New book explores America's history of celebrating freedom while excluding millions

By — Geoff Bennett Geoff Bennett By — Jonah Anderson Jonah Anderson Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/new-book-explores-americas-history-of-celebrating-freedom-while-excluding-millions Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Audio The United States is preparing to mark 250 years since its founding, a milestone often framed as a celebration of democracy, freedom and national promise. But Eddie Glaude Jr. argues that America’s anniversaries have always been shadowed by a deeper contradiction. Geoff Bennett sat down with Glaude to discuss his new book, "America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries." Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. 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