Bitterness at the Bottom of the Cup
I am still on my book tour for America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries. The conversations have been amazing and the responses from people have left me, at times, stunned and amazed. So many are ready to reimagine the country. They are ready for us to live into a different way of being together. Below I have included an excerpt of what some consider to be the controversial opening of the book. The first sentence works on several levels: 1) it announces a disagreement with James Baldwin. Baldwin writes in Notes of a Native Son: “I love America more than any country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” I start in a different place; 2) it rejects the distinction between “good” nationalism (patriotism) and “bad” nationalism; and, in doing so, sets up a riff on Hannah Arendt’s skepticism about the love of nations and 3) it turns the attention of the reader to the interior experience of the country’s contradictions. Implicitly, I am asking how anyone can expect me to love the country. All of this sets up how I try to reimagine love and country in the book (notice the shift from the preposition “of” to the conjunction “and”).
I do not love America, and never have, especially now. It seems to me misplaced love or dangerous to love something so abstract and so morally dubious. Love is most often felt and experienced close to the ground – in the life lived in a particular place and time, and in memories that take up residence in the heart. I suspect “love of country” is a shorthand for the heartfelt relationships and experiences that make us who we are—things that happen in the place we call home, no matter how complicated that place may be. James Baldwin was right: “Whoever is part of whatever civilization helplessly loves some aspects of it, and some of the people in it.” And I suppose that is why, in part, we are willing to risk our lives in defense of this place, and of what it might become.
But in America, those feelings and experiences have always been stained by the ugliness of what white people believe about color—that somehow or in some inscrutable way, the color of one’s skin determines your value. You end up spending much of your life trying to prove to others and to yourself—not because you are obsessed with white people but because you want to live—that you are not a “nigger.” Some Americans may believe that this view is a relic of a past that we have long left behind. After all, they might say, we elected a Black president and vice president. Look how far we have come. Stop complaining, I hear them say. You teach at Princeton University. You are not a victim. But I speak from the experiences of a life lived in this country. Not in the abstract but close to ground, and I trust what I know, what I have seen, and what now sits in the pit of my stomach.
Each one of us must face the battle with this place to live fully, and to try to beat back the bitterness that threatens to overrun everything and to consume us. It’s enough to drive you to madness. I can still feel the sting of my neighbor’s dad screaming at his son to stop playing with “that nigger,” wondering then what was wrong with him and asking myself what was wrong with me. An adolescent version of a familiar cry arose: Why did God make me a stranger in my own house? Would I resign myself to such a world, or slip into what W.E.B. DuBois described as a “silent hatred of the pale world…and mocking distrust of everything white?” Either way, a wound deposited by a calloused heart made it difficult, if not impossible, to love the place that hurt me. I had to learn, instead, how to survive it.
Bitterness settles in the heart of a child and innocence is lost, because the world announces in stark terms that you, no matter how young you may be, do not belong here. This happens in every corner of the country. The hurt I felt all those years ago wasn’t an isolated incident or something unique to Mississippi or the South. America believed what that man said about me and that word—that belief—did not die with the civil rights legislation of the 1960s or the election of Barack Obama. Its sentiments and sensibilities have not been relegated to the dustbin of history. Too many lives have been lost since then to believe that. Instead, these ideas have lurked beneath the surface of American life like a Leviathan. Today, the monster is in full view, eating the souls of the damned.
I saw it with the election of Donald Trump in 2024 as millions of white Americans, and a smattering of others, declared that the country belongs to them. I can hear it in the summary judgments about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI): that, by definition, diversity (and the word always seems to refer to Black people) involves the compromise of standards; that Black people in leadership positions or students who are admitted to Ivy League schools and elite state colleges, or professors like me really did not earn their place—that any attempt to address racism in this country amounts to reverse discrimination. I see the monster in masked ICE agents snatching people out of their homes, at courthouses, in front of schools as parents wait for their children—people the American government has determined do not belong here. Those who still believe themselves to be the “true” Americans repeat an old, insidious idea of white people that requires a certain view of Black and Brown people. The “true” Americans desperately need, and still want, their “niggers.”
No. I do not love America. I only wished that the country could be better, more decent and just, and in wishing that, I confess that I love deeply those who have borne and must bear the brunt of the country’s madness. Even if most Americans don’t see it, that love includes us all.
