Geoff Bennett:
This book, you open it with a striking line. You write: “I do not love America and never have, especially now.”
Why did you choose to begin there? What are you asking readers to reconsider about their relationship to this country?
Eddie Glaude Jr.:
I think the sentence works on three registers.
One is the kind of rejection of the idolatry of the nation state, right? What does it mean to have an abiding love for something so abstract and often something so morally dubious, the second sentence of the book?
And I think the second aspect is, I wanted to differentiate myself from James Baldwin. I’m starting from a different place. Baldwin begins with his love of country and says, from there, I can criticize the country perpetually.
I want to begin with wound, which takes us to the third — the interior experience. My dad was the second African American hired in the post office in Pascagoula, Mississippi. He moved us from one side of town to the other. I’m playing with my Tonka truck. The man came out, my little neighbor.
I imagine him as blond-haired, blue-eyed. His dad comes out and he says, stop playing with that N-word. I grab my truck and I walk back inside. The world had announced what it thought about me. And then I went inside and my parents placed a crown above my head. They taught me how to survive it.
So I’m really asking the question, how can you expect me to love the country, given the reality of my experience and the experience of race in the country?
Geoff Bennett:
There are people who will hear you say that and will say that you can argue that love of country and criticism are not opposites, that criticism can be an act of love. Why does that frame not work for you?
Eddie Glaude Jr.:
Well, I think part of what I’m trying to do is to recalibrate it, right, trying to get us to really confront the truth of who we are, to kind of move beyond the myths and the fantasies, and to think about, instead of having the preposition of, but have the conjunction and, not love of country, but love and country.
I’m more interested, Geoff, in loving closer to the ground, not the abstractions, because whenever I hear a certain kind of invocation of patriotism, it sounds to my ear like a rebel yell.
Geoff Bennett:
On that point, one of the central arguments of this book is that the country suffers from a double consciousness. How does this formulation differ from Du Bois’ original form of that idea?
Eddie Glaude Jr.:
Yes. So, that’s a great question. So Du Bois in 1903 wrote “The Souls of Black Folk.”
And he says that Black folks see themselves through the eyes of those who despise them. We are American and we’re African, right? And this — that doubleness has this impact on how we live our lives. Well, I think double consciousness is — that Du Bois describes to us is actually a consequence of the double consciousness of the nation.
America imagines itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And you can’t hold those two commitments together at once without contradiction, without depositing a kind of madness at the heart of the country. And that’s been present from the founding.
And it’s this madness that leads to the cycle that returns over and over again that we have to navigate.
Geoff Bennett:
And we’re seeing that now with immigration and voting rights, which you also explore in the book. What patterns are repeating themselves?
Eddie Glaude Jr.:
Oh, absolutely.
So when you think about the mid-20th century revolution, you have two major pieces of legislation that fundamentally changed the nation, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Now, the Immigration Act of 1965 overturned the Immigration and Nationality Act of ’24, which was basically written by the Klan. And that established national quotas. And in this period, in 1926, the 150th-year anniversary of the nation, the Klan was approved to have its annual convention on the grounds of the Philadelphia Exposition celebrating the nation’s 150th year.
They were going to celebrate the flag and burn a cross at the same time. That puts that divided soul in clear relief, right?
Geoff Bennett:
That is history that most people do not know.
Eddie Glaude Jr.:
No, we tend to think of the 1920s as the Roaring ’20s, the Jazz Age, the age of the Charleston…
Geoff Bennett:
Right.
Eddie Glaude Jr.:
… when in fact it was the decade of the Klan.
The Klan claimed to have been responsible for the election of Calvin Coolidge. The man who actually co-authored from the House of Representatives the Johnson and Reed Act, the Immigration Act of 1924, was a member of the Klan.
Senator Reed from Pennsylvania, not Philadelphia, Mississippi, but Pennsylvania represented, a state where there are over a quarter-million members of the Klan. And so 1926, there are all of these parallels to 2026. Geoff, to 2026.
In Calvin Coolidge’s speech, for example, he says, we don’t need but one revolution. And that revolution wasn’t radical. It just gave voice to the enduring metaphysical principles that are true, irrespective of what we do. All we need to do is to remember and restore. MAGA gives that in an evangelical twist.
Geoff Bennett:
In order for this country to be fully redeemed, I would imagine, in your view, is entirely dependent on what average Americans decide to do in this moment.
So what should people be doing right now?
Eddie Glaude Jr.:
In the book, I resist this question in a way, because it’s the typical American question. You describe the problem. We talk about the way in which race works and sentimentality kicks in. We cry our crocodile tears, white rage kicks in, and then we give the policy blueprint, this is what we need to do in order to move forward.
And it’s a ritual to make us think we’re trying to be better.
Geoff Bennett:
Well, we saw that after the police killing of George Floyd.
Eddie Glaude Jr.:
And then, in a blink of an eye, here we are.
Geoff Bennett:
Was it because the solutions were so symbolic and performative?
Eddie Glaude Jr.:
On one level. That’s what sentimentality is. Sentimentality proceeds from the assumption that freedom is my possession, is your possession, white folks’ possession, more specifically, to give and to take away.
So it’s sentimentality that drives it. What can I do for you, not with you, not a fundamental change. And when those folks who are the object of charity continue to push back, wanting justice, then rage kicks in. You get the question, what more do you want? You get the claim, this is overreach.
And then we reach back to what was. Douglass said, Frederick Douglass said, I don’t want alms. I want justice, right? So sentimentality and rage, that’s the cycle. So I resist that ritual. I say something much more basic, Geoff. We can’t be a beacon of freedom and a white republic. You can’t be that at once. Choose. Which one you going to be?
Geoff Bennett:
Eddie Glaude. The book is “America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries.”
Always a privilege to speak with you. An instant bestseller, by the way. Congratulations.
Eddie Glaude Jr.:
Thank you, my friend. It’s always a pleasure.
