AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation's Anniversaries

Review

SECTION ONE Eddie S. Glaude Jr. has spent his career asking one question with unusual persistence: what does America do with the distance between its stated ideals and its actual history? In America, U.S.A., the Princeton scholar and public intellectual extends the argument he began in Begin Again, his study of James Baldwin's later work, into a broader account of the American past and what it demands of the present. The book's premise is that the United States has never resolved the founding contradiction built into its political identity — the claim that all persons are created equal, issued by men who enslaved other persons and wrote legal protections for that institution into the founding documents. Glaude does not treat this as settled history but as an open wound that continues to shape policy, culture, and moral imagination. His intended reader is the American citizen who suspects the national story is more complicated than the civics-class version but has not yet worked out what to do with that suspicion. The book functions less as a polemic than as a sustained argument for honest reckoning as a prerequisite for genuine civic health. SECTION TWO - **Created**: Glaude's moral indignation at racial exclusion rests on an implicit claim about personhood that Catholic anthropology makes explicit: every human being bears a dignity that precedes and exceeds any political category. His outrage at the gap between American ideals and American practice is only coherent if persons have a worth that cannot be assigned or revoked by the state — a premise the CCMMP grounds in the imago Dei. - **Fallen**: The book's most anthropologically precise contribution is its account of willed forgetting. Glaude argues that American amnesia about slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow is not passive ignorance but an active choice — a disordering of the intellect in service of comfort. This maps onto the CCMMP's treatment of concupiscence as a disorder that affects not only appetite but cognition: the mind can refuse what it does not want to see. - **Fallen (social dimension)**: Glaude identifies what the tradition would call social sin — patterns of injustice institutionalized over generations that become the water in which individuals swim, shaping perception and opportunity before any individual act of malice occurs. The CCMMP's Fallen state includes this structural dimension without reducing personal responsibility to it. - **Redeemed**: The book's implicit anthropology is one of possible repair. Glaude does not argue that the American experiment is simply corrupt and irredeemable; he argues that repair requires honest memory. This is structurally consonant with the movement from Fallen to Redeemed in the CCMMP: restoration begins with acknowledgment, not denial, of the wound. - **Prudence (memory)**: For Aquinas, prudential memory is not nostalgia but the disciplined retrieval of past experience in service of present judgment. Glaude uses history precisely this way — not to assign guilt but to correct a present judgment that has been distorted by selective recall. The book is, in this sense, an exercise in the integral virtue of memory as a component of practical wisdom.

✓ Strengths

• ✓Glaude takes the founding contradiction at the center of American identity — the gap between stated ideals of liberty and the lived reality of racial exclusion — seriously as a moral problem, which aligns with the CCMMP's understanding that the human person has inherent dignity (imago Dei) that no political arrangement can legitimately override.
• ✓The book's method is historical memory as moral formation: Glaude argues that selective amnesia about race is not simply ignorance but a willed disorder, which maps directly onto the CCMMP's treatment of concupiscence as a disordering of the intellect, not just the appetites.
• ✓By pressing readers to confront what has been suppressed rather than celebrating what has been achieved, the book exercises the integral virtue of memory (prudence-memory) — drawing on past injury not to paralyze but to correct present judgment.
• ✓Glaude's call for a reckoning implies that moral repair is possible, which is structurally consonant with the Redeemed state in the CCMMP: the person and the community are not simply broken but capable of conversion and restoration.
• ✓The book's civic focus trains the virtue of political prudence (prudence-civic-wisdom): readers are asked to reason from particulars of American history toward principles of a more just common life, a practice Aquinas identifies as essential to sound public judgment.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠Glaude writes from a progressive political-theological tradition shaped more by the Black church and pragmatist philosophy than by Catholic anthropology; his account of the person is primarily social and political, and the transcendent dimension — the soul's orientation toward God — is largely absent, which limits the depth of his account of restoration.
• ⚠The book's framework of collective guilt and national reckoning, while pastorally serious, risks conflating structural sin with personal moral responsibility in ways the CCMMP distinguishes carefully: Aquinas's account of justice requires both social analysis and a precise account of the individual act.
• ⚠Readers looking for a path forward rooted in sacramental or formational practice will find the book's prescriptive horizon thin; the Redeemed arc it gestures toward is political rather than theological, and the mechanisms of moral repair remain largely at the level of discourse and policy.