The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3670 - How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries w/ Eddie Glaude, Jr.

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

It's Casual Friday on The Majority Report. On today's program: In a pre-taped interview, Sam Seder was joined by Eddie Glaude, Jr, distinguished professor of African-American studies at Princeton University and author of several books. Glaude's newest release is titled: "America U.S.A: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries:. For more from Eddie check out his Substack - A Native Son. Happy Juneteenth. To connect and organize with your local ICE rapid response team visit ICERRT.com The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the AM Quickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors: ZOCDOC: Go to Zocdoc.com/MAJORITY and download the Zocdoc app to sign-up for FREE and book a top-rated doctor SUNSET LAKE CBD:  Use the coupon code FS26 to save 25% on all full-spectrum CBD Gummies at SunsetLakeCBD.com. The sale ends June 27th at midnight Eastern time Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech On Instagram: @MrBryanVokey Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.  

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You will save 25% on all full spectrum. spectrum, sabaday gummies. Sale ends June 27th at midnight, Eastern time, June 27th. All right, I get ahead over there. See their site for additional terms and restrictions. And now, time for the show. Casual Friday.

That means Monday is casual Monday. Tuesday. Casual Tuesday. Wednesday. Casual hump day. Thursday. Casual Thursday. That's what we can.

call it and Friday, casual Shabbat. The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. It is Friday, June 19th, 2020. My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live to tape steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, it is a special Juneteenth celebration for us because we're off. It's a federal holiday, ladies and gentlemen, and it is time to celebrate. But for you, we have an amazing Juneteenth gift, an interview with the Distinguished Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University,

author of nine books, the writer of a native son on Substach, and the author of his latest America, USA, How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. Eddie Gleod Jr. will be with us today for the interview. And that's going to be it, but it is a super casual Friday. Yes, it is so casual that we are not in the office. I mean, you say it's a federal holiday. It's one of the federal holidays we respect.

Like we don't take President's Day off, for example. Yeah, we don't take President's Day. we not? No. Well, maybe we'll read it. But, you know, in the past, we've done, we've done shows on June 19th. And we've had some great guests. And you can check out. I would encourage you to just go back on June 19th in the past, I don't know, five or six years. We've had great guests who've talked about where the holiday came from. This, of course, in 1865, the last place in the country to know about the Emancipation Proclamation, which was signed two years earlier, was in Galveston, Texas.

And it became a celebration in Texas and then spread across the country over the past couple of centuries, or I should say the century, 18, yeah, 1800s would only be one century. and it is a celebration that has meant different things at different times in our history. But just very important to understand to place into context how race has formed this country or the question of race. racism really and has dominated this country through the years in this interview with

Eddie Glewit it's I think we went about 45 minutes we recorded it the other day and I'm like we got to use this he he is a great writer a great thinker and has

captured sort of these moments from the 100th birthday of the country in 1876 and then the sequential 150 years in 1926

and then the bicentennial in 1976 and then of course talking about where we are today it's a fascinating look into our history of race in this country and it is nuts how it feels like we're in a loop

almost you know that I'm not one of those people who says that like time is a you know everything happens now future in the past but it is crazy how similar of a situation we find ourselves in today well history rhymes is what they say at least we don't need to get into these thoughts about what the nature of time is because that makes my brain hurt a lot oh i'm sorry uh that could be because you're hungover from the uh next parade that was yesterday Anticipatory hangover, yes, perhaps. That's the real reason why we had to take Juneteenth off because...

I couldn't run the show. Yeah, I mean, Emma is we're actually having to stand vigil by her hospital bed to hope that she recovers. She's got an IV with all... Well, that's what I'm telling you. It's at least I got to live to see the Knicks win a championship, honestly. There's no pain of light left in Manhattan. Exactly.

You better, you better take some of that zibiotics. I will be taking it from the office. In the meantime, we'll be talking, I'll be doing this interview with Eddie Glowd in just a moment. We will be back live on Monday. And in the event that like anything dramatic happens, I may hop on YouTube and just do a quick, a quickie, quick stream. We'll see. But in the meantime, just a word from our sponsor. Today's sponsor, Zocdoch.com.

