If you live in the U.S., you’ve probably been inundated with campaigns and messaging from social media ads and grocery store displays to the ongoing Great American State Fair in Washington, D.C. celebrating America’s 250th anniversary. Often, these displays of celebration honor America’s independence and the freedom America has held for the last 250 years.
Freedom is a word that carries a lot of weight. It’s a word often used across the political spectrum, from the farthest on the right to the farthest on the left, yet carries a different meaning for a lot of people. Over the last decade in particular, freedom has been touted in Conservative circles as something that is at the core of the right’s political beliefs. The constant calls of “Faith, family, and freedom” among Conservative seeks to defend Chrisitian nationalism, bring the nuclear family back into American culture, and limit government interference in people’s lives. Take the celebration of America’s 250th birthday for example: Nearly a decade ago, the bipartisan organization America250 was established to develop a massive celebration of America, with ambitions to create time capsule with contributions from all 50 states and throwing a July 4th America’s Block Party concert featuring Queen Latifah, Chris Stapleton and the Smashing Pumpkins, according to the Guardian.
But then Trump came into the picture and decided to put more “freedom” into America’s 250th birthday by hijacking the America250’s original July 4th plans and instead bringing in the Trump-aligned initiative Freedom250 to honor the nation’s birthday. In stark opposition to America250’s messaging, Freedom250 presents a sanitized, whitewashed kind of approach to the America’s birthday, celebrating and honoring white freedom and Christian nationalism, while also encouraging people to be “patriots” for their country by applying to be in the Patriot Games, a Hunger Games-like competition where the nation’s strongest teenagers can compete against one another for a scholarship grand prize.
Freedom250 has even created “Freedom Trucks,” mobile museums that provide people with the opportunity to “experience the story of American independence as it arrives in communities across the country.”
Despite Conservative ideology viewing freedom as “religious liberty” or “small government,” we know that for Conservatives, freedom isn’t about being free from oppression — freedom is about being free to be the oppressor, without consequence. Abortion bans, ICE terrorizing communities, attacking trans and queer communities have all been done in the name of freedom to uphold the right-wing, conservative agenda.
How Conservatives are framing America’s 250th birthday as a celebration of freedom is a prime example of what erasing history looks like, particularly erasing the history of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people and the leaders who fought for equality in this country. Acknowledging this milestone birthday without naming both the past and present atrocities that have made America into what it is today is a bold act of revisionist history that we must actively resist. There is no doubt that America was built on stolen land, colonization, genocide, and chattel slavery. Indigenous peoples were murdered, separated from their tribes, and watched as colonizers destroyed the lands that had been sacred to them for generations — the land that held the bones of their ancestors and kept them nourished and alive. Manifest Destiny was heralded by the U.S. government as a vital act to expand freedom, democracy, and capitalism across America by any means necessary — including displacing and murdering Native Americans so white Americans could enjoy their post-Revolutionary war freedom.
The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade brought millions of people from Africa who worked under the most inhumane conditions while white Americans enjoyed the freedom that came with being white in the U.S. during that time. Slaves were tourted, raped, and killed for nearly 250 years, and even after Emancipation, Black people remained in chains due to Jim Crow Laws, racial segregation, redlining, and more. Those metaphorical chains still exist among Black Americans today, who continue to deal with the systemic racism from slavery and Jim Crow through limited opportunities to build wealth, access to affordable healthcare, food apartheid, housing access, and more.
The whitewashed, sanitized version of America that Conservatives are offering up this July 4th holiday is a white supremacist agenda in action. Behind these massive celebrations of America’s freedom is a deeply disturbing reality: America, on its 250th birthday, is still not free. Gutting the remaining key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that will make it harder for Black and Brown communities to be represented in Congress and state legislatures isn’t freedom. Unlimited power to gerrymander maps in Republican favor so conservative policies can harm more people isn’t freedom. Banning people from accessing abortion care and then letting them die isn’t freedom. There is nothing free about the current state of America, and the celebration of this false freedom is an attempt to erase history, avoid the present, and create a future where harm and oppression takes precedence over care and safety.
What the marking of America’s 250 birthday needs to do is tell the truth. The longer we wait to tell the truth of America’s past and present, the longer we deny and evade the dignity, healing, belonging that is birthed from repair. When we tell the truth, we can move forward in ways that reduce harm and make freedom for all non-negotiable. We must reclaim the American story that represents ALL the people — not the 1%, not our elected leaders — but we the people.
So, a reminder as we mark this July 4th holiday:
You can’t celebrate America’s 250th birthday if you are erasing history
You can’t celebrate America’s 250th birthday if you are forcing people to give birth
You can’t celebrate America’s 250th birthday if you’re on stolen land
You can’t celebrate America’s 250th birthday if Black people haven’t received reparations
You can’ celebrate America’s 250th birthday if you fund ICE
You can’t celebrate America’s 250th birthday if you allow children getting gunned down in schools
You can’t celebrate America’s 250th birthday if you don’t see queer and trans folks as human
You can’t celebrate America’s 250th birthday if you put profit over people
You can’t celebrate America’s 250th birthday if you take the side of the oppressor
You can’t celebrate America’s 250th birthday if everyone is not free
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