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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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. I don't know what, I've never seen this happen.
Wait, this is true?
This is true. Mysteries of every size, each week. This American Life, wherever you get your podcasts.
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya 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 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. 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.
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Chapter 2: What insights does Eddie Glaude Jr. provide about America's founding principles?
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.
Sure. 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 and 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, 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.
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?
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.
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Chapter 3: How does Eddie Glaude Jr. analyze the significance of historical anniversaries in America?
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 something inside of my head just simply said, but this is what you have to say. You have to begin here. And then you can explain it. So I left it there.
and decided, you know, in this time you have to be courageous and vulnerable and daring. And I couldn't- And truthful. Yeah, exactly.
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. Yeah, yeah.
Am I right in that feeling? In the same way that Langston Hughes, we felt in his later writings and in James Baldwin.
Yeah, so in so many ways, I'm arguing with Jimmy. In Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin says, you know, I love my country more than anything. And because of that love, I reserve the right to criticize it relentlessly, to paraphrase him.
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Chapter 4: What role does Frederick Douglass play in understanding America's past?
I never began there. I didn't begin there. Maybe it's because I'm from Mississippi. You know? But I'm rageful. 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 have to make a choice, right? Will we do this or that? And we have a choice to put this moment behind us 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.
Chapter 5: What does Glaude mean by 'the divided soul of the nation'?
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.
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?
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 saintliness of the founders, a story about the sacredness of this grand experiment. In 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 this 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 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.
I want to talk with you in particular about two moments. 1926, 1976, but I'm very curious about the title, America, USA. Why both of those in the title?
Yeah, you know, usually it's not a comma, it's a hyphen. Yes. The Italian American, the Irish American, you know, the Black American, 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 America, 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.
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