MS NOW guest Eddie Glaude, an author and professor at Princeton, said Tuesday that he felt “great trepidation” about celebrating America’s 250th anniversary because he felt the country is being “destroyed,” and questioned what they were celebrating.
“Well, I’ve been struggling with what are we actually celebrating,” Glaude told the hosts of “Morning Joe,” adding, “I’m thinking about Donald Trump, kind of, in so many ways, blending his own kind of cult of personality with the celebration of the nation, and wondering what exactly are we celebrating? Is it a storybook version of America?”
“This idea that, you know, we are a beacon of freedom and that our perfection was secured in our salvation, or are we looking at the way in which our ideals don’t match up to our practices, our current practices?” he continued. “And so I’m really going into July 4, grappling with whether or not the ugly ghosts of our country have us by the nape of the neck, Mika.”
Co-host Mika Brzezinski asked Glaude if he still had hope in the country.
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“I don’t know, you know, how can I put this, that the country that made my life possible is being destroyed right in front of me,” he said.
Glaude argued that people who imagine the country as a “White Republic” were actively trying to make it so, and that diversity was no longer seen as a strength.
“I believe, in this 250th, we have to make a choice,” he said. “America, in many ways, has to leave behind [this] guaranteed innocence, Willie. And confront who we actually are so that we can release ourselves into being otherwise. Otherwise, we’re not going to make it to the other side of this madness, it seems to me.”
“So I’m barreling towards July 4 with great trepidation, but hoping that the great diversity of this country will make itself known, and we can beat back some of these ugly forces,” he added. “Because remember, JD Vance doesn’t believe that the creed defines who we are. He believes in something more sinister. That there’s something more fundamental about who we are as Americans that we need to reject, I think, outright,” Glaude said.
MS NOW’s Mike Barnicle told Glaude that he still sings the “Star Spangled Banner” at sporting events and still enjoyed seeing the American flag fly on a sunny day, but also says a slave owner wrote the words, “All men are created equal.”
“And I also know that we’re a country that we fail to remember what Lincoln once said. We cannot escape history. And we cannot escape our own history, but we can improve it, I think,” he said. “And we can celebrate it without thinking that we are carrying a millstone around our neck because of the political activities that have taken place in the last, certainly the last six or seven years.”
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Barnicle went on to ask Glaude if he saw optimism “at the end of this July 4 rainbow.”
“No, Mike, I don’t. And it comes about I think that that orientation follows from my own formation. I don’t think I’ve ever teared up around patriotism, I don’t ever think I’ve found joy in singing the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ It has something to do with the tradition out of which I’ve come,” he responded. He added he’s had to live the “contradiction of America itself, even as we have struggled for its promise.”
He said he had a “blue-soaked hope” that the world is ugly and that the U.S. has a burdensome past that has it by the throat, but that he had some faith in human beings.
MS NOW host Ali Velshi is among those who have expressed feeling unease about celebrating the 250th anniversary of America, as well as far-left journalist Joy Reid and MS NOW host Al Sharpton, who expressed uncertainty about the 4th of July, specifically for Black Americans.
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“They’re going to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the country July 4, but that’s not our celebration,” Sharpton said at the National Action Network’s 35th Anniversary National Convention in April.
He continued, “We were slaves then, and they celebrate signing the Declaration of Independence in 1776. We were not even emancipated until 1863. So I don’t know what everybody is getting ready for a celebration [for]. You know that it seems crazy for me to have on the birthday hat at your birthday party. That ain’t my party.”
Reid said during a podcast conversation earlier this month, “I can promise you, Black folks, we will take that day off, we will barbecue because we [are] off, but nobody Black I know is really excited about the 4th of July.”
