Mourning that which never was

Eddie Glaude, Jr., holds a mirror up to America. Look, he tells us, look! How often I have heard him on television, invited to the camera by Nicolle Wallace to lament another American tragedy and sin: racist murders, the shooting deaths of mere babies, the abuse of immigrant children, the bigotry of the president. Do not say that this is not us, he demands. This is us. This is America. The italics are his. Unless and until we, we white Americans, acknowledge and absorb that truth, he tells us, we cannot and never will move past it. Glaude’s new book, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, is that mirror, reflecting the worst of our reality in sharp detail. He uses the moment of the nation’s already spoiled 250th anniversary to look back on earlier birthdays, on earlier assertions of an American ideal that were always in fact claims to a white America. Those claims have met their lowest ebb in Donald Trump and his klan’s brazen denials of the nation’s racism and…