The U.S. at 250, Juneteenth, and the Contradiction of Freedom

I looked out my home office window the other day and noticed our neighbors across the street had hung up a new American flag with 250 in the blue square where the stars usually are, honoring the 250^th anniversary of the United States. I sent my husband a message about their flag, saying, “I’m about to get us a Juneteenth flag to hang up.” Only half joking. Seeing the flag immediately made me think about what it means to celebrate American freedom in a month when we also commemorate the delayed freedom of enslaved Black people.

This year, the U.S. marks 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This month, we celebrate Juneteenth, a holiday that commemorates the day enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863. Together, these two celebrations reveal a contradiction. One marks the founding promise of U.S. freedom, and the other reminds us that not everyone was included in that promise on July 4, 1776. Frederick Douglass raised a similar question in 1852 when he asked, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” His question still echoes in moments like this, when national celebration asks us to honor freedom without always reckoning with who was excluded from it.

Seeing my neighbors’ flag also brought me back to my own complicated relationship with the American flag. Over the last decade or so, probably since the first Trump administration, the flag has taken on a different meaning for me. When I see it, it doesn’t evoke pride. It evokes unease.

However, if I’m being honest, my uneasiness didn’t begin with the Trump/MAGA movement. I recall in high school opting out of saying the daily Pledge of Allegiance to the flag because the words “… with liberty and justice for all” did not feel true for me as a Black person. Even then, I couldn’t reconcile what I was being asked to affirm with what I knew to be true in my lived experience. My relationship with what the flag symbolized became more complicated during the first Trump administration and even more so now during his second term.

I remember watching the documentary The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones a few years ago. The project began as a New York Times magazine initiative in 2019, marking 400 years since the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in what would become the United States. It was later expanded into a book and documentary series by the same name. In the first episode of the documentary, “Democracy,” she spoke about how her dad flew the American flag at the home where she grew up. Hannah-Jones recounts how the flag always flew pristine and that her dad would replace it “as soon as it showed the slightest tatter.” She shares that when she was young, the flag never made sense to her, writing, “how could this Black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused Black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism.” I remember shouting “yesss!!” when I heard her say that because I understood the disconnect. How do you proudly fly a flag for a country that has never fully acknowledged the humanity of people who look like you?

I have a hard time celebrating the 250^th anniversary during a time when we are experiencing heightened overt racism, rollback of protections, and a retreat from commitments to DEI. Messages that signal to Black people that our safety, our contributions, and even our presence remain conditional in this country. These realities continue to place an emotional and psychological burden on Black people to endure the contradictions of American democracy. These burdens exacerbate what Mary-Frances Winters and I write about in Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body, and Spirit.

Hannah-Jones writes that 1619 is as important to the American story as 1776. I would add that 1865 is just as important to that story. She further asserts that “Black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are the nation’s true founding fathers. And that no people has a greater claim to the flag than we do.” I believe that is a powerful truth. And still, I continue to wrestle with what the flag evokes in me.

The question remains: what does it mean to live in a nation that has not always claimed you, especially when it asks you to celebrate a promise it has not fully delivered?