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.
Professor, the expression about our love being " close to the ground" really resonates with me. When I think of where I grew up on the south shore of LI, with the Captree Bridge and the Great South Bay in my sights, with my cousins and friends and all of the things that go with growing up on the water, well, I can really understand what that entails. That place could be anywhere. It was made what it was , and is, because of what I have described. I live in Massachusetts now- it is home because my children and grandchildren live here- no other reason. But the bay, the beaches , the memories of that place, my hometown, happens to be on LI by accident of geography.
My cousin from NYC was visiting me last week and I was telling her how I went to see you ( my birthday present to myself) and what you said about not loving America. She was saying she couldn't understand how anyone who is from here could think that way and I am sure that most of that comes from how bravely my uncle fought in the Pacific during WWII, an experience he wishes he never had. It took him years to finally be able to speak of it. I spoke of how our love of country isn't really that literal but comes from the experiences, the memories that we share and that where we are, where we were, could be anywhere. Our love and memories are " close to the ground."
Thank you for allowing us to think about that. I have to be honest; it never occurred to me to think about it in those terms. I must confess, though, I never thought of myself as a " patriot."
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.
I hear your words and my heart is full. I have never loved America either but I'm usually too afraid to say it because of the reaction by others. I have white privilege but I have seen the injustice in this country since I was a child. No matter what I do I still see the hatred. It sickens me to the point that I seriously wonder if the ignorance, hatred, and cruelty will ever change.
Oh Eddie, my heart just breaks that America has failed so miserably in even attempting to attain the ideals so eloquently stated in The Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. As a teenager, I desperately wanted to believe the message of Jesus would take hold, and all of the hatred and injustice I read about in books that I cried through- To Kill a Mockingbird, Gone With the Wind, Huck Finn and others- would disappear. Then the horrors revealed throughout the Civil Rights movement shook my belief, but I remained hopeful. The jubilation of Barack Obama’s election sustained that hope, until the ugliness of racism and hate resurfaced openly in Congress and elsewhere, giving rise to the horror of DJT. Now, as a 74 year old white woman, I am no longer a believer, and my hope is hanging on by a thread. My husband and I don’t think there’s anything to celebrate about our 250 years given the atrocities America has perpetrated against Native Americans, Black and Brown Americans and immigrants, women, LGBT people, and children. I guess I still love the ideals we pretend to hold- all people are created equal, equal justice under the law, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for ALL- but I don’t love America at the moment. I am embarrassed and humiliated by who we are and the way the world sees us. I am thankful for you, and the many others who are fighting hard to tell the truth, to keep us informed, and to encourage us to continue fighting. The thin thread of hope that I cling to is that we can survive this deplorable state of affairs, and elect leaders who are ready to make the changes and put in place the enforceable guardrails that are so glaringly missing. It will be another long and challenging fight, but I hope, I hope…
Dear Professor Glaude: I have been listening to your wisdom for over ten years now, but this is the first time I purchased one of your books. I was captured by your opening statement of never having loved America. It brought tears to my eyes. I witnessed the turbulent 60's where our country killed so many of our leaders and changed the moral progression of America. I am bitter about the deaths of so many of our freedom fighters; bitter about the dumpster in the White House, Congress and the Confederate Supreme Court. Keep speaking, keep fighting even to those who refuse to understand white supremacy (Stephanie Ruhle, Joe Scarboro) is the reason the dumpster was "re-elected." V. Tomlin
As a person who have similar lived experiences, but not quite as successful as you; I do understand and know (inwardly the ancient greek word maybe gnosis) your position. While, it is difficult at best to see America in a good light, however I try to see it and keep hoping for a better future (as our ancestors hoped) and as such our lived experiences will become history.
Btw, I see you as America’s good conscience, keep up the good work!
As a white woman I experience white privilege. However the lurking prejudice held for women has remained throughout all the improvements in our legal rights. I know whereof you speak.
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.
