Great post Prof. Glaude! In respecting your points of view, I take after my (white) father, who , in March ‘65, marched on the Pettis Bridge in Selma with his dear friend Cecil B. Moore, whom he met as an attorney fighting for desegregation of Girard College in Philadelphia. He was so happy to have met John Lewis (before Bloody Sunday) and James Baldwin. My wife and I look forward to meeting you at Philadelphia Public Library this Wed.
Thank you Eddie for this timely and unfliching essay. My response is written from a place of love and respect.
The Republic and Its Ghosts: A Reflection After Eddie Glaude
Professor Glaude’s essay arrives as a timely reminder that distance in time does not dissolve proximity in power. Two hundred and fifty years after the founding, America stands once again before the question it has never fully answered: what kind of nation does it imagine itself to be?
Glaude reaches for Moses Gordon because Gordon’s life reveals something deeper than contradiction. Freed, recaptured, escaped, reclaimed, his story exposes the strange rhythm of American freedom: granted, withdrawn, promised, delayed. What emerges is not simply hypocrisy but repetition.
Yet the deeper tragedy may not be that America forgot. It may be that America remembers selectively.
That distinction matters.
Empires rarely survive by forgetting. They survive by arranging memory. They preserve certain stories and suppress others until victory itself becomes evidence of virtue. Gordon’s story therefore becomes more than an American story. It reveals a recurring political instinct: victories seek moral confirmation, and domination survives not only through law but through the stories nations tell themselves about what their victories meant.
This is why conquest so often reaches beyond territory into meaning itself. The coloniser does not merely occupy land. He desecrates temples, renames rivers, erects monuments and rewrites origins. The purpose is not destruction alone but demonstration: your gods could not protect you, and our victory proves our righteousness.
This logic is ancient, and this is where Glaude’s essay opens into something older than America itself.
The nation often speaks in the language of Abraham. Covenant, liberty, chosen purpose, a city upon a hill. Yet at crucial moments it behaves within the emotional architecture of Homer. It invokes covenant while reaching for honour, speaks of liberty while seeking vindication, and turns criticism into wounded sovereignty rather than prophetic correction.
These are not identical moral universes.
Abrahamic covenantal logic, found in Genesis, Exodus and the prophets, binds authority to obligation, justice, remembrance and responsibility to the stranger, widow and poor. Power remains conditional because even Israel stands beneath judgement. Nathan confronts David. Amos condemns kings. God remains above the nation.
Homeric logic moves differently. Honour, prestige and inheritance structure legitimacy. Injury becomes political and power becomes performative. Agamemnon mistakes possession for legitimacy. Menelaus experiences loss partly through the language of wounded honour. Achilles withdraws because recognition has been denied. No prophet appears above the king. The gods largely mirror political struggle rather than transcend it.
America narrates itself as New Israel, yet repeatedly behaves as Achaea.
This is why its deepest problem may not be hypocrisy. It may be tragedy.
For tragedy begins not with evil but with hubris. Achilles is not destroyed because he is weak, nor Agamemnon because he lacks power. They fall because they cannot imagine themselves as subject to judgement. Their greatness becomes blindness. Their injury becomes identity. Their authority becomes self-justifying.
Perhaps this is America’s Achilles.
Not slavery alone. Not the massacre and dispossession of Indigenous peoples alone. Empires have conquered before. The deeper wound lies in the belief that domination could coexist with declarations of freedom while preserving the conviction of innocence; that liberty could remain universal while its benefits were administered selectively; that freedom could be proclaimed for all while remaining governed as possession.
That contradiction generated the pattern Glaude traces across American history. The Revolution proclaimed equality while preserving bondage. Reconstruction extended citizenship and then abandoned it. The Civil Rights movement widened belonging, and backlash emerged to police its boundaries. George Floyd’s murder prompted reckoning, and reaction followed to foreclose it.
Progress appears, retreats and returns because the underlying argument remains unresolved: who truly possesses freedom?
The pattern repeats because the wound was never mourned.
Baldwin understood this with unusual clarity. His insight was not merely that America lied. It was that America feared knowing itself. In Nothing Personal, he wrote that Americans live in a labyrinth, desperately trying not to discover what they really feel and therefore cannot tell the truth. Those lies became institutions before they became suffering.
