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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A FORCEFUL HISTORY OF AMERICA’S UNFINISHED RECKONING  
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Roberta Silman
May 30, 2026
The Arts Fuse
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_ In a sweeping account of the nation’s anniversary milestones,
Eddie Glaude Jr. shows how whitewashing and racial exclusion have
shaped America’s self-image from 1826 to 2026. _

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_America, U.S.A.__How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries_Eddie S.
Glaude Jr.CrownISBN: 9780593239803 

To get to the book under review, I must first go back to an earlier
2020 book by Eddie Glaude. It is _Begin Again, James Baldwin’s
America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. _In it are two paragraphs
that etched themselves in my mind when I read them only a few months
ago and remain strikingly relevant today:

_We are told every day not to believe what we see happening all around
us…. We are told, for example, that Trumpism is exceptional, a
unique threat to our democracy. This view that Trump, and Trump alone,
stresses the fabric of the country lets us off the hook. It feeds into
the lie that Baldwin spent the majority of his life trying to convince
us to confront. It attempts to explain away as isolated events what
today’s cellphone footage exposes as part of our everyday
experience. Exceptionalizing Trump deforms our attention (it becomes
difficult to see what is happening in front of us) and secures our
self-understanding from anything he might actually represent. If
anything, Trump represents a reassertion of the belief that America
is, and always will be, a white nation. _

_Today, our task remains the same, no matter its difficulty or the
magnitude of the challenge. Some of us must become poets, but we all
must bear witness. Make the suffering real and force the world to pay
attention to _it, _and not place that suffering all at the feet of
Donald Trump, but understand it as the inevitable outcome in a country
that continues to lie to itself. _

Eddie Glaude Jr. was born in 1968 in Moss Point, Mississippi, and
earned his bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College and his graduate
degrees from Princeton University, where he is now the James S.
McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of African American
Studies. He is the author of nine earlier books, only one of which I
have read and quoted from above. But he is also gaining fame because
he is an MS NOW analyst — which is how I “know” him. He is a
handsome, charming man who wears blue-framed glasses and whose
piercing intelligence directs him to the core of the matter quickly
and accessibly. But what I love most about him is his capacity for
anger. Unlike so many commentators who are normalizing what is
happening in this country, Glaude understands that only anger on the
part of all Americans — white, Black, brown, yellow — will help us
to realize where we are and why we need to change.

And now, as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of
Independence, Glaude has given us a new, equally penetrating, and
timely book that further explores how the shadow of racism still looms
over the forthcoming celebrations. He uses details from a selection of
50-year celebrations — 1826, 1876, 1926, 1976, and now 2026 — to
examine the history of what he calls the “doubleness” that has
plagued us since “the founders made a tragic choice that corrupted
the American soul, and [which] Americans have been bound by … ever
since.” He delves into the ways that Black people dealt with the
whitewashing that accompanied those celebrations, and addresses the
fundamental problem clearly and bluntly: that a portion of this
country has never accepted the idea of true equality for Black people,
and that this same percentage has felt, and continues to feel, that
freedom is their gift to give — if and when they choose.

The idea that freedom is transactional, a commodity owned by one
segment of our population, is at the heart of this book. Glaude’s
examination of that dehumanizing belief will force you to reassess
certain assumptions you thought were inviolable, only to discover that
they — and even you — are part of the lie itself.

Just as we are learning — from such commentators as Rachel Maddow
— that in World War II America there were fascists who helped create
a through line to our present difficulties, we can learn from Glaude
how, for example, the hatred that propelled the Ku Klux Klan affected
the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition. That at the time President
Coolidge bought into the notion of the superiority of American
Protestantism, which in turn led the Klan to embrace the simpler
racial system of “white and not white,” which then led to a
stunted immigration policy and assaults on Jews by such figures as
Father Coughlin. And how all of these actions are connected to our
present dilemma. Glaude concludes:

_With the mania of MAGA and Donald Trump in the White House, the
Klan’s and Coolidge’s version of Americanism still shadows our
days. Immigration, questions of American identity, how we ought to
view American history, and who can lay claim to our country drive our
current politics. As do the fear and the mass of lies. On the 250th
anniversary of the nation, the country drowns in lies._

No book review can do justice to the volume of detail that Glaude
gives us as evidence of those lies and the various solutions proposed
to help us rid ourselves of them. Or to his deep understanding of
Black American history. I will simply pick out one thread that I found
fascinating, especially because it wound its way to a groundbreaking
event during the Biden presidency that was not covered as widely as it
should have been. And that it signifies the best solution of all.