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Sometimes you can find same day appointments because they open up when people cancel. I want to thank Zoc Doc for sponsoring today's episode. Stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to Zocdoc.com slash majority to find it instantly and book a doctor you love today. That's Z-O-C-D-C dot com slash majority. Z-D-O-C-D-C dot com slash majority. Thanks Z-K-D-O-C for sponsoring this episode and for the cap I got on my tooth. All right, we're going to take quick break. When we come back, I'll be talking to Eddie Glewd Jr., professor of African-American studies at Princeton University,

publisher of a native son on Sobstack, and author of America, USA, How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. We are back, Sam Cedar, on The Majority Report. It is a real pleasure to welcome back to the program, Professor Eddie Gleod, the author of, I think it's now, this is your ninth book. uh if i am counting correct um the most recent one america usa how race shadows the nation's anniversary of course a professor at princeton and ms now uh contributor um uh edy thank you so much for joining us um we're right in the thick of it uh and what you've been writing about now i got to start I know many of the interviews you've had have started with those first lines of the book. And they're poignant.

You wrote, I do not love this country, never have. As a starting point, before we get into the notion of anniversaries and what we learn from it, explain that, I guess. I mean, look, I don't think it's that in some circles, and I don't think for this audience, It's a hugely controversial thing to say. But certainly for the parts of America that you're speaking to, it is. And to varying degrees, I would imagine. Yeah, it's a provocation, a deliberate one. And I thought I had to say it, Sam, for the folks who feel like they can't.

But it works on three different registers. One, I'm signaling a disagreement with James Baldwin. Because Baldwin in notes of a native son says, you know, I love my country, you know, and because of that love, I've reserved the right to criticize it perpetually, to paraphrasing there. Well, I grew up in Mississippi. I don't begin there. All right. So the first thing is to kind of announce this disagree with it. The second thing, and this is not at any order of importance, is that I'm really skeptical of state idolatry. What does it mean to love something so abstract and so morally dubious, which is the same thing? second sentence, right? And so, so oftentimes what happens is that, you know, we make these

distinctions, these scholarly distinctions between good nationalisms and bad nationalisms. The good nationalism is the patriotism of the United States. The bad nationalism is what led to the implosion of Europe, right? It came, it resulted in Nazism and the like. And so that distinction lets off the hook some of the ugliness of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, U.S. patriotism, as it were. So I'm trying to resist that the idolatry of the state. And then the third thing is, how could you not believe that I, why would you believe that I would love the country? And this is much more interior. And I talk about the story, and I wrote about this in democracy and black. My dad is the second African-American hired at the post office in Pascagoula. He moves us,

in Mosspun, he moves us to one side of town to the other. I'm playing with my Tonka truck. And I imagine the kid as either blonde-haired, blue-eyed or red-haired and green-eyed, and his dad comes out and says, stop playing with that N-word. And I grabbed my truck and I go inside. So America told me what it thought of me, outside. And then my parents had to go to work to keep me from believing it. So why would you expect me to love? What does that say about you?

And so that sentence is really aimed at trying to recalibrate how we think about love and country, not love of country, but love and country. And the, I guess there, you know, in terms of that nationalism, it's a slippery slope. And the, and I get too often, like the, I guess the idea of that abstraction can be appropriated in some very, very bad ways. And in ways that just are, you know, motocross. on the White House lawn and basically the Roman Colosseum on the White House lawn is can can be appropriated in the in service of the notion of patriotism.

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I wish somebody would have been playing, would have played on very loud speakers blaring the music during the UFC fight on the White House lawn, you know, men in tights. Because this is manly men kind of thing happening here. So absolutely. I think there's a certain, how can I put this, Sam? And I've said it before. A certain kind of American patriotism sounds like a rebel yell to me.

