The subtext of this book frames a rhetorical question we need an urgent answer to if the American experiment is to continue: Isn't wiping out the indigenous population, 250 years of slavery, a trail of tears, two decades of lynching, a century of Jim Crow, a half century of mass incarceration, the decapitating of the Civil Rights Movement, and turning our inner cities into moonscape-like wastelands, not yet too high a moral price to pay for a ticket into a gated post-modern community with a few white supremacist comforts?
Jimmy Baldwin and Eddie Glaude agree on one thing in particular. To begin again, to do our "first works" over again, to cease living on moral credit, our nation must first confront the lies it has told itself.
It must confront them head on, and then reexamine its own self-understanding about the meaning of this country.
Only then can we collectively go about the work of building a country truly based on the kind of democratic principles we are all willing to go to the mat to defend.
Up until this very day, and at every inflection point in between, American history has remained short on moral courage and accountability. So much so that it seems clear now that the very idea of being American is to be able to continue devising clever means to live forever on moral credit: avoiding and escaping moral responsibility, while at the same time claiming it as the value that must stand above all others.
It is the hypocrisy and contradictions that have sullied the American Project and rendered it untrustworthy.
From afar, it is easy to see that American democracy is mostly a sham, a leaky vessel, taking on water but with its Captain still standing tall at the helm pretending to be ready to set sail across the open ocean at any moment.
Professor Glaude does not pretend to have easy answers to our national dilemma. But he loves the country enough to put the truth on the line, and tells us the truth and nothing but" over and over.
For that, we owe him a debt of gratitude.
The voices of truth were abruptly stilled and the gears jerked into reverse over the last four years. And now that the main threat seems to have been averted, we are back to business as usual, again engaged in shameless moral self-censorship and moral self-silencing.
How else can the political party in power "crab-walk" away from calling out the same gang of killers that ran down Heather Heyer and stained the office of the Speaker of the House with blood and feces? What kind of self-respecting democratic country would wink and nod at holding these perpetrators accountable?
Was the American Project founded on bad faith? Is white identity so tied to America's ugliness that the two cannot be decoupled at any cost? After greed, selfishness and systematic cruelty for profit, can there be anything left but wreckage and decay? Is there room in the American house for both our foundational lies and a healthy self-respecting democracy?
Our history says no! But Professor Glaude says, maybe: If we can grasp a new way of being in the world in the midst of one of our darkest hours, then, just maybe, we can also clean the slate and try to remember how to begin again. Five stars
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