cause. There's an all out assault on how we know what we see, how we tell our story. So the assault on dei, the assault on affirmative action, the assault on federal contracts, all the things that we're seeing as they rip out the infrastructure of the civil rights movement, let's call that the second redemption. But the way in which you're going to restore truth and sanity to American history, the way in which you're taking off, you know, removing signs, attacking the Smithsonian, that's the second lost cause. And so we're in this moment right now as MAGA tries to assert its control of our very conception, our very idea of the country itself.
- [51:55]
Sam Seder
One is the intellectual sort of underpinnings of these actions that actually have material impact.
- [52:02]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
Exactly, my friend.
- [52:06]
Sam Seder
So what do we do? I mean, I know you didn't, I mean like the, this is, how does this cycle get broken? I mean I, you know, I've heard you, you speak about, about the book and in the context of the book, the idea of what individuals have to do in terms of confronting things. And you and I have had many conversations, many of your books over the years and I, you know, still live every day with the idea of the practice of white supremacy as an, as an individual. A concept which I have learned from you. But like what can we do as a collective? To the extent that there are, on some level they know they can't pull the reunion sort of like trick on some level which is different than it's been in the past, we don't, like they're not spending time with the, the pretend it is just full on our force, this is what we're going to dictate. Does, does the, in some ways it's more truthful than we have seen at other anniversaries. Is the response, is there an opportunity for a more collective response because that truth is already laid bare to us.
- [53:31]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
I hope So I pray you know. One of the things I do in the book, Sam, is I resist the American ritual of putting forward policy suggestions.
- [53:43]
Sam Seder
You didn't have the and how to fix it part of the book.
- [53:45]
Announcer
Yes.
- [53:46]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
And because that's part of our ritual to pat ourselves on the back, to lead us to believe that we're actually trying to be better in so many ways, I end with a kind of moral claim. We can't be a beacon of freedom, and we can debate what that means. We can't be a beacon of freedom and a white republic at the same time. You just can't do it without contradiction, without perpetuating the madness that has engulfed the country since its founding. You just can't be both. MACA has made its choice. You're right. They're not pretending to their mind this is a white republic, and they're doing everything in their power to make it so. Our task is to make a choice. We can't finesse the difference. We don't need charity. We don't need to think of racial justice as a philanthropic enterprise or a charitable gesture. We don't need to think of the diversity of the country as an example of the virtue white folk. Right. We need to choose to be a beacon of freedom, and we need to understand what that means. Right. That's going to involve addressing the horror, the evil, of one man being a trillionaire. God forbid, can you imagine that one person is a trillionaire? That's evil. We're going to have to deal with the toxic brew of greed, selfishness and hatred that has this country by the throat. But it begins fundamentally with a choice. Either we're going to be a beacon of freedom or we're going to be a white republic. You can't be both. It's just as simple as that. And, you know, sometimes I. You know, I fetishize complexity, Sam. Sometimes. But sometimes the issue is simple. You don't bomb babies. You don't kill innocents. One life is not valued more than another. All human life is precious. Those are some basic commitments that ought to guide how we live in the world. And I think what we have to do in order to release ourselves into a different future. If we get to the other side of this madness, if we survive, it is that we just finally have to make a choice and leave this idea that the country is white right to history's dustbin. If that makes sense.
- [55:59]
Sam Seder
It does. Professor Eddie Glaud. The book is America USA How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. We will link to that at Majority FM and in the podcast and YouTube descriptions. Cannot thank you enough. I really, anytime I get a chance to speak to you, I feel really blessed. I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on, man.
- [56:22]
Eddie Glaude Jr.
Thank you for all that you do, Sam. Keep fighting, man. Talk to you soon.
- [56:25]
Announcer
Okay.
- [56:33]
Musical Guest or Performer
But I know somehow I'm gonna get there I wasn't looking when I just got caught between the truth in the light bar if I didn't out won't make me feel any better yeah, I know the clock is ticking but the message are gonna kick it and my pilot light shining bright I get somewhere the choice was made for the option where you don't get paid for the road that bends before it finally breaks
- [57:18]
Sam Seder
you
- [57:21]
Musical Guest or Performer
I get somehow lost my drive between the 101 and the 5 do you know how far the teacher takes you? Yeah, I know the clock is ticking but the man's not gonna kick in and that pilot light shining bright. While I shifted in and out of gear Waiting for my moment to happen I don't know how much longer I can stay in or how much more I got to pay to play in I know somehow.