There’s nothing quite like Independence Day in America. You see it in the big cities and small rural towns. You see it in neighborhood block parties and family cookouts. You see it in the faces watching those fireworks displays, whether the rockets are exploding behind the Statue of Liberty or the little league ballpark. It’s special, and it’s important.
But while we celebrate this year, there is an undertone of struggle. After all, skyrocketing gas prices have caused many of us to cancel this year’s family road trip. Independence Day layoffs have too many of us trying to figure out how to make ends meet instead of gazing at exploding bottle rockets with childlike wonder.
Energy costs are up 21%, so running the air conditioner may not feel like an option during this hot July. Inflation has made those hamburgers and hot dogs so expensive that the cookout may not happen this year. All of our families are struggling when we should be celebrating because the people in charge have created an unnecessary affordability crisis.
But here’s the thing: we don’t have to accept it. You see, while some tout patriotism as empty platitudes that cheer a flag regardless of how the people suffer, we know that our story, America’s story, is about resilience.
America has never been about perfection. It’s about progress, and progress is not permanent. That’s especially true for Black America.
Think about this nation’s story from slavery to now. Think about how we went from the highs of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to our Constitution to the lows of the KKK and Jim Crow. Think about how the Progressive Era and Harlem Renaissance were followed by a new segregation era, the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Massacre and the assassination of Marcus Garvey.
We started integrating the classroom, and white families flocked to private schools and started defunding public education. We saw the violent pushback after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. White flight followed fair housing. Then Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the War on Drugs and mass incarceration.
And when Black voters turned out in droves to elect Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, the response came swiftly: Voter ID laws, purged voting rolls, and the Tea Party movement that paved the way for what followed.
Today, we find ourselves struggling with those same issues and leaders who insist on living in our past instead of marching toward tomorrow. As a Black man, I can’t help but see it because our past and present represent the same struggles, the same obstacles, that some leaders don’t want to remove. In fact, they’re replacing the obstacles we already overcame.
Consider the reality: Trump’s war on DEI cost 300,000 Black women their jobs in one three-month span last year. 600,000 Black women are currently out of work. More than half a million Black men lost their jobs between November and February. While we’re all looking at the 4.3% unemployment rate with concern, the Black unemployment rate sits at 7.3%.
Black men are 30% more likely to die from heart disease and 60% more likely to die from stroke than white men. We have higher rates of oral cancer, prostate cancer, diabetes and HIV/AIDS, and we’re 75% less likely to have health insurance than white men.
Black farmers have had over $127 million in USDA grants stripped away. Our history is being whitewashed, erasing everything from the horrors of slavery to Jackie Robinson. Rural hospitals are closing, health insurance costs are climbing, poor children are being kept off Medicaid, and since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, efforts have launched to wipe majority Black Congressional Districts off the map.
That’s the reality as our nation celebrates its 250th birthday. But I said it before, and I’ll say it again: we don’t have to accept it.
In his two-volume work Democracy in America, French writer Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” Tocqueville, an aristocrat whose parents were jailed during the French Revolution, developed his opinion while visiting the United States and studying our prisons. I doubt he would recognize our nation today for many reasons. But while we continue to strive toward the more perfect union imagined in our Constitution’s preamble, the work is far from complete—particularly when it comes to liberty and justice for all.
Let us embrace the greatness Tocqueville pronounced because right now, America needs some repairs, and those repairs should focus on the core issues we’ve always led on.
America needs repairs, but instead of wrenches and screwdrivers, our tools are our voices and our votes. They always have been.
A decade after signing the Constitution, Ben Franklin was met outside of Independence Hall by a woman who asked a simple question: do we have a monarchy or a republic? Franklin looked her in the eye and told her, “We have a republic, but only if you can keep it.”
That’s what some leaders don’t understand. They never have. America isn’t a land or a flag. It isn’t a president or a party. It’s a people. America is only free if we are too, because freedom is more than just liberty.
Liberty is simple. It’s the absence of constraint in all its forms, the removal of chains. A hermit in the woods has liberty. A stray cat searching the trash can for a meal has liberty.
Freedom is advanced citizenship. It’s independence guaranteed in the interdependence of community, the mutual self-governance of a people where all voices are heard and all voices carry weight.
A man, woman, child or beast can have liberty. Only a people can be free. And the only way to guarantee that freedom is to do it ourselves.
So let’s get to work. Let’s make those repairs. Let’s have an Independence Day we can be proud of.
★TR★