To my ear, it invokes who meant, why are you wrapping yourself in the flag in this way? What are you doing? What are you? Because oftentimes it's aimed at demon. marking who's, you know, us and then. Right. Inside, outside. And so, you know, I'm much more interested in love close to the ground. These people can love the flag and despise everyday ordinary Americans. And so I'm not interested in the idolatry of nationalisms. I'm more interested in loving people on the ground because I think that's the heart of the nation. It just reminds me as

we're speaking like um having uh living in new york city uh prior to nine 11 and after nine eleven i mean the virulent disdain of new york city from various parts of the country and and frankly you know like an ilk of people uh who then just simply used new york in in service to their patriotism i think it was like that was it was it rocker john rocker coming up for uh from the uh from the braves i think and and and uh heading up the to play the mats and was like i would never go into one of those uh subways with uh and it just listed off of you know black people uh immigrants gay people um and uh it is fascinating how someone can love that the flag are these symbols and uh but have

for a significant portion of the people who are ostensibly represented by it. But let's talk about the notion of anniversaries. You use anniversaries as a way of checking in, I guess, on some level, on the American project. What is it about anniversaries that it provides a good opportunity for assessment? Yeah. I mean, I think these are occasions, particularly the milestone anniversaries, the centennial, the sesquicentennial, the bicentennial, and the 250th. They provide these telescoped moments where the country has to tell a story about itself. It has to render, right, the particulars of its founding. And in each of these moments, because, you know, I was going to, you know, I'm thinking about how I'm trying to figure out because I'm pissed. Because we have to deal with this now, 250 years. They're gutting the Voting Rights Act. 250 years later, they're redrawing districts.

People have to raise their babies in this shit, Sam. Right? The very thing that my mother had, my father had to do for me to keep me from believing what the world said about me, people are having to do that with their children right now in the 250th year of the country. So instead of writing a 250-year history, I'm not Jill Lepoor. I'm not going to write, we the people. I thought, let's look at these anniversaries, because these are telescoped moments where the country has to tell a story about itself. And lo and behold, in each of these moments, the contradiction, the divided soul of the nation, is in full view.

So the 100th year anniversary of the country, the centennial, is 1876. Reconstruction is being murdered. Cofax, Louisiana, Vicksburg, Mississippi, Hamburg, South Carolina. There are literal coups going on across the South, right? 2019, 26, that's the decade of the clan. 1976, I mean, this is Watergate, this is Vietnam, this is Black Power, you know, deep-seated skepticism, anti-bussing, right? All of this is, you know, corporate takeover.

All of this stuff has happened. So the anniversary has become these really kind of concentrated, moments where the contradiction, the double consciousness of the nation is in full view. That's why I decided to focus on each of them. Let's start with 1876. Yeah. The, and like you say, this is literally scholars will debate over the specific year that reconstruction essentially is dead, but we have seen in the wake of.

at the beginning of reconstruction, 10, 11 years earlier at the end of the Civil War, we see an ascendance of, well, in addition, of course, to the freeing of the slaves, we see an ascendance of black political power, particularly in the places that you mentioned. I mean, not coincidentally, places like South Carolina, where you have a full-on political black political class. you have you know starting the the semblance of of a of a black middle class perhaps um and it's literally uh so little of our education deals with the the literal programs that took place the murders of these black politicians the driving them out of town we're waiting for the feds to come

and they never show um what was what was the myth i mean that's the reality of what's going on the like a brief shining moment of a missed opportunity for the country to reset on some level and in it in what many consider it second founding the 13th 14th 15th 14th in particular amendments are much of what happens in this country now or a function of that but what was the story that americans are trying to tell themselves and by that i mean uh you know largely white Americans trying to tell themselves about the country at that time? Well, I mean, I think this is a moment where the elements of reunion are taking place, right? 600,000 plus left dead on land and sea. How might we think of the country as a single entity in light of this regional

tractricide. You know, Thomas Carlyle writes about the carnage among these white men over these barbarians, as it were. So how can loyalty overcome these sectional divides? So there's this voice, so, you know, Grant speaks at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876. He doesn't mention a word, doesn't talk about the Civil War. Custard. gets defeated. No talk about that at all, right? The violence that's happening across the South, no mention at all. He's gotten a lot of blowback for sending federal troops, union soldiers into Louisiana after the Kofax Republic. So instead, what we get is this story, Sam, of American innovation, of our technological prowess that we finally fulfilled. Emerson's demand that we no longer be apprenticed to Europe.