~
Bitterness Across the Water: A Response to Eddie Glaude
Eddie Glaude’s essay is devastating not because it tells us something new, but because it articulates something many of us already know and have felt. His words give voice to a contradiction that sits at the heart of Black life in the West: how does one love a nation that has so often struggled to love you back?
As a Briton of African descent, I cannot claim the same history as African Americans. The experience of Black America is singular. Few peoples have travelled such a brutal path from slavery, through Reconstruction, through lynching and Jim Crow, through segregation and mass incarceration, while being asked at every stage to prove their loyalty to a nation that questioned their humanity. The descendants of the enslaved in the United States have endured a unique historical burden. Their freedom was incomplete, their citizenship conditional, and their belonging perpetually contested.
Yet reading Glaude, I recognise the sentiment immediately.
The details differ across the Atlantic, but the feeling is familiar. One grows up hearing the language of equality and fairness while simultaneously learning that acceptance is often provisional. You can succeed, contribute, pay taxes, serve your community, and still find yourself one incident away from being reminded that you are not fully part of the national “we.”
I was reminded of this in the aftermath of the Southport murders. The crime was horrific and deserved universal condemnation. What struck me, however, was not the condemnation itself, but the language surrounding it. Before long, attention turned to ancestry. We were told that the perpetrator’s parents came from Rwanda. The detail may have been factually accurate, but it carried a familiar implication. He was not simply a British criminal. He was, in some deeper sense, not quite British at all.
For many Black Britons, moments like this feel familiar. When a white Briton commits a terrible crime, the act is usually understood as the failure of an individual. When a Black person commits one, questions of origin, culture, migration, and belonging often enter the conversation. Consciously or unconsciously, the individual becomes a representative figure. The nation instinctively reaches for distance.
That reflex is revealing.
Belonging says, “One of us has done something terrible.”
Tolerance says, “One of them has done something terrible.”
The distinction is profound.
The tension is not merely personal. It is woven into the history of the nation itself.
Consider the experience of Commonwealth soldiers during the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of African, Caribbean, and Asian soldiers fought in Britain’s defence. They served in Europe, North Africa, and Asia under brutal conditions. My own uncle fought in Burma, where many African soldiers were deployed on the assumption that they would be better suited to jungle warfare. He returned carrying the trauma of war, having fought for a Crown that called upon its imperial subjects in a moment of existential danger.
Yet for decades much of that contribution remained at the margins of public memory. Recognition eventually came, but often belatedly. One cannot help but notice the pattern. In moments of national crisis, Black and Brown bodies are summoned to defend the nation. In moments of remembrance, their stories too often become footnotes.
The same tension is evident in the Windrush scandal.
Post-war Britain actively recruited workers from the Caribbean to rebuild a country exhausted by war. They arrived as citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies. They staffed hospitals, drove buses, worked in factories, and helped sustain public services. They were not outsiders arriving uninvited. They were participants in the reconstruction of modern Britain.
Yet decades later many found themselves recast as strangers. Through the hostile environment policy, individuals who had lived and worked in Britain for most of their lives were denied employment, healthcare, housing, and, in some cases, deported.
For many Black Britons, Windrush was more than an administrative scandal. It was a revelation. It exposed how fragile belonging could be. People who believed themselves unquestionably British discovered that citizenship, memory, and contribution could be overridden by bureaucracy and political expediency.
Between Windrush and the present lay other reminders: the stop-and-search controversies of the 1970s and 1980s, the Brixton uprisings, the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and recurring national debates about immigration, race, and identity. Different events, different contexts, but a recurring question remained: who truly belongs?
It is perhaps for this reason that contemporary displays of national identity can evoke mixed emotions among some minorities. Patriotism itself is not the problem. Every people has the right to honour its history and celebrate its achievements. The question is what vision of the nation is being expressed.
When flags suddenly proliferate across public life, some see a healthy expression of civic pride. Others cannot help but wonder whether they are being invited into the story or reminded that they stand outside it. The unease is not about the flag itself. It is about whether the symbol represents a shared civic identity or a narrower understanding of who truly belongs.
The same ambiguity arises in political language. When leaders warn that Britain risks becoming an “island of strangers,” many hear a legitimate concern about social fragmentation. But others hear an older question echoing beneath the surface: who exactly counts as one of us?
