America’s 250th Birthday: What Are We Really Celebrating?

As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its independence, we have to ask a more honest question:

What, exactly, are we celebrating?

In online conversations about this anniversary, you can clearly see the divide. Some people approach July 4th with deep patriotism, seeing it as a symbol of national pride and possibility. Others experience the day differently: as a day off, a chance to gather with family, but not necessarily a celebration of freedom that has never fully included them.

That divide is a mirror. It reflects the unresolved question at the center of this country’s story: whether America is willing to become the democracy it has long claimed to be.

Frederick Douglass held up that mirror in 1852 when he asked, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” More than 170 years later, the question still stands. But if all we do is repeat it at each milestone anniversary, we have mistaken remembrance for repair.

The task now is not only to name the contradiction. It is to build a democracy where future generations do not have to keep asking the same question.

I think about that question through the lens of my own family’s history. My great-great-grandfather, who chose the freeman name Harris, was enslaved in Alabama. He escaped shortly before the Civil War. After the war, when the South had collapsed, he returned and purchased the plantation where he had once been enslaved. He left that land to the Harrises.

My great-great-grandfather acted in a moment when freedom was still uncertain, when the future for Black people in this country was being violently contested. Yet he made a choice that reached beyond his own lifetime. He imagined a future he might not fully see, and took action to ensure his descendants could inherit it.

That is what democracy has always required from those excluded from its promises: the courage to resist what is, and the imagination to build what has yet to exist.

Democracy remains the unfinished project of the United States.

Constitutional amendments and civil rights laws have expanded freedom, but they have never guaranteed it unconditionally. Today, policies are restricting the right to vote, censoring what can be taught, criminalizing protest, attacking bodily autonomy, threatening birthright citizenship, targeting immigrants and LGBTQ communities, and punishing people for demanding a more honest and inclusive democracy.

These are not isolated fights. They are part of a coordinated backlash to the political power and civil rights won through generations of organizing. We should be clear about what this is: racialized authoritarianism in action.

Though it is currently being challenged, distorted, and ignored, what we know to be true is that the foundation of this country was built on white supremacy and racial hierarchy. In pursuing their own freedom, European settlers stole land from Indigenous peoples and built an economy through the enslavement of African people and their descendants. 

So as we approach this anniversary, the questions before us are not ceremonial. They are structural.

Can America become a true democracy without racial justice?

Can it do so without recognizing and repairing the harms of the past?

Can it do so without transforming institutions so they govern for all of us, rather than serving the wealthy, the powerful, and the already protected?

The answer is no.

Race and the backlash to racial progress are among the primary mechanisms through which democracy is dismantled. Naming race helps us see the pattern underneath what can otherwise look like separate attacks. 

Racialized authoritarianism moves through race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, immigration status, religion, and indigeneity to decide who belongs, who is protected, and who gets to govern. We are not all targeted in the same ways, but our futures are bound together.

The strategy of authoritarianism is to isolate us. It ranks people, divides communities, targets the most vulnerable first, and asks everyone else to believe that someone else’s exclusion is the price of their own safety.

Multiracial democracy rejects that bargain.

If we are serious about multiracial democracy, we must also be precise about anti-Blackness. That does not mean reducing racism to a Black-white binary or treating other communities as secondary. The racial order in the United States is dynamic and adaptive. But anti-Blackness has long functioned as a central force within white supremacy, providing justification for slavery, segregation, criminalization, disenfranchisement, voter suppression, and the politics of fear.

These tools have targeted Black communities most directly, but they have also weakened democratic possibility for everyone. That is how authoritarianism works: it tests its tools on the people it has made easiest to exclude, then expands them outward.

The Black freedom struggle has always understood this. The Black project in America has been democracy itself. But it has never moved alone. It has moved in relationship with Indigenous sovereignty struggles, immigrant justice movements, labor movements, reproductive justice movements, disability justice, LGBTQ liberation, faith-rooted organizing, and many communities that have refused to accept exclusion as the price of belonging.

Together, these movements have expanded democracy beyond formal rights. They have insisted that democracy must also mean safety, dignity, repair, belonging, and the power to shape the decisions that affect our lives.

As America turns 250, celebration without truth will not be enough. Reflection without repair will not be enough. Resistance without a plan to govern will not be enough.

If this country is ever to become the democracy it has claimed to be, racial justice cannot be treated as an add-on, a sidebar, or a special interest. It must be understood as foundational.

Because democracy is not only what we commemorate.

Democracy is who decides.

Glenn Harris is the president of the national racial equity organization Race Forward.

SEE ALSO:

Frederick Douglass Said ‘This Fourth Of July Is Yours, Not Mine’

Whose July Fourth Is This? Douglass Speech Still Resonates