It's the Gilded Age. It's the beginning of the guilt. So it's talking about American prosperity and our ingenuity and the like. And so this is a really fascinating convergence historically. The Gilded Age, American Imperial ambition, and the consolidation of Jim Crow. It's all beginning to happen in this period. And we have to see the echo, right? We have to see the echo in our own current time. So we're telling a story about the country

that in effect disappears the reason for the Civil War altogether. Black folk have to be pushed to the side. Frederick Douglass was invited to be on the dais with President Graham. He had his ticket to enter because the exposition was wildly successful in 1876. And as he was trying to enter

of Philadelphia police officers said, there's no way an N-word is supposed to be on this day. And if it wasn't for a senator who saw the big hairy, you know, the white-haired mane of Douglas, he would have never gotten in. So they allow him to come in. He sits on the dais, but he cannot speak. The most famous order in the United States is forced to be silent during this ritual of what, as I call it, this massive ritual of disremembering at this moment. And this is 25 years after his July 5th speech, 24, 25 years. And still, it's almost as if he sat up there just to sort of confirm what he had said decades earlier. In the year before, in 1875, he speaks on July 5th, 1875.

he describes the country as full of apostles of forgetfulness. He calls them the apostles of forgetfulness. And he has this wonderful line, and I'm paraphrasing here, he says, by a stroke of luck, we gained our freedom through a falling out between white men. Now we must brace ourselves for what will follow from their reunion, from their reconciliation. So here's a man who was born in slavery.

escaped. The fugitive slave clause of night, the fugitive slave law in 1850, forced him to be a fugitive. He had to leave. He came back. Live long enough to see the emancipation proclamation signed. The Civil War amendments, 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. And he lived long enough to see the first Jim Crow laws sign. He lived in the context of what I'm calling following Gwendolyn Brooks the whip of the world. And he was absolutely. right to hoist a warning of that reconciliation the next 50 years are essentially white America clawing back any gains that were made by black folk in the wake of the civil war the all of the political stuff and even the this is when we have the

re-emergence of the clan and what's fascinating about coming in 15 years later in 1926 is we have just gone through a period of 10 or 15 years of building all the statues to Confederate soldiers like all the statues that we have taken down or took down in the the past five or ten years glorifying the Confederacy were in fact not built until 40 till 50 50 some odd years after the Civil War when this sort of backlash from emancipation takes us even first to a like a codified KKK and they make an appearance in 1926.

Yeah, you know, Sam, I think it's really important, man, for us to, you know, there's a, there's a historiographical dispute in the book. C. Van Woodward and the strange career of Jim Crow makes, makes a really important point to say that Jim Crow doesn't just simply emerge full, you know, and fully grown, fully mature right after the collapse of reconstruction. There's a kind of period of ambivalence. What I argue, instead of that point, I think he's right, Jim Crow doesn't come out of the death of reconstruction as if Athena came out of Zeus's head. That's not the point. But there's something that makes reunion possible, and that is the voicing of the white American.

it allows for a kind of camaraderie that can that can subvert sectional differences. Yes, you're from the south, I'm from the north, but we're white. You have to redraw the lines of where the other is. Exactly. Now, what happens as that's being consolidated, this is something important. As we get to the 20th century, the end of the 19th century, Robert Smalls, who was a Civil War hero from South Carolina, documents that over 53,000 black people are murdered between the end of reconstruction and the turn of the century. And we're not just talking about random violence.

We're talking about they're attacking black political leaders. They're attacking black poll workers. They're attacking anyone who's interested in exercising the responsibility of citizenship. 53,000 people, he documents, have been, are murder. Now, the Klan comes into existence. it's reborn in 1915. Ironically, the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and all of this stuff is happening at the same time, disappearing again, the presence of Black Union soldiers, nowhere to be found.

