America's 250th birthday must reckon with racism, historian says

0:00Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:This message comes from Odoo. How many streaming subscriptions do you have? Is it the same for your business? Avoid it by having all of your business on one platform. Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

0:17Eddie Glaude:WBUR Podcasts. Boston. It's not creed that secured our salvation. It's blood and soil. So they double down on the idea that America is a white republic.

0:33Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:Historian Eddie Glaude says celebrating 250 years since the founding of the country also means reckoning with the racism that shadows the nation's anniversaries.

0:52Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:It's Friday, June 19th, and this is Here and Now, Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

1:01Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:A little later, we'll speak with a surgeon who remembers chaos at the hospital after the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando 10 years ago. We had one scenario where law enforcement was concerned that it was a second shooter and that they may have gotten into the hospital as a patient. So we were on lockdown. The legacy of that mass shooting, the second deadliest the country has ever seen, from a doctor who treated the victims, coming up in about 15 minutes.

1:38Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:But first, on this Juneteenth holiday, we're talking to historian Eddie Glaude of Princeton. His new book focuses on what he calls mythologies that America tells itself on big anniversaries, including this one, the 250th anniversary of America. The country has a long history of ignoring or downplaying its racist past, Glaude says. And he sees it continuing today. The White House is requiring Washington's Smithsonian museums to remove, quote, divisive narratives. and the president says the upcoming July 4th celebration on the National Mall will double as a Trump rally. Scott Tong sat down with Eddie Glaude at WBUR's studios in Boston recently to talk about Glaude's new book, which is called America USA, How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries.

2:28Eddie Glaude:Oh, it's such a pleasure to see you and talk with you.

2:31Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:I want to talk to you, but first I want to play a little music. Sure.

2:52Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:Your book published with this original music composition from classical composer Joel Thompson. In this first section we're listening to, you say it reflects the core idea of the book. So as we listen, let me ask you about the main contention you make, that America has a double consciousness. What do you mean?

3:09Eddie Glaude:Yeah, so, you know, in 1903, Du Bois wrote The Souls of Black Folk. And he said that black people see themselves through the eyes of those who despise them. And he called that double consciousness. But I think the double consciousness that he's describing is actually a consequence of the divided soul of the nation. America imagines itself at once as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. And you can't hold those two views together without contradiction, without depositing a kind of madness at the heart of the nation. And so what I'm trying to do is to explore this tension, this vexed contradiction that bubbles up with the milestone anniversaries when we have to tell ourselves a story about ourselves.

3:48Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:Well, there's the story kind of America publicly tells itself on July 4th. Yeah. And then you write about the long history of what often happens on July 5th, a day historically where African-Americans have often, in your words, spoken back. Yeah. And I want to play a very famous speech from orator, freed slave Frederick Douglass, July 5th, 1852. This is actor Phil Darius Wallace performing it in 2017. And in that speech, Douglass writes, What to the American slave is your 4th of July? I answer. It is a day that reveals to him more than any other day of the year the gross conduct and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

4:33Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:To him, your celebration is a sham. 1852. What is the long importance of July 5th?

4:42Eddie Glaude:July 5th was celebrated among black Americans, like Juneteenth today, because it marked the end of slavery in the state of New York. It was New York Abolition Day.

4:51Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:1827. Exactly. Exactly.

4:54Eddie Glaude:So the point here is that there's been always this alternative commemorative calendar, black America. As America is celebrating its freedom, purportedly John Adams said to King George, we will not be your Negroes. At the very moment in which he's giving voice to a notion of freedom is based on an intimate understanding of unfreedom. So initially black folks celebrated January 1st. Why? Because it's January 1st, 1808. It's the end of the transatlantic slave trade. Then we celebrated August 1st, 1834, West Indian Emancipation Day, July 5th, New York Abolition Day, Juneteenth. Now, in July 5th of 1852, Douglas is speaking in that moment.