For some Black Britons, the phrase carries a particular resonance. It recalls Windrush. It recalls Commonwealth veterans whose service was forgotten. It recalls the uneasy feeling that one can contribute, sacrifice, work, vote, and raise children in a country, yet still periodically be asked to prove one’s place within it.
This is why Glaude’s reflections resonate far beyond the United States.
The histories are different. The scale of violence is different. The particular forms of exclusion are different. But beneath them lies a familiar anxiety: the fear that one’s place within the nation remains conditional, that acceptance can be withdrawn, that decades of contribution can be eclipsed by older assumptions about race, origin, and belonging.
Glaude writes of being called a racial slur as a child and of the bitterness that settles in the heart when a society announces that you do not fully belong. Every Black person knows some version of that moment. The particulars vary. The lesson remains the same.
That is why the election of Barack Obama was so symbolically important and yet ultimately insufficient. For a moment it appeared that America might finally be escaping some of its oldest racial assumptions. The reaction to his presidency revealed how premature that hope was. I still remember the moment during Obama’s address to Congress when Representative Joe Wilson shouted, “You lie!” The words themselves were not racial. Yet many Black observers understood immediately why the moment felt familiar. The insult carried the weight of a much older script in which Black authority must be challenged, diminished, or put back in its place. Beneath the surface, one could still hear the ancient word.
This is what Glaude means by the monster.
The monster is not simply individual prejudice. It is the recurring tendency of Western societies to reserve full belonging for some while making it conditional for others. It appears in different forms and under different names. In America it emerged through slavery, segregation, voter suppression, and contemporary battles over affirmative action and diversity initiatives. In Britain it appears in immigration panics, stop and search, citizenship scandals, and recurring debates about who truly belongs.
The specifics differ. The structure remains recognisable.
And yet, what strikes me most about Glaude’s essay is not his anger but his restraint. He refuses both sentimentality and hatred. He does not romanticise America, but neither does he abandon the possibility of something better. Instead, he directs his love away from the abstraction called the nation and toward the people who bear its contradictions in their bodies and memories.
That distinction matters.
Perhaps the challenge for Black people in both Britain and America has never been learning how to love the nation. Perhaps it has been learning how to survive its disappointments without surrendering our humanity to bitterness.
For bitterness is always waiting at the bottom of the cup.
We know it is there because history put it there.
The Commonwealth veteran returning from Burma knows it.
The Windrush pensioner wrongly told he does not belong knows it.
The child called a racial slur on a playground knows it.
The African American who watches rights won through generations of struggle become politically contested once again knows it.
The real achievement is not pretending that bitterness does not exist. The achievement is refusing to allow it to become the final word. Nations cannot become what they aspire to be until they are willing to confront honestly what they have been. And those who have borne the burden of those contradictions must somehow find a way to continue believing in justice even when history gives them every reason not to.
That, it seems to me, is the deeper challenge that Eddie Glaude places before both America and the wider Atlantic world. Not whether we love our countries, but whether our countries are prepared to love all of their people equally.
Dear Eddie,
I have always appreciated you as a scholar who does not half-step, under intellectual cover, the truth of this land. Lately, what keeps coming up for me is that by in large, people of European descent have profound difficulty with the beauty, intelligence, creativity, boldness, style, and more ,of people of African descent. At the root of what is going on today, on full display is affirmative action, the true one, that allows for the stunning level of incompetence to be in power. Tell me, anyone, that you can imagine a Black person as ignorant and corrupt as the current President, a Black person who would fill government positions in the same manner, and bilk the government, while trying to starve those who need food, and cut off health care that we all need, but only some can receive; break laws at every turn. Some have argued that it's all about labor, the exploitation of it. But it is not solely or secondary to the exploitation of labor and greed. Why do people need so much money, it's never enough, and how do you spend $50 million dollars on a cake. What is the lack, that needs racism, classism? As Toni Morrison once said, if White people can only feel good about themselves when others are on their knees. that's the question to be addressed.
It makes me remember when the study of whiteness became a source of exploration in academia, and I was glad to hear it. In direct opposition to the idea of the "White Man's Burden," referencing Africa and colonialism, it is the European that is the Black Man's burden (add in the Indigenous Native Americans and other Brown people). What came from the study of whiteness? If anyone in this audience knows, please share.