Black folk, not the reason whatsoever. But what's interesting about the Klan is that the Klan is also responding to these folk coming from S-whole countries out of Europe, Italian, swarthy, white folk. They're not white yet. Irish, Catholics, Jews, right? The clan in its second iteration is as anti-clerical, and it's so vicious in its hatred of Catholicism. Right. So what you get is this pressure on the very meaning of who is white by virtue of this massive influx of Europeans into the country. And so what you see in the 1920s is this, you know, the Immigration Nationality Act of 1924, which these people are trying to come back to return to, which was basically written by the Klan. 1926 is so important. I just want to say this really quickly. At the Philadelphia Exposition in South Philly, and it was a disaster, it was corrupt in so many different ways,

the Klan was initially approved, Sam, to hold his annual convention on the grounds of the exposition, they were going to celebrate the flag and burn across at the same time to give us a sense of what was happening in that moment. And what we see is that eventually the notion of the white American expands to include this new category of white ethnics. And that's going to be really important for how we understand 1976 in the bicentennial. Is that was that? I mean, there's two things that people should be aware of. One, that by 1920, I think there were something like six million card carrying members of the clan. You're talking about six percent of the population who were like proud of their clanness. You know, the hood came in for a reason at different times because you were ostensibly supposed to be like, we've got to be quiet about this. But they're card carrying members. Do you think, you're think the inclusion like what was behind that sort of um because at that time they're talking like we we got to return to our Nordic roots yeah like super white uh northern northern white Europeans

what was it that broaden that inclusion was it uh just time and just people calm down Was it the need for people to fight in the war for that matter? Or was it also just sort of some calculation that we're going to need to have more of these folks over here if we want to maintain the other other from black people? I mean, because there was a time in it towards the end of reconstruction where South and North Carolina white politicians were trying to get, poor white Appalachians to sort of become more racist to get disloge its black political power. And they couldn't quite do it.

So that's why they ended up with the violence. Was there a concern? Like, we're going to need more, we're going to need some more troops, essentially, on our side. Absolutely. There's this worry. You know, you read Stoddard's book. There's this worry among eugenesis and the like that that, that, that, that, that, that, the white race is going to disappear because of the black and brown world. There is this,

it's in this period, the 19-teens, right, and the 1920s that we see not only eugenesis from the early period, but we see that the roots of great replacement theory driving a lot of things. And what's interesting is that from Woodrow Wilson to Teddy Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson to Calvin Coolidge, all of them are speaking to this nativism, trying desperately to hold off this, what they see as the discriminatory practices vis-a-vis, right, a certain portion of Europe, the Italian and the Irish, and they're calling for a kind of egalitarianism, a kind of openness, and they're referencing it during these celebrations, but it has nothing to do with black people. It has everything to do with these European immigrants that they're trying to

in so many ways incorporate into an understanding of the white. Now, it's important, too, for us to understand this, too, because remember, white Anglo-Saxonism is an ideology that's driving American imperial ambition. It's connecting America to England and other European countries, right? that there's, there's, and that Anglo-Saxonism becomes, you know, how can I put this in, baseball isn't the only American export, right? So at the very moment in which we're consolidating Jim Crow in the South, we're literally incorporating millions of brown people under U.S. rule in the Philippines, in Cuba, in Haiti, and the like. And so we see the relationship here, but this is really important because by the

1930s, remember the Catholics in the 1920s are danger because their loyalties are to the papacy. By the 1930s, you get Father Koffler. He's creating another set of others. Yes. And this is happening, 150. This is happening in the decade that we describe as the roaring 20s, as the age of jazz, as the decade of the Charleston, right? When, in fact, what we're seeing is extraordinary racial violence.

in so many ways a conception of the state that is rooted in blood and soil. That's why Hitler looks to us for an example. We don't look to him. He looks to us for an example of the Heronvoke state, right? Not, not us looking the other way. Madison Square Garden full of Nazis supporting Hitler before Hitler becomes Hitler. Just as we talk about this, the echoes of the past couple of years are just like, you know, trying to structure an interview without sort of like acknowledging, like, holy crap, we are really, we are really have returned in a myriad of ways to that period. But before we get to, hold up, but I got to tell you this one, no saying, in the North American Review, the Grand Wizard of the KKK, the North American Review now, the Grand Wizard of the KKK,

Hiram Wesley Evans was invited to write a piece. And they invited scholars from around the country, synagogues, universities, Princeton, and W.B. Du Bois to respond to him. And in his article, not Du Bois's, but Evans' article, he talks about America First. He talks about how education is warping the minds of their children. He translates the KKK's ideology into a broad mainstream idiom, and Du Bois responds to his piece with an article entitled The Shape of Fear. And at the end of it, he talks about we are awash in lies, and democracy dies as lies smothers, right, our capacity to engage in X, Y, and Z.