What Baldwin called “unadmitted sorrow” resembles what tragedy calls the absence of anagnorisis — recognition.
Without recognition there can be no catharsis, and without catharsis there can only be repetition.
Glaude names this as America’s divided soul, but perhaps the division runs deeper than morality alone. A nation that narrates itself through covenantal language while repeatedly reverting to epic logic struggles to repent. It can defend itself, justify itself and commemorate itself, but repentance requires submission to judgement.
This may explain why demands for expanded freedom are so often experienced not as fulfilment but as humiliation, why accountability sounds like accusation and why correction feels like defeat.
The prophets of Israel understood something that epic heroes could not. Israel was not chosen because it was innocent. It remained covenantal only insofar as it could be judged. The prophet’s role was not to flatter power but to hold it accountable to its own stated commitments. Nathan confronted David not as an enemy but as a mirror. Amos condemned Israel not from hatred but from fidelity to the covenant Israel claimed to honour. No nation stood above correction.
If this is the prophetic function, then Baldwin and Glaude stand within that tradition. They do not speak from outside America but from within its covenant, demanding that it honour what it claims to believe. The line runs from Frederick Douglass, who asked what the Fourth of July means to the slave, through Ida B. Wells, who documented the violence that enforced white supremacy, through Baldwin, who named the fear at the heart of innocence, to Glaude himself, who calls the nation to confront its ghosts.
Black American intellectual traditions have repeatedly occupied the prophetic position: inside the nation but outside its consoling myths.
That may be the choice before America now.
Not whether it will remain powerful, but whether it will continue to narrate itself through Achilles — nursing grievance, mistaking honour for virtue and allowing wounded identity to consume the world it claims to defend — or whether it will recover something older than empire.
The prophetic tradition never demanded innocence.
It demanded truth.
Professor Glaude asks whether America can survive its ghosts. Perhaps the deeper question is whether it can finally mourn them, because mourning is not weakness but the precondition for anything other than repetition. Grief acknowledges what was lost, what was taken and what was done. It submits the self to judgement and interrupts the cycle in which injury endlessly regenerates injury.
Only when the dead are mourned do ghosts become ancestors. Only when ancestors are honoured does inheritance become responsibility rather than possession.
Moses Gordon chose death when liberty was denied to him. His ghost remains because the conditions that made such a choice intelligible were never fully mourned.
To set that ghost to rest is not to forget and not to abandon the nation. It is to refuse innocence where truth is required.
America has spent two hundred and fifty years asking whether it can preserve greatness.
The more difficult question is whether it can survive recognition.
It must finally recognise itself, not in order to condemn what it has been, but to become accountable for what it claims to be.
Thank you for this reminder why we historians fight the whitewashing and erasure of our nation's history, especially regarding the genocide of indigenous peoples and horrors of slavery. We have done great things as a nation, however those blots on our history can only be considered great when we acknowledge them, change the attitudes and erase the false stereotypes of the harmed and make reparations in a variety of ways to them. I believe one of the primary reparations for starters is honest history and remembering those who valued freedom so much that they died for it. Keep telling the truth and encouraging the rest of us to do the same.
What can I say that has not been said, once again Prof.your words give a lie to the PL Hartley’s often quoted words about the past being a different country. IT IS NOT. Things are not done differently there, in my view. The past exists contemporaneously with the present and those unresolved events often explode in the present with disastrous consequences.
“The nation imagined itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white Republic. This is America’s double consciousness, its divided soul. And it is our inheritance as we commemorate the nation’s founding.” Our actions as a nation exemplify our character. Thank you for sharing Moses Gordon with us. Today, he rest in my heart. I recently heard your thoughts on PBS related to W. E. B. Du Bois. As a former teacher, I am frustrated that Du Bois, Baldwin and so many other pioneers are left out of the canon, diminishing my own sense of feeling well-educated. Thank you for shining a light on the pathway to finding these resources to nourish myself on truth.
Thank you Eddie, for this important and profound commentary. We have so much work to do. My heart is heavy today.