5:31Eddie Glaude:The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 has turned the country into slave catchers and fugitives. He's speaking at the heart of the contradictions, the horror that will lead us to the Civil War that would leave 600 ,000 men dead on land and sea. So in that moment, he's saying, look, there's a serpent coiled in the belly and the bosom of the nation that is slavery. You must rid the country of it if we are to survive.

5:59Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:Well, let's move on to some of the key years you chronicle in your new book, America, USA, these big American birthdays, as it were. So 1876, the centennial. Reconstruction has been declared for more than a decade, but the period sees horrific anti-black violence, as you write, in places like Vicksburg, Mississippi, Colfax, Louisiana. So I'm going to cue in part two of the music composition that goes with your book.

6:31Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:So, Ediglade, you say it explodes the motif with sounds of conflict and violence. Yeah. In this period, in and around 1876, you write, the country has grown weary of Reconstruction. Tell me about that.

6:43Eddie Glaude:Yeah, you know, there's this claim of overreach. And so you have this all-out assault on the aims and ends of radical Reconstruction. And what's so tragic about it is that Frederick Douglass in 1875 says, we gained our freedom through a falling out between white men. Now, we must ask the question, I'm paraphrasing him here, what will happen now that they've reconciled? Oh, wow. And we know what happens. So Douglass, who is in so many ways, got an example of freedom snatching, born a slave, escapes, lives long enough to see the Emancipation Proclamation signed. But he also lives long enough to see the first Jim Crow laws.

7:26Eddie Glaude:He calls these people in this moment the apostles of forgetfulness. Sounds familiar, right? The apostles of forgetfulness.

7:52Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile might be right for you with plans starting from$15 a month. Shop plans today at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for a three-month 5GB plan required. New customer offer for first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. All right, we're going to have to jump forward. 1926, the sesquicentennial of the U.S. By now, the 1920s, the Klan has reemerged in 1915. So many anti-immigrant laws have passed, including quotas on Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans and Central Europeans.

8:38Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:the Klan holds this huge march in Washington, D.C. in 1925. Again, it's on one of these key birthdays. What do you make of this period, this marking of the country's birth?

8:50Eddie Glaude:Well, it's really contentious because, you know, immigration has placed all these strains on the way in which the country imagines itself. I mean, you forgot to mention in the 19th century the Chinese Exclusion Act. 1882. Yeah, and so there's this insistence on imagining the country as white. We need to understand this because the ideology of white Anglo-Saxonism is driving America's imperial ambition at the same time. And Jim Crow is being consolidated. The Klan is reborn in this period. The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 was basically written by the Klan. Congressman Johnson from Washington was a member of the Klan.

9:28Eddie Glaude:Senator Reed represented Pennsylvania, which had over 250 ,000 members of the Klan. And so at the 150th anniversary of the nation in Philadelphia, the Klan was approved to hold its annual convention on the grounds of the exposition. They were going to celebrate the flag and burn a cross at the same time. So it gives us a sense of the divided soul.

9:52Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:Well, and this is the division you said comes up over and over. As we move on to 1976, the Bicentennial, it was a complicated, divided country, post-Watergate, post-Vietnam. I kind of want to come up to the present. You know, year 250, there is a, quote, Trump rally upcoming. And in the context of politicized history, of course, the remaking of the architecture of my town, Washington, D.C., removing museum exhibits on slavery, affirmative action. As a scholar of history, how do you situate? How do you contextualize this moment, 250th moment?

10:29Eddie Glaude:We're in a second lost cause. You know, when we see the collapse of Reconstruction, you have two phases. You have redemption and you have lost cause. Redemption, of course, is the violent overthrow of Reconstruction, the disenfranchisement of black folk. Well, the lost cause is the epistemic violence. It's an assault on what we know, on the history books. Well, what are we doing now? We're telling a particular story. We're trying to whitewash the past, right? We don't want to tell a story about our ugliness. Now, what makes this important, Scott, is that in 1926, Calvin Coolidge was making a move around the revolution.

