Editorial: America at 250 - Eddie Glaude’s Call to Maturity

Editorial: America at 250 - Eddie Glaude’s Call to Maturity

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, Princeton historian Eddie Glaude Jr. offers a sobering reflection: America must finally grow up.

His new book, America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, is not a celebration but a reckoning. Glaude begins with a startling confession, “I do not love America, and never have, especially now”, a declaration born of rage, melancholy, and disillusionment.

He points to the erosion of voting rights and redistricting efforts that threaten Black representation as evidence of a nation still unwilling to confront its contradictions.

For Glaude, anniversaries are not just milestones but mirrors. Each one forces the country to tell a story about itself, often sanitized and mythologized. He critiques the tendency to exalt the founders and the “sacredness” of the American experiment while ignoring the ghosts of slavery and racial injustice that haunt the nation’s halls of power.

His experience touring Philadelphia’s Congress Hall in 2024 illustrates this disconnect: instead of acknowledging slavery as the defining conflict, guides spoke of trivial differences in handshakes.

To Glaude, this was a chilling example of America’s storybook version of history, one that erases the pain at its core.

Patriotism, in his view, is often weaponized. He hears in its loudest expressions not unity but exclusion, a “rebel yell” from those who wrap themselves in the flag while denying the lived experiences of marginalized communities. 

This, he argues, is part of the adolescent fantasy America clings to: imagining itself both as a beacon of freedom and as a white republic. 

The tension between these identities produces what he calls “madness at the heart of the country.”

As the nation prepares for its semiquincentennial, Glaude insists that America can no longer hide behind youthful mythologies. To grow up means to face the failures of its founding principles honestly, to acknowledge the shadows of race that have shaped every anniversary, and to resist the temptation of nostalgia.

His blunt advice is not meant to extinguish hope but to demand maturity, a call for America to finally reconcile its ideals with its realities.

In this moment of reflection, Glaude’s words challenge the country to decide whether its 250th birthday will be another page in a storybook or the beginning of a more honest narrative.

The choice, he suggests, will determine whether America remains trapped in adolescence or steps into adulthood.