Great post Prof. Glaude! In respecting your points of view, I take after my (white) father, who , in March ‘65, marched on the Pettis Bridge in Selma with his dear friend Cecil B. Moore, whom he met as an attorney fighting for desegregation of Girard College in Philadelphia. He was so happy to have met John Lewis (before Bloody Sunday) and James Baldwin. My wife and I look forward to meeting you at Philadelphia Public Library this Wed.
Dearest Eddie, Such a magnificent essay on where we find ourselves in 2026. Thank you. I will share it.
Thank you Eddie for this timely and unfliching essay. My response is written from a place of love and respect.
The Republic and Its Ghosts: A Reflection After Eddie Glaude
Professor Glaude’s essay arrives as a timely reminder that distance in time does not dissolve proximity in power. Two hundred and fifty years after the founding, America stands once again before the question it has never fully answered: what kind of nation does it imagine itself to be?
Glaude reaches for Moses Gordon because Gordon’s life reveals something deeper than contradiction. Freed, recaptured, escaped, reclaimed, his story exposes the strange rhythm of American freedom: granted, withdrawn, promised, delayed. What emerges is not simply hypocrisy but repetition.
Yet the deeper tragedy may not be that America forgot. It may be that America remembers selectively.
That distinction matters.
Empires rarely survive by forgetting. They survive by arranging memory. They preserve certain stories and suppress others until victory itself becomes evidence of virtue. Gordon’s story therefore becomes more than an American story. It reveals a recurring political instinct: victories seek moral confirmation, and domination survives not only through law but through the stories nations tell themselves about what their victories meant.
This is why conquest so often reaches beyond territory into meaning itself. The coloniser does not merely occupy land. He desecrates temples, renames rivers, erects monuments and rewrites origins. The purpose is not destruction alone but demonstration: your gods could not protect you, and our victory proves our righteousness.
This logic is ancient, and this is where Glaude’s essay opens into something older than America itself.
The nation often speaks in the language of Abraham. Covenant, liberty, chosen purpose, a city upon a hill. Yet at crucial moments it behaves within the emotional architecture of Homer. It invokes covenant while reaching for honour, speaks of liberty while seeking vindication, and turns criticism into wounded sovereignty rather than prophetic correction.
These are not identical moral universes.
Abrahamic covenantal logic, found in Genesis, Exodus and the prophets, binds authority to obligation, justice, remembrance and responsibility to the stranger, widow and poor. Power remains conditional because even Israel stands beneath judgement. Nathan confronts David. Amos condemns kings. God remains above the nation.
Homeric logic moves differently. Honour, prestige and inheritance structure legitimacy. Injury becomes political and power becomes performative. Agamemnon mistakes possession for legitimacy. Menelaus experiences loss partly through the language of wounded honour. Achilles withdraws because recognition has been denied. No prophet appears above the king. The gods largely mirror political struggle rather than transcend it.
America narrates itself as New Israel, yet repeatedly behaves as Achaea.
This is why its deepest problem may not be hypocrisy. It may be tragedy.
For tragedy begins not with evil but with hubris. Achilles is not destroyed because he is weak, nor Agamemnon because he lacks power. They fall because they cannot imagine themselves as subject to judgement. Their greatness becomes blindness. Their injury becomes identity. Their authority becomes self-justifying.
Perhaps this is America’s Achilles.
Not slavery alone. Not the massacre and dispossession of Indigenous peoples alone. Empires have conquered before. The deeper wound lies in the belief that domination could coexist with declarations of freedom while preserving the conviction of innocence; that liberty could remain universal while its benefits were administered selectively; that freedom could be proclaimed for all while remaining governed as possession.
That contradiction generated the pattern Glaude traces across American history. The Revolution proclaimed equality while preserving bondage. Reconstruction extended citizenship and then abandoned it. The Civil Rights movement widened belonging, and backlash emerged to police its boundaries. George Floyd’s murder prompted reckoning, and reaction followed to foreclose it.
Progress appears, retreats and returns because the underlying argument remains unresolved: who truly possesses freedom?
The pattern repeats because the wound was never mourned.
Baldwin understood this with unusual clarity. His insight was not merely that America lied. It was that America feared knowing itself. In Nothing Personal, he wrote that Americans live in a labyrinth, desperately trying not to discover what they really feel and therefore cannot tell the truth. Those lies became institutions before they became suffering.
