America Has Never Loved Us

Fireworks🎇will fill the sky tomorrow tonight.

Families will gather around grills.

Children will wave flags.

Across the country, Americans will celebrate the birth of a nation built on the promise of freedom.

And every year, I find myself asking the same question.

Freedom for who?

Because from where I stand, America has never truly loved us.

I don’t mean there have never been good people.

There have been.

Every generation has produced people willing to fight for justice.

There have always been Americans who believed this country could become better than it was.

I believe it should be better than what it is as it kinship to Jim Crow Era is real.

In plain terms

If someone asks what Jim Crow “looks like” today, my answer, the agenda wears hooded robes.

And it's cloak is unequal access, segregated outcomes, and policies that can reproduce racial disadvantage without using the same explicit language as before.

But as a nation—as a system—

America has repeatedly shown Black people that our freedom is conditional, our citizenship is questioned, and our humanity is often negotiable.

That is why the Fourth of July has always felt different to me.

As Frederick Douglass asked more than 170 years ago:

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery.”

Those words were spoken on July 5, 1852.

More than 170 years later, they still refuse to die.

They refuse to die because they continue to ask a question America has never fully answered.

Who is freedom actually for?

Every generation of Black Americans has had to answer that question.

My grandparents answered it.

My parents answered it.

Now I have to answer it as I raise a Black son in America.

And my answer is uncomfortable.

I cannot celebrate freedom without first confronting the distance between America’s ideals and America’s reality.

That isn’t hatred.

It is honesty.

America has always expected Black people to love a country that has struggled to love us back.

Not because we haven’t contributed.

Not because we haven’t sacrificed.

Not because we haven’t believed in the promise of this country.

But because, generation after generation, we have had to fight for rights that were supposed to belong to us from the beginning.

We fought to be free.

We fought to vote.

We fought to read.

We fought to own land.

We fought to attend school.

We fought to live where we chose.

We fought to work.

We fought to build wealth.

We fought to be treated as fully human.

Every generation has inherited a different battlefield.

The names have changed.

The laws have changed.

The language has changed.

But the struggle has never truly disappeared.

So I ask again:

How do you celebrate freedom when Black children still grow up learning survival before they learn independence?

How do you celebrate freedom when a Black teenager can be treated like a criminal over an accusation and lose his life before the truth is ever established? When justice seems to depend on who is standing trial rather than what actually happened?

How do you celebrate freedom when the name Trayvon Martin is still part of our national memory—not because he committed a crime, but because walking home became a death sentence?

How do you celebrate freedom when Black parents still have “the talk” with their children about police encounters while other parents never have to imagine that conversation?

How do you celebrate freedom when, in the grand scheme of history, your ancestors were enslaved just moments ago?

How do you celebrate freedom when schools are still separated by neighborhood wealth, and neighborhood wealth still reflects generations of discrimination?

How do you celebrate freedom when children in one ZIP code receive opportunities that children in another never see?

How do you celebrate freedom when your community is over-policed but under-protected?

How do you celebrate freedom when the wealth your family never had the chance to build still shapes what is possible for your children today?

How do you celebrate freedom when investment flows into your neighborhood, but ownership rarely flows to the people who have lived there for generations?

How do you celebrate freedom when Black entrepreneurs continue to face greater barriers to capital, commercial lending, and generational wealth?

How do you celebrate freedom when every election seems to reopen battles over whose voice counts and whose vote matters?

How do you celebrate freedom when every generation of Black families has had to prove that our lives, our children, our communities, and our futures deserve the same investment as everyone else’s?

How do you celebrate freedom when equality exists in law but not always in lived experience?

And then there are the daily cuts.

The assumptions.

The stereotypes.

The moments when you know you are being judged before you speak.

The pressure to constantly explain yourself.

The exhaustion of carrying history while pretending history is over.

The burden of having to prove your pain before anyone will believe it.

The burden of raising children in a country you desperately want them to love while knowing they may not always be loved in return.

Freedom is more than the absence of chains.

Freedom is safety.

Freedom is dignity.

Freedom is opportunity.

Freedom is ownership.

Freedom is being able to walk through your own country without constantly calculating risk.

Freedom is being able to raise your children without first teaching them how to survive institutions that were supposed to protect them.

Freedom is knowing that your life will be valued the same as everyone else’s.

I don’t write these words because I hate America.

I write them because I have spent my entire life hoping America would become what it has always claimed to be.

Loving a country does not require lying about it.

In fact, the deepest form of patriotism is telling the truth.

Truth is not what divides us.

Silence does.

History does not become less true because it makes us uncomfortable.

Ignoring it has never healed it.

Perhaps one day America will love Black people as fiercely as it asks Black people to love America.

Perhaps one day the promises written into our founding documents will belong equally to every child born beneath this flag.

Perhaps one day Black parents will stop having to choose between teaching hope and teaching survival.

When that day comes, I’ll celebrate with everyone else.

Until then, I refuse to confuse fireworks with freedom.

I refuse to mistake patriotism for justice.

I refuse to pretend that equality is complete simply because the law says it should be.

America is not diminished by truth.

It is diminished by its refusal to confront it.

So this Fourth of July, I do not celebrate a finished story.

I remember an unfinished one.

And I continue believing that telling the truth about America is one of the most patriotic acts any citizen can perform.