AMERICA, U.S.A.

A meditation on race and racism in America and its 250th year.

Should Black people celebrate the semiquicentennial? Let’s look, as Princeton historian Glaude does, at the bicentennial and a contemporary panel discussion with Joseph H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Convention; National Urban League leader Vernon Jordan; and historian Lerone Bennett Jr. “Black people had to lay claim to the country and to the cause of freedom that it represents,” argued Jackson, while Jordan counseled participation only to remind white people that Blacks are and have been central to American history. Only Bennett opposed the celebration outright, holding that “the country had failed Black people.” The question endures, and there’s no question but that Glaude agrees with the last view, opening, memorably: “I do not love America, and never have, especially now.” The “especially now” part is central, for, by his account, in Donald Trump’s America, whites have “declared that the country belongs to them,” as manifested by the war against DEI, racial considerations in college admissions, and social services. The “America, U.S.A.” of Glaude’s title, echoing John Dos Passos, is a place of fear and hatred, of violence, of racism as policy, ruled by madness and a Praetorian Guard—the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—that “is charged to help make America white again.” But so, Glaude suggests, it has always been, as he invokes images of huge Klan marches in America’s capital and decries John F. Kennedy for rejecting Martin Luther King Jr.’s proposed “Second Emancipation Proclamation outlawing segregation, one hundred years after Lincoln’s.” As Glaude writes, Kennedy did not do so for fear of offending white Southern voters, who in any event revealed their true colors by turning to the Republican Party and, now, to MAGA. So, celebrate? No, writes Glaude. Instead, “we must all be freedom-­seekers, haunting the past for resources to live unshackled from the lies that bind our feet.”

A charged renunciation of American unfreedom that could not be timelier.