So that's just another example of the damn echoes to our current moment. I want to hop to 76, but as a interlude as you have included in your book. That concept of lies earlier in this week on the show, we had a guy on who trains activists and goes in and helps activist organizations deal with their internal issues and become more strategic and whatnot. And he was talking about your truthfulness being the fundamental thing that, that in all of these cases, people have to practice. Truthfulness about themselves as individuals as to what their agenda is,

truthfulness about their abilities as an organization and what they can do, truthful to those causes that they need to say, like, we can't help you because to be effective we need to do this and your book reminded me that dynamic of the failure to be truthful with ourselves is the fundamental problem that we have in escaping as we go through these 50-year segments of the country there's not enough that's different frankly and and and and and that notion of that you talk about in your book about, about truth, being like our inability to sort of look in the mirror on our birthday. And it's like, I got no crow's feet.

I got no gray hair. I'm looking great. Like, everything's fine. That seems to be like, I know, that just, it struck me because we had been on that this week. And that is, in all of these anniversaries, what is. quintessential is that we're hiding from the truth and using these other things as a distraction, almost of ourselves. Yeah, I know we've got to get to 1976, but this is such an important point.

Because our evasion of the mirror, our evasion of telling the truth, is rooted in our refusal to grow up. The country is stuck in adolescence. It refuses to be responsible. It refuses to hold itself to account. And, you know, how can I put this? You know, that adult that refuses to grow up, you know, the one who thinks that, you know, it's a kid. Yep. They're always on the borderline of being monstrous.

You know, so, you know, you can bomb the, you know, Iran and close the straight of her moves and then tell the world to fix it. Right. You end up electing a cowboy as your president who fundamentally changes everything. And then you elect a reality television show. B list actor, C list act. And so I think the refusal to tell ourselves the truth is rooted in our in our insistence that we're innocent and it makes the country monstrous at times.

Let's go to 76, but I want to sort of like put a, you know, come back to that notion because just to remind myself, the what you know when we say we're a country that refuses to grow up we're talking about an abstraction that's not growing up and so i want to when we get to 2025 we can talk about 2026 we can talk about sort of that fundamental difference but let's talk about 1976 uh because it was it was fun for me to to read your memories of that because i was nine uh just uh we're about the same age and I remember the the bicentennial train came through and you know it it it obviously I was a more naive as a nine-year-old but there was a lot of like there was a lot of marketing of of that in a way

that I don't even see today you know maybe that was because it was 200 years as opposed to 250 but a lot of people aren't going to be around for 300 so you would imagine but there doesn't seem to be the same. It's almost as if it's the opposite. Instead of people sort of like commercializing the anniversary, it's almost just like the anniversary is an excuse to provide commerce. Yeah. So remember the Bicentennial bears a particular kind of burden because all hell is broken

loose in the 1960s and early 70s. So much so in 1970, the Panther Party, along with other movement organizers, convened a constitutional convention to write another constitution at Temple University. Nothing came of it, but it gives you a sense of the depth of skepticism. You got Watergate, you got Saigon, Vietnam, you have black power, you have black women's movement, I mean the women's movement, liberation movement, the LGBTQ, gay liberation movement. The country is coming apart at the seams. And so the bicentennial bears the burden of positing a kind of consensus.

And this is the first major milestone anniversary with television. So you don't have to gather in Philadelphia. You don't have to gather in Philadelphia. And so, you know, I remember as a kid trying to figure out what the hell the Mormon tabernacle choir was singing. You know, and Bob Hope Special and all of that stuff. I got a picture of me in red, white, and blue pants and stuff. But, you know, it's a moment that is really overrun by corporate interest because it's very much decentralized.

