The more I studied the situation, the more I was convinced that the Southerner had never gotten over his resentment that the Negro was no longer his plaything, his servant, and his source of income.
Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice
I was reading historian Eddie Glaude last week in preparation to write this review/essay. I'm familiar with his work and with his views on the America we live in, where haters of democracy, no longer in shadows, make sure their interests are known and demanding that the country, come hell or high water, bend to those interests.
"I do not love America, and never have, especially now." That is the first sentence of America, U. S. A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. I had to stop and read this sentence again and again. In an interview, Glaude was asked to comment on this opening sentence: I do not love America. He heard the sentence too. It was there. He rose from his desk and had to walk around the room.
I do not love America"
I put the book down to repeat the sentence: I do not love America. The re is something here more truth than I'm willing to admit out loud. Glaude heard that truth. I picked the book up again, and I could hear my long deceased father, a man who worked in the cotton fields of Arkansas before fleeing that state in the 1940s"
White people! White people!
A few weeks before 2026 Semiquincentennial, I wondered why it took me so long to reach a point where I would be cautious about uttering such a truth when I had been referred to as "anti-American" by students refusing to hear truth about America. The social media is filled with cruel and racists statements about Black Americans. I'm forced to hear that voice again and again, sounding more authoritarian, and I, more and more, a submissive child. A silent child.
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