Scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. reflects on America at 250
6/15/202645 min
Glaude's book*, '*America, U.S.A.,' looks at the country through the lens of its previous anniversaries and centennials. Today, as in the past, he tells Tonya Mosley, "the divided soul of the nation is in full view." As the 250th anniversary approaches, he says it's time for the U.S. to acknowledge the ways it has failed to deliver on its founding principles. "America has to grow up. It can no longer hide in its adolescence," he says.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Tonya Mosley· Host0:14
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tonya Mosley, 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 Again: 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 USA: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. In it, Glaude takes us to the country's big birthdays, 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