Even though there are these moments like the train, the freedom train, the ships that float coming to New York and the like, but it's really happening at the local level. And so, but the idea, which is really important, Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian told me this. He said, in so many ways, the bicentennial was really focused on white ethnics. It was the kind of embrace of this vast Ellis Island story to kind of bring about unity. Because in the book, I'm trying to argue, wherever you see this insists on consistency,

it's in response, on consensus. It's in response to the experience of deep division. So the more forceful the consensus now, the more likely divisions are threatening to overwhelm the country. So the grandchildren, the children and grandchildren of the people who were considered infestations in the 1920s are now claiming the revolution in 1976 as their own. They are the ones who are the true revolutionaries or inheritors of the revolutionary legacy. And you see this most clearly in the debates around anti-bussing in Boston. And so we get a counter narrative, not just simply black people speaking back, you get the PBC, you get the People's Bicentennial campaign.

And they are responding to the corporate takeover of America, how corporations have overwhelmed the good, how they're responding to a kind of conservative rendering of the revolutionary era. They're claiming Tom Payne as their resource. And you see, these are some of the folks who come out of SDS and the like trying to give voice to, and 30,000 plus people. show up and conquer as they offer an alternative vision to the bicentennial celebration. But the contradiction, the divided soul of the nation is still in full view. As we get with that iconic Stanley Foreman photographs, the soil and old glory, right, as this young teenager with the American flag attacks Ted Landsmark, right, in Boston. So here we are again in the midst of the contradiction as corporate money overwhelms

and America's racism is in full view. And that takes us to 2026, where the irony is, is it feels like there's no attempt at the consensus thing. Like, it's almost like the, all of the institutionalists who were desperately trying to hold it together with the consensus. And in these past years, And it's easiest to defer to consensus by make sure we have an other. Otherwise, we wouldn't know who us is.

In this instance, there's no attempt whatsoever to do that. It's almost as we've just seized all the means of expression. And so, therefore, we don't need to pretend that there's consensus because we're just going to pretend that we just rule it. I think that's absolutely right. You know, MAGA has no interest whatsoever and make, you know, the more perfect union talk. That more perfect union talk for them, right, is an affront. It's scandalous.

You know, it's like J.D. Vance's response to Mamd. Vannes, then mayor candidate, Momdani's claim that he loved America, but America has a long way to go. And in that July 5th address at the Claremont Institute, Vance says, who the hell does he think he is? He should show gratitude. We made his life possible. because for Vance and others,

America's perfection was secured in its founding. America's perfection was secured in its founding. This is Calvin Coolidge in 1926. He says, because Coolidge, in response to the Russian Revolution, is telling people, no, our revolution wasn't radical. Our revolution was just an expression of enduring metaphysical principles that had nothing to do with the American project necessarily. They are universal in their meaning and import.

All we need to do is to remember and restore. He renders the revolution in conservative terms. Maga gives that an evangelical twist. Right. The Claremont Institute, right, the nationalist conservatives, these folk who are post-liberal, they don't care about democracy as such. Many of them are Cesare. Right.

Conservative Catholics, there's this kind of, I would urge everyone to read Laura Fields' this extraordinary book, The Furious Minds, that give us a sense of the intellectual scaffolding of Maga. right? You see all of these Straussian sand. Yep. Doing all of this work. It's mind-blowing, actually. And so what you see with MAGA is no interest in consensus because they've made the choice. America, for them, America is a white republic.

And white people possess freedom. So it's not a beacon of freedom or a white republic. No, it's a white republic where white people, as they understand. or the possessors of freedom itself. And that's what we're facing in this current moment, which is consistent with the white nationalist project, in my view. And you write about the idea of white people sort of gifting freedom at various times. Obviously, in the wake of the civil war,

but consistently throughout our history, the idea that freedom is a commodity that white people control. And we see it now with attacks on people who write about Palestine. These people are not, they don't deserve what theoretically has been our universal rights that were obligated to provide people by the Constitution. The idea of denaturalization, the idea of Hegsith going in, pulling No promotions for black people. No promotions for women.

All this theoretically anti-D-E-I stuff is really just a purification. We just got to make things more white. Absolutely. That's why we're in, we can say we're in the midst of two things. You know, redemption and lost cause are not the same thing. Redemption is the violent overthrow of reconstruction. It involved the disenfranchisement of black folk, political coups. coercive violence and the like, the Mississippi plan became the blueprint.

