Scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. reflects on America at 250

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Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or 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 on to 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.

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