11:04Eddie Glaude:The revolution wasn't radical. It was conservative. All we need is to remember and to restore because in the revolution, in our founding, America's salvation was secured. Now, what MAGA does is give that an evangelical twist. Trump and Vance and other, they don't care about more perfect union talk. In fact, it's an affront to talk about the country moving towards perfection because perfection was already secured. And then he blends that with his own sense of self. America's celebration must be a celebration of Trumpism itself because Trump ushers in the golden age of the country. And then Vance comes along and makes the choice.

11:47Eddie Glaude:It's not creed that secured our salvation. It's blood and soil. So they double down on the idea that America is a white republic.

11:57Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:I want to cue the last movement in this composition that comes with your book.

12:20First of all, this is beautiful.

12:22Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:Oh my goodness. Eddie Glaude, you end your book and you describe this part of the composition as a section of hope shadowed by ambivalence.

12:32Eddie Glaude:What does that mean? At the crossroads. It's a blues. It's the slave spiritual. He's quoting in that moment. You could hear America, the beautiful. It's hopeful. but then you hear a blues sonority at the end, which is what was in the beginning.

13:00Eddie Glaude:But I keep going back to what my student told me, what she wrote in her final paper in my Baldwin seminar. She said, perhaps it's not hope that we need to reach for. Perhaps what we need to do in this moment is just simply tell the truth, carried with love, but lit by rage. We have to bear witness in our troubled times, she basically told me, and I listened to her.

13:24Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:The book is America USA, How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries. And the author here with us in studio, Eddie Glaude, Professor of African American Studies at Princeton. Always a pleasure. Eddie, thank you.

13:37Eddie Glaude:Always, Scott. Thank you so much, man. Appreciate you.

13:44Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:As we reflect on the 250th anniversary of the country and its ongoing struggles to make good on its foundational promises of liberty, justice, and equality, we are also remembering a tragedy that took place 10 years ago. Coming up, remembering the Pulse nightclub shooting with someone who helped save lives that day. Stick around.

14:13Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:Ten years ago, on June 12, 2016, a man walked into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and opened fire inside the LGBTQ-friendly club that was filled with people celebrating Latino culture and music. Here's Peter O'Dowd. At the time, it was the deadliest shooting in U.S. history. 49 people died. More than 50 were injured. The victims poured into a level one trauma center that was just blocks away. They arrived at the Orlando Health Hospital in the back of police pickup trucks and inside the cars of civilians. The crisis pushed the medical staff to its limit, performing 28 surgeries in the first 24 hours.

14:56Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:Trauma surgeon Dr. Joseph Ibrahim was there that night, and he joins us now. Now, doctor, welcome. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. I understand you just got out of a surgery, and I imagine it's not easy to reflect on that night even after a decade has passed. No, thanks for having me, Peter. If we could just go back to that night. I mean, this happened in the middle of the night. At what point did you realize that something was seriously wrong? Yes, I was the backup surgeon. I got called in by Dr. Chad Smith around 2 a.m. Just remember, you first, you kind of take it in and like, okay, where do I even start?

15:31Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:And then the training kind of kicks in. And, you know, seeing a very critically injured gentleman, you know, first off the bat, and Dr. Smith informing me that, you know, this person had been triaged to basically non-survivable injury, had non-survivable injuries. And while we train for that and we do drills that look at that, that is something that when it comes to you in real life, it takes you for a second. Because obviously every case that comes in, we do our best to get that patient back to their way of life. Well, if I can understand what he was saying to you, then it sounds like he was saying this person won't survive.

16:09Dr. Joseph Ibrahim:We have to give up and move to the next one. Correct. And that's the different mindset that we, you know, unfortunately you have to take when you have 30, 40 patients coming in at once. Once he told me that, like I said, I took a second, kind of looked at him and I realized he was correct and moved on to the next patient. And then, you know, we had a brief discussion on, you know, should we call in more help? And then we were like, yes, we should call in everybody that's available. Well, as I said, a team of doctors performed 28 surgeries in the first 24 hours of this crisis, which I assume is something you had never seen before in your career and probably since.