Exposing the American lie enables telling a truer foundational story

Evidence

Revealing the lie at the heart of the American idea, however, occasions an opportunity to tell a different and better story. It affords us a chance to excavate the past and to examine the ruins to find, or at least glimpse, what made us who we are. Baldwin insisted, until he died, that we reach for a different story. We should tell the truth about ourselves, he maintained, and that would release us into a new possibility. In some ways, as I scoured the rubble and ruins of his life and works, this call for a different story was the answer I found to my own shaken faith. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 69

Categorization

• DEFINE: Frames the ‘lie’ as the false American self-story that secures virtue and hides vices; truth-telling about it releases new possibility.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing what precisely ‘a different and better story’ consists of — the positive content of the new narrative remains unstated here.
• XREF: connects to: Patriotism requires truth-telling about a nation’s flaws — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 211