The Most Ambivalent Anniversary Ever

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

July 4, 2026, has come and gone. It has to be remembered as the most ambivalent anniversary ever for America. We are caught in the grip of a madman and the whole world knows it. Trump’s birthday/Independence Day celebration was a fiasco. On this 4th of July, the Patriot Front, a white Nationalist hate group, marched to “reclaim America” in the nation’s capital, a city that used to be known as “Chocolate City.”

Videos of the group show a pack of roughly 150 masked men in uniforms carrying upside-down American flags (Rawsalerts screengrab)

On social media, those who expressed alarm at this display of racist patriotism were ridiculed and showered with a strident defense of the First Amendment. America is demonstrating fascism on steroids.

The 250th Anniversary came at a time when the country is mired in division, disinformation and absolute despair in many places for what the future holds. While the Supreme Court did not disavow the birthright citizenship granted under the Fourteenth Amendment, it is steadily reshaping America’s legal architecture to enshrine white supremacy.

Any resident of America who ventures outside of the continental United States and its “territories” does so at his or her peril. Native-born residents are subject to ridicule, scorn and in some places, death, because of how America is viewed on her 250th birthday. Immigrants who dare to leave the country are not allowed to return to their homes, sometimes under a pretense that they have violated (or are suspected of violating) some innocuous law.

As New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani pointed out in his compelling 4th of July address to New Yorkers and the nation, “America has always been a nation of contradictions. The wealthiest country in history, yet millions of families struggle to afford housing, healthcare, childcare and food.” The divisions and contradictions that he acknowledged were there at the beginning and have persisted for all of these past 250 years.

Congresswoman Lateefah Simon’s statement was inspiringly appropriate for the holiday.

Her tone reflects the ambivalence that Black people in America have held since the great Frederick Douglass delivered his Fourth of July speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” on July 5, 1852. Douglass pointed out that the Fourth of July was a day of mourning for enslaved people. The hypocrisy or what Douglass called “national inconsistencies” of white America’s celebration could not be hidden or camouflaged the way some try to do in 2026.

Frederick Douglass called out the slave traders, the politicians and the Christian Church saying:

“The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad, it corrupts your politicians at home.”

The celebration of America’s 250th anniversary in 2026 seems to similarly mock the challenges facing our communities and our world today. While Black people were declared “free” when the Civil War ended in 1865, over the next 100 years after Reconstruction ended in 1877, we moved from enslavement to Jim Crow to mass incarceration.

When Frederick Douglass passed in 1895, he was focused on anti-lynching, addressing the disenfranchisement of Black people after Reconstruction, advocating for women’s rights and condemning early efforts to glorify the Confederate “patriots” who fought to keep Black people enslaved in America’s bloodiest conflict.

I confess that as long as I have been “woke,” I have not adopted the 4th of July as a holiday to celebrate. I have not been ambivalent about the 4th of July since I was 13 years old. This year, as the nation celebrated Juneteenth, I even felt discouragingly ambivalent about Black Independence Day. It does not feel like we are “free” when the leaders of our country are proclaiming that immigrants from Black and Brown countries are “poisoning the blood of our country

Are we to forget that the same Patriot Front militia that marched in Washington D.C. last weekend attacked and mercilessly beat a Black man unconscious during their Independence Day march in Boston in July 2022?

Charles Murrell III fends off a marcher from a group bearing insignias of the white supremacist group Patriot Front on Saturday, July 2, 2022, in Boston. (Credit: Michael Dwyer/ AP)

On the anniversary of America’s independence, do we not remember that Renee Nicole Good lost her life on January 7th of this year at the hands of a federal immigration agent? Are we to forget that on January 24th of this year, federal Border Patrol agents murdered Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse and American citizen, during the federal occupation of Minneapolis?

Alex Pretti (1988-2026)

How do we reconcile Congress’ complete capitulation to Benjamin Netanyanu’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people with the image of America’s “exceptionalism” as promoting freedom and democracy.

The truth is we cannot. And those who blindly hold fast to the mythology that America’s “independence” is cause for celebration in 2026 give aid and comfort to those racists who want to “reclaim America.” They betray the values that many of us still hold dear: that equal justice under law is a constitutional promise that must be honored in every community, and Americans should be resolute in resolving our contradictions.

In the famous words of Frederick Douglass, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Free Palestine.

NOTES:

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/extremist-files/patriot-front/

https://www.history.com/articles/reconstruction-timeline-steps

https://historianspeaks.org/f/death-of-frederick-douglass-1895

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-casualties

https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/R/PDF/R44865/R44865.31.pdf

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-says-immigrants-are-poisoning-blood-country-biden-campaign-liken-rcna130141

https://loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/1852FrederickDouglass.pdf

https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/01/13/patriot-front-attack-boston-lawsuit

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/17/us/ice-shooting-minneapolis-renee-good

https://web.archive.org/web/20260126164959/https://www.startribune.com/fact-check-federal-officials-claims-about-fatal-minneapolis-shooting/601570444

https://www.military.com/israel-defense-provision-blocked-from-house-vote-despite-bipartisan-push