As the U.S. turns 250, this historian has blunt advice: 'America has to grow up'

Eddie Glaude Jr. speaks in Philadelphia on March 1, 2023. Lisa Lake/Getty Images hide caption

As the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, historian and Princeton professor Eddie Glaude Jr. says he's feeling rageful. He opens his new book, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries, bluntly, with the declaration: "I do not love America, and never have, especially now."

Glaude points to the Supreme Court's dismantling of the Voting Rights Act , and to redistricting efforts that threaten to limit Black representation in Congress.

"What I was trying to do with this book was kind of write some security underneath my feet. So that I could actually get this rage under control, to get my sadness, my melancholy under control," Glaude says.

America, U.S.A. looks at the country through the lens of its previous anniversaries and centennials. Today, as in the past, Glaude says, "the divided soul of the nation is in full view." As the 250th anniversary approaches, he says it's past time for the country to acknowledge the ways it has failed to deliver on its founding principles:

"America has to grow up. It can no longer hide in its adolescence," he says. "America imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And to hold those two things together ... deposits the kind of madness at the heart of the country."

On starting his book with the sentence: "I do not love America"

I had written some version of the introduction and it didn't land. I thought I was holding something back. … And so I returned to that first paragraph, and suddenly this sentence just came on the page. And I got up and I started walking around my study and I was afraid of what this would mean if I left it there. And then something inside of my head just simply said, "But this is what you have to say. You have to begin here and then you can explain." So I left it.