What Baldwin called “unadmitted sorrow” resembles what tragedy calls the absence of anagnorisis — recognition.
Without recognition there can be no catharsis, and without catharsis there can only be repetition.
Glaude names this as America’s divided soul, but perhaps the division runs deeper than morality alone. A nation that narrates itself through covenantal language while repeatedly reverting to epic logic struggles to repent. It can defend itself, justify itself and commemorate itself, but repentance requires submission to judgement.
This may explain why demands for expanded freedom are so often experienced not as fulfilment but as humiliation, why accountability sounds like accusation and why correction feels like defeat.
The prophets of Israel understood something that epic heroes could not. Israel was not chosen because it was innocent. It remained covenantal only insofar as it could be judged. The prophet’s role was not to flatter power but to hold it accountable to its own stated commitments. Nathan confronted David not as an enemy but as a mirror. Amos condemned Israel not from hatred but from fidelity to the covenant Israel claimed to honour. No nation stood above correction.
If this is the prophetic function, then Baldwin and Glaude stand within that tradition. They do not speak from outside America but from within its covenant, demanding that it honour what it claims to believe. The line runs from Frederick Douglass, who asked what the Fourth of July means to the slave, through Ida B. Wells, who documented the violence that enforced white supremacy, through Baldwin, who named the fear at the heart of innocence, to Glaude himself, who calls the nation to confront its ghosts.
Black American intellectual traditions have repeatedly occupied the prophetic position: inside the nation but outside its consoling myths.
That may be the choice before America now.
Not whether it will remain powerful, but whether it will continue to narrate itself through Achilles — nursing grievance, mistaking honour for virtue and allowing wounded identity to consume the world it claims to defend — or whether it will recover something older than empire.
The prophetic tradition never demanded innocence.
It demanded truth.
Professor Glaude asks whether America can survive its ghosts. Perhaps the deeper question is whether it can finally mourn them, because mourning is not weakness but the precondition for anything other than repetition. Grief acknowledges what was lost, what was taken and what was done. It submits the self to judgement and interrupts the cycle in which injury endlessly regenerates injury.
Only when the dead are mourned do ghosts become ancestors. Only when ancestors are honoured does inheritance become responsibility rather than possession.
Moses Gordon chose death when liberty was denied to him. His ghost remains because the conditions that made such a choice intelligible were never fully mourned.
To set that ghost to rest is not to forget and not to abandon the nation. It is to refuse innocence where truth is required.
America has spent two hundred and fifty years asking whether it can preserve greatness.
The more difficult question is whether it can survive recognition.
It must finally recognise itself, not in order to condemn what it has been, but to become accountable for what it claims to be.
Only then does tragedy cease repeating.
Thank you for this reminder why we historians fight the whitewashing and erasure of our nation's history, especially regarding the genocide of indigenous peoples and horrors of slavery. We have done great things as a nation, however those blots on our history can only be considered great when we acknowledge them, change the attitudes and erase the false stereotypes of the harmed and make reparations in a variety of ways to them. I believe one of the primary reparations for starters is honest history and remembering those who valued freedom so much that they died for it. Keep telling the truth and encouraging the rest of us to do the same.
What can I say that has not been said, once again Prof.your words give a lie to the PL Hartley’s often quoted words about the past being a different country. IT IS NOT. Things are not done differently there, in my view. The past exists contemporaneously with the present and those unresolved events often explode in the present with disastrous consequences.
Thank you Eddie. We still have such a long way to go.
Thank you sir. What an excellent essay. #ReparationsNow
“The nation imagined itself as a beacon of freedom and as a white Republic. This is America’s double consciousness, its divided soul. And it is our inheritance as we commemorate the nation’s founding.” Our actions as a nation exemplify our character. Thank you for sharing Moses Gordon with us. Today, he rest in my heart. I recently heard your thoughts on PBS related to W. E. B. Du Bois. As a former teacher, I am frustrated that Du Bois, Baldwin and so many other pioneers are left out of the canon, diminishing my own sense of feeling well-educated. Thank you for shining a light on the pathway to finding these resources to nourish myself on truth.
All I can write here is thank you.