America, U.S.A.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. opens with a personal declaration: He does not love America. Love of country, he argues, is shorthand for the relationships and experiences that shape who we are, but in the United States those experiences have always been stained by white supremacist beliefs. Drawing on a childhood memory of a neighbor's father screaming a racial slur, Glaude establishes this wound as a national condition.

Glaude introduces his central thesis by adapting a concept from W. E. B. Du Bois, the Black scholar and activist who described a "double consciousness" in The Souls of Black Folk (1903): the "twoness" felt by Black Americans forced to see themselves through the eyes of a contemptuous white world. Glaude argues this condition belongs to the nation itself. America simultaneously defines itself as committed to liberty and equality and as a white Republic where freedom is the possession of white people, and its refusal to confront this split produces recurring madness. Writing during President Donald Trump's second term, Glaude contends that Trump's administration set out to dismantle the infrastructure of civil rights and restore a vision of America centered on whiteness.

He frames the book around America's major anniversary celebrations, treating them as concentrated expressions of the nation's doubleness. Each arrived at a fraught moment marked by racial backlash, and each insisted on American uniqueness while expressing the belief that the country belongs to white people. Glaude structures the book as historical vignettes stitched together like a quilt, and he identifies a recurring cycle: When Americans confront evidence of racial cruelty, they engage in sentimental gestures of repentance, but when absolution is not forthcoming, resentment boils over into white rage.

The first chapter tells the story of Moses Gordon, an enslaved man in North Carolina freed by his Quaker owner in November 1776. North Carolina law forbade such manumissions, or acts of freeing enslaved people, and Gordon was arrested and sold in 1779. He escaped in 1785 and built a new life in Philadelphia, but he was captured in 1797 under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which empowered slave owners to reclaim people who had escaped bondage. Rather than return to slavery, Gordon drowned himself. Glaude uses this story to argue that freedom in America has always been the white man's possession to give and take away. He connects Gordon's fate to petitions by free Black leaders, including Absalom Jones, the first African American ordained as an Episcopalian priest, and Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, who petitioned Congress to end the slave trade. Congress rejected the petitions, concluding that Black people stood outside the Constitution's protection.

Glaude then turns to Frederick Douglass, the formerly enslaved abolitionist and orator, and his famous July 5, 1852, speech in Rochester, New York. He traces a tradition of alternative Black freedom celebrations that exposed the hypocrisy of Independence Day, turning America's civil religion, its quasi-religious faith in the nation's founding ideals, on its head. Douglass's speech demanded confrontation with the constitutive role white racial superiority played in the nation's identity. Glaude connects Douglass's indictment to the 2022 massacre at the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York, where an 18-year-old white supremacist killed 10 Black people, arguing that the same dynamics persist.

The centennial chapter examines 1876, when white Democrats across the South used systematic violence to overthrow Reconstruction governments. President Ulysses S. Grant refused to send federal troops to protect Black citizens. Intellectuals declared Reconstruction a failure and questioned Black fitness for citizenship. Douglass warned that reunion between North and South would come at Black people's expense, and at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia he was nearly denied entry by police. The centennial established a consolidated idea of "the white American" that bridged regional divisions by requiring Black erasure.

An interlude traces what Glaude calls "the plague years," from Douglass's death in 1895 through the early twentieth century. Jim Crow laws swept the South. Pseudoscientific racism, particularly eugenics, gave existing prejudices the authority of established fact. The Ku Klux Klan was reborn in 1915 under the banner of "100 Percent Americanism." Black Americans founded organizations and fought back; Du Bois co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

The sesquicentennial chapter examines 1926, when the nation's 150th anniversary collided with the Klan's peak influence. An expanding idea of the white American absorbed European immigrants while hardening against Black people. At the exposition's opening, A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a Black labor union, declared Black folk "the most typically American," but his words went unreported. Du Bois, responding to an article by Klan leader Hiram Wesley Evans, warned that the real danger lay in the wide tolerance the Klan's methods evoked among ordinary Americans.

A second interlude traces the postwar period through the civil rights movement. Consensus historians emphasized continuity in the American experience while downplaying conflict. The Civil War centennial commemorations of the early 1960s staged reunion without acknowledging slavery, even as sit-ins and marches convulsed the South. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader, asked President John F. Kennedy to issue a second Emancipation Proclamation outlawing segregation; Kennedy refused.

The bicentennial chapter examines 1976, when the nation's 200th anniversary unfolded amid disillusionment. In The Broken Covenant (1975), sociologist Robert Bellah acknowledged that the moral consensus he had described was now "an empty and broken shell." Anti-busing violence in Boston produced Stanley Forman's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph The Soiling of Old Glory, showing a white teenager attacking a Black man with a staff bearing the American flag. The image crystallized the nation's ongoing refusal to resolve its double consciousness.

An interlude traces how subsequent presidencies drafted the civil rights movement into a storybook version of America. President Ronald Reagan signed the Martin Luther King Day bill in 1983 but used a selective reading of King's legacy to justify attacking affirmative action. President Barack Obama's 2013 speech at the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington echoed this pattern. President Joseph Biden's 2021 remarks at the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre departed by describing the violence in unadorned detail, but policy did not match rhetoric.

The final chapter examines Trump's takeover of the semiquincentennial, the nation's 250th anniversary. Trump created Task Force 250, installed loyalists in the nonprofit America250, and used the celebration as a political platform. Glaude traces the broader campaign to control historical narrative, from legislation banning the 1619 Project, which reframed American history around slavery, to the executive order "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" to a partnership with Hillsdale College to produce a video series on the founding. Vice President J. D. Vance, in a July 5, 2025, speech at the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank, rejected the American idea as a basis for national identity, grounding Americanness in heritage and lineage. Glaude argues that Vance made explicit what has been a feature of the country since the founding: American identity is based, in part, on blood and soil.

Glaude closes by wrestling with what it means to love amid national madness. Rereading the work of essayist James Baldwin during Trump's second term, he argues that the path through madness requires letting go of hatred while continuing to fight injustice. Love and country can come together not through sentimentalized patriotism but through the bonds forged in particular places with particular people. He invokes historian Vincent Harding's question, "Is America Possible?" and closes with a direct address: The country belongs not to those who claim it as a white Republic but to all whose labor and sacrifice have shaped it. The fundamental choice can no longer be deferred.