Oh, no. I'm here. Oh, okay. I'm just wondering what happened. The Mississippi plan became the blueprint. The blueprint for, I don't know what happened, just happened. I'm sorry. No worries.

I mean, we were talking about essentially the difference between redemption and the loss And the loss cause was good. So the Mississippi plan became the blueprint for redemption. But the lost cause was a different kind of violence. It was epistemic violence. It was a violence directed at what we know, how we come to know, what we see. This is the Dunning School out of Columbia University, writing the stories of reconstruction. Why am I bringing it up?

Because we see aspects of redemption now with the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the redrawing of districts and the like. So there's a second redemption happening. But there's also a second lost cause. There's an all out of salt, right, on how we know, what we see, right? What we, how we tell our story. So the assault on DEI, the assault on affirmative action, the assault on federal contracts, all the things that we're seeing as they rip out the infrastructure of the civil rights movement, let's call that the second redemption. But the way in which, you know, you're going to restore truth and sanity to American history, the way in which you're taking off, you know, removing signs, attacking the Smithsonian, that's the second lost cause. And so we're in this moment right now, as MAGA tries to assert

his control of our very conception, our very idea of the country itself. One is the intellectual sort of underpinnings of these actions that actually have material impact. Exactly. So what do we do? I mean, I know you didn't. I mean, we, like, the, this is, how does this cycle get broken? I mean, I, you know, I've heard you speak about, about the book and in the context of the book, the idea of what individuals have to do in terms of confronting things. And you and I have had many conversations with many of your books over the years.

And, you know, they still live every day with the idea of the, of the practice of, of white supremacy as an individual, a concept which I have learned from you. But like, what can we do as a collective? To the extent that there are, on some level, they know they can't pull the reunion sort of like trick on some level, which is different than it's been in the past. We don't, like they're not spending time

with the pretend. It is just full on our force. This is what we're going to dictate. Does the, in some ways it's more truthful than we have seen at other anniversaries. Is the response? Is there an opportunity for a more collective response because that truth has already laid bare to us? I hope so.

I pray. You know, one of the things I do in the book, Sam, is I resist the American, ritual of putting forward policy suggestions. Right. You didn't have the, and how to fix it part of the book. Yes. And because that's part of our ritual to pat ourselves on the back to lead us to believe that we're actually trying to be better. In so many ways, I end with a kind of moral claim. We can't be a beacon of freedom and we can debate what that means. We can't be a beacon of

freedom and a white republic at the same time. You just. You just can't do it without contradiction, without perpetuating the madness that has engulfed the country since its founding. You just can't be both. America has made its choice. You're right. They're not pretended. To their mind, this is a white republic. And they're doing everything in their power to make it so.

Our task is to make a choice. We can't finesse the difference. We don't need charity. We don't need to think of racial justice as a philanthropic. enthropic enterprise or charitable gesture. We don't need to think of the diversity of the country as an example of the virtue of white folk. We need to choose to be a beacon of freedom, and we need to understand what that means. That's going to involve addressing the horde, the evil of one man being a trillionaire. God forbid. Can you imagine that one person is a trillionaire? That's evil.

We're going to have to deal with the toxic brew of greed, selfishness, and hatred that has this country by the throat. But it begins fundamentally with a choice. Either we're going to be a beacon of freedom or we're going to be a white republic. You can't be both. It's just as simple as that. And, you know, I sometimes I fetishize complexity, Sam, sometimes. But sometimes the issue is simple. You don't bomb babies.

You don't kill innocence. One life is not valued more than another. All human life is precious. Those are some basic commitments that ought to guide how we live in the world. And I think what we have to do in order to release ourselves into a different future, if we get to the other side of this madness, if we survive it, is that we just finally have to make a choice and leave this idea that the country is white, right, to history's dustbin, if that makes sense.

It does. Professor Eddie Glowd, the book is America, USA, How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. We will link to that at majority.fm and in the podcast and YouTube descriptions. Cannot thank you enough. I really, anytime I get a chance to speak to you, I feel really blessed. I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for all that you do, Sam.

Keep fighting, man. Talk to you soon. Okay. to where I want, but I know I'm going to get there when I just got caught. But see the truth in a life.