Professor, the expression about our love being " close to the ground" really resonates with me. When I think of where I grew up on the south shore of LI, with the Captree Bridge and the Great South Bay in my sights, with my cousins and friends and all of the things that go with growing up on the water, well, I can really understand what that entails. That place could be anywhere. It was made what it was , and is, because of what I have described. I live in Massachusetts now- it is home because my children and grandchildren live here- no other reason. But the bay, the beaches , the memories of that place, my hometown, happens to be on LI by accident of geography.
My cousin from NYC was visiting me last week and I was telling her how I went to see you ( my birthday present to myself) and what you said about not loving America. She was saying she couldn't understand how anyone who is from here could think that way and I am sure that most of that comes from how bravely my uncle fought in the Pacific during WWII, an experience he wishes he never had. It took him years to finally be able to speak of it. I spoke of how our love of country isn't really that literal but comes from the experiences, the memories that we share and that where we are, where we were, could be anywhere. Our love and memories are " close to the ground."
Thank you for allowing us to think about that. I have to be honest; it never occurred to me to think about it in those terms. I must confess, though, I never thought of myself as a " patriot."
It's mot such a bad thing.
Robin x
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 Professor,
I hear your words and my heart is full. I have never loved America either but I'm usually too afraid to say it because of the reaction by others. I have white privilege but I have seen the injustice in this country since I was a child. No matter what I do I still see the hatred. It sickens me to the point that I seriously wonder if the ignorance, hatred, and cruelty will ever change.
Oh Eddie, my heart just breaks that America has failed so miserably in even attempting to attain the ideals so eloquently stated in The Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. As a teenager, I desperately wanted to believe the message of Jesus would take hold, and all of the hatred and injustice I read about in books that I cried through- To Kill a Mockingbird, Gone With the Wind, Huck Finn and others- would disappear. Then the horrors revealed throughout the Civil Rights movement shook my belief, but I remained hopeful. The jubilation of Barack Obama’s election sustained that hope, until the ugliness of racism and hate resurfaced openly in Congress and elsewhere, giving rise to the horror of DJT. Now, as a 74 year old white woman, I am no longer a believer, and my hope is hanging on by a thread. My husband and I don’t think there’s anything to celebrate about our 250 years given the atrocities America has perpetrated against Native Americans, Black and Brown Americans and immigrants, women, LGBT people, and children. I guess I still love the ideals we pretend to hold- all people are created equal, equal justice under the law, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for ALL- but I don’t love America at the moment. I am embarrassed and humiliated by who we are and the way the world sees us. I am thankful for you, and the many others who are fighting hard to tell the truth, to keep us informed, and to encourage us to continue fighting. The thin thread of hope that I cling to is that we can survive this deplorable state of affairs, and elect leaders who are ready to make the changes and put in place the enforceable guardrails that are so glaringly missing. It will be another long and challenging fight, but I hope, I hope…
Dear Professor Glaude: I have been listening to your wisdom for over ten years now, but this is the first time I purchased one of your books. I was captured by your opening statement of never having loved America. It brought tears to my eyes. I witnessed the turbulent 60's where our country killed so many of our leaders and changed the moral progression of America. I am bitter about the deaths of so many of our freedom fighters; bitter about the dumpster in the White House, Congress and the Confederate Supreme Court. Keep speaking, keep fighting even to those who refuse to understand white supremacy (Stephanie Ruhle, Joe Scarboro) is the reason the dumpster was "re-elected." V. Tomlin
Sir,
As a person who have similar lived experiences, but not quite as successful as you; I do understand and know (inwardly the ancient greek word maybe gnosis) your position. While, it is difficult at best to see America in a good light, however I try to see it and keep hoping for a better future (as our ancestors hoped) and as such our lived experiences will become history.
Btw, I see you as America’s good conscience, keep up the good work!
As a white woman I experience white privilege. However the lurking prejudice held for women has remained throughout all the improvements in our legal rights. I know whereof you speak.