It starts in 1967 with a sociologist named Robert Bellah
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essay “Civil Religion in America.” In it, Bellah postulated that
“Civil religion at its best is a general apprehension of universal
and transcendent religious reality as seen in or … as revealed
through the experience of the American people.” In Bellah’s view,
we Americans had a unique goodness and shared a vision that, as Glaude
interprets it, “provided the basis for a background consensus that
could hold off the chaos, which resulted from the doubleness that
rested at the nation’s heart.” I did not know of Bellah or his
essay, but I can attest that the basic premise of his essay was
widespread in the ’50s and early ’60s.

However, after the Orangeburg Massacre
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assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in 1968,
the lack of trust in Nixon and the Vietnam War, and as Glaude
describes it, “the unbridled greed and selfishness overrunning every
other value,” things began to change; “.. .a deeper cynicism took
root as if the darker angels of the country had won the battle of the
soul of America.”

I remember it well — in my memory it was the worst time I had lived
through, including World War II, the McCarthy era, and JFK’s
assassination. So it is easy to understand how those years forced
Bellah to question the ideas in his 1967 essay. Eight years later, in
1975, a year before the 200th celebration of our founding, Bellah
wrote _The Broken Covenant _in which “he refused the safety and
comfort of the lie.” But how to go on? On this important point,
Glaude says:

_Unlike Huey Newton, Bellah did not look at the past and find only
lies and ruin, or simply toss the past aside for what awaits in a
future made possible by revolution. Instead he reached for those who
had tried to live up to the covenant; who, even in the face of
betrayal left “genuine achievement behind.” Slavery was no more.
Women had the right to vote. Still, the moral principles underlying
the sacred documents of the nation had to become more than words on
parchment — they needed to be inscribed on the hearts of American
men and women…. But greed, hatred, and selfishness kept getting in
the way…._

_America would have to confront its ugly underbelly, grapple honestly
and earnestly with “its experience of loss” and its defeats. Then
he quotes Bellah: “If we are to free ourselves for the future we
must remember what we would rather forget.” _

Bellah’s story and his influence on the 1976 centennial are an
example of Glaude’s evenhandedness and superb research. That
continues into more recent times when Joe Biden was our president. As
Glaude points out, “One of the fascinating features of Biden’s
presidency involved the way he embraced Black history quite
differently from Presidents Clinton and Obama in his effort to tell a
_different _story about America. In certain moments, Biden sought to
do exactly what Bellah urged the country to do in _The Broken
Covenant.” _He goes on:

_Biden’s remarks at the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre
in June 2021 closely approximated what Bellah called for. He was the
first president to come to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and acknowledge the evil
done on the day that left nearly three hundred Black people dead…_

_Biden’s unadorned sentences offered a straightforward description
of hate-motivated rage…. “As soon as it happened,” Biden
reminded the audience, “there was a clear effort to erase it from
our memory—our collective memories— …_

_For Biden the broad democratic crisis the country faced was steeped
in the history the nation actively avoided. Hatred and grievance had
the country by the throat. Double consciousness had driven us all mad.
Picking and choosing what to learn and what to know, and leaving aside
the direr elements of the past, would only seal the country’s fate.
“The only way to build common ground,” the president suggested,
“is to truly repair and to rebuild. I come here to help fill the
silence, because in silence, wounds deepen…. For too long we’ve
allowed a narrowed, cramped view of the promise of this nation to
fester — the view that America is a zero sum game where there is
only one winner.” …_

_[Thus] Biden stood apart: he sought to leave behind American
innocence. The story of Tulsa refused and refuted the lie. _

June 2021 seems a lot longer than five years ago. Biden’s greatness
has begun to fade, erased by the fact that he couldn’t let go of the
presidency when he should have. History will correct that in time. For
now, we are a country suffering far more than we anticipated when
Trump was elected to a second term in 2024. That is why Glaude’s
book is so important. As you read, you come to see the fuller picture:
that there are tools at our disposal, and that we can call on them to
become a people who live up to the original covenant — but only if
we force ourselves to confront our unvarnished history and follow Joe
Biden’s example. Perhaps then we can face the 250th anniversary with
the necessary knowledge, the essential compassion, and the
strengthened resolve to cast aside the lies, the whitewashing, and the
delusions — and emerge into a new era, bolstered by truth.

ROBERTA SILMAN is the author of five novels, two short story
collections, and two children’s books. Her second collection of
stories, called _Heart-work_, was just published. Her most recent
novels, _Secrets and Shadows _and _Summer Lightning_, are available on
Amazon in paperback and ebook and as audio books from Alison Larkin
Presents. _Secrets and Shadows_ (_Arts Fuse_ review
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is in its second printing and was chosen as one of the best Indie
Books of 2018 by _Kirkus_. A recipient of fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she has
reviewed for _The_ _New York Times_ and _Boston Globe_, and writes
regularly for _The Arts Fuse_. More about her can be found at
robertasilman.com [[link removed]], and she can also be
reached at [email protected].

* US History
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* African American history
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* US 250 Anniversary
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* US Anniversaries
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