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and how his murder both elevated his status and began to create the myth that conceals much of the truth about him the civil rights movement and how many of its gains have been lost the mass incarceration epidemic and what the author believes are the legally sanctioned murders of young black men. Among his many topics: Martin Luther King Jr. In prose that is eloquent and impassioned-sometimes hopeful, sometimes not-the author presses his fingers on our bruises, the ones many of us would prefer to ignore. Repeatedly, the author examines “the ugliness of who we are”-and of the men we have elected president (Reagan and Trump do not come off well). In this follow-up to his 2016 book, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, the author mines that work to illustrate our ongoing inability to confront what both Baldwin and Glaude call the lie at the center of our American self-conception and how the nation refuses “to turn its back on racism and to reach for its better angels.” Glaude employs a blend of genres: some biography of Baldwin (the text ends at Baldwin’s gravesite), literary analysis of key works, memoir (first-person appears throughout), and pieces of American history, especially those events that many of us don’t want to think about. Glaude, a frequent guest on political talk shows and chair of the African American Studies department at Princeton, has long read, admired, and taught Baldwin’s work. For white people in this country, “America” is an identity worth protecting at any cost.A penetrating study of how the words of James Baldwin (1924-1987) continue to have (often painful) relevance today. That history would fortify our national identity, and any attempt to confront the lie itself would be sabotaged by the fear that we may not be who we say we are. Slavery would be banished from view or seen as a mistake instead of a defining institution of systemic cruelty in pursuit of profit.

American history would be contorted in the service of it: where efforts to resist the likes of slavery or to break the back of Jim Crow segregation would be conscripted into the grand story of America’s greatness and its ongoing perfection. That lie is the basis of our present trouble. For if he wasn’t, then no crime had been committed. They knew he wasn’t…anything else but a man but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one’s life was to say that he was not a man. They could recognize a man when they saw one. “The people who settled the country had a fatal flaw.