On how the obsession with niceness has brought America to its knees

Americans are obsessed with niceness, of seeing themselves as good people. It is a cultural obsession right up there with baseball and apple pie. But it is impossible to be a good person and elect someone like Donald Trump to the presidency not once but twice. Something is rotten in this republic.

Michelle Obama used the term “failing forward” to describe Donald Trump during her speech at the 2024 Democratic Convention. That is a fair description of Trump and the mostly men he has hired to dismantle American democracy and to help him line his pockets while they line theirs. Skating on their Fox News credentials or family names, they revel in ignorance, and a lack of attention to the substance of their jobs. 

From the time I was a child visiting the U.S., where I was born, from the three African countries where I was raised, I knew something here was off. The uneasy truce established between the races after the Civil Rights era could not hold up over time, I thought. Could a white family lynch a Black person in one generation, peeling the victim’s skin like one would peel a banana, and then be a Black person’s friend the next? My naïve and perhaps poorly phrased inquiries were often met with derision and even anger. My outsider’s view was dismissed. “That was then and this is now. What do you know? You didn’t grow up here.”

“Laws don’t change hearts,” I have told African American friends. Trump has given people the license to be their true selves, and there is nothing nice about it. After he departs, the stench of him, the viciousness that Americans have supported in his name, will be with us for generations.

The stance of the well-meaning liberal, or anti-Trump Republican, is that if you just defeat Trump, this country of nice people who give to charity and take their children to soccer will return to its natural self. Just get rid of the big, bad bully, and you will be restored to your full Americanness, smiling your Colgate smile with your big American teeth. 

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University, appears often on MS NOW, trying to convince a hard-to-reason-with liberal/anti-Trump crowd that they are not nice. That Americans have never come to terms with the nation’s flaws. Instead, they are eager to hold up Barack Obama as a sign that all is well with America’s racial credibility, unwilling to acknowledge or oblivious to the racial backlash that followed his presidency. Question: What more could they (people of color) want? Answer: Equality. Equal access. Opportunity. Freedom. 

Glaude has spoken passionately about America’s need to reckon with its complicated, contradictory history, one in which the insightful founding fathers fought for liberty while owning slaves. Without examining the contradictions in our DNA, it will be impossible to move toward a more progressive, holistic future — for everyone. 

On April 29 after the Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Glaude was featured on Deadline, White House with Nicolle Wallace. In an appearance that seared the souls of those who have them, Glaude said of the justices, “These people play fast and loose with our dead. They play fast and loose with our sacrifices. They think they own freedom. They can give it to us and take it away whenever they want.” Ouch. Glaude looked like he was on the verge of tears as Wallace clutched her hands nervously in front of her.

Last year I read an op-ed by an E.R. doctor who often meets patients on the worst day of their lives. It is his job to minister to them with deep, abiding compassion. Given the funk in the country: the racial animus, the partisan divide, the vile, slur-filled thick air, he felt that it was impossible to offer the best of himself. He could not do his job in America, so he immigrated to Canada.   

If there is a way back to a civilized, civil American democracy, it starts with recognizing that we are not the nice people we want to believe that we are. There must be a brutal examination of our brutal history, leading us to where we are now on this, our 250th anniversary year.  And then we can celebrate our sterling accomplishments and recommit to the Constitution’s values. Honesty is the only way to treat the rotting flesh, to give it air, to allow it to heal. It is not too late.

Cheryl McCourtie, a writer, has lived in Riverdale for the past 11 years. She was raised in Liberia, Malawi and Eswatini by Jamaican parents.