Editor’s Note: This week’s guest author once again courageously tells the truth – this time about our 250^th anniversary as a nation. My friend, anti-racist educator and activist A. Adar Ayira, passionately and persuasively challenges the mistruths and lies that are the basis of our 250^th celebration and the movement to solidify white supremacy in America forever. Adar is a founding member of Baltimore Racial Justice Action and the founder of Ayira Core Concepts LLC.

After one bout at the “UFC Freedom 250” – an event held on the lawn of the White House as part of the 250^th celebration – an invited fighter gleefully shouted into the waiting microphone “..Michelle Obama is a man.  Am I right, America?”

Many in the nearly all-white crowd laughed. Media noted the smile/”half-smile” on the lips of the president after the comment was spewed (he even called the fighter “outstanding” after hearing his comment about the former and first African American First Lady).  

To this day, that comment has been allowed to stand: not surprising, considering all the racist (as well as homophobic, transphobic, and ableist) comments that have come from those now responsible for creating and passing policies, allocating resources, and steering the helm for what the U.S. will look like in and beyond its 250^th.

Considering current reality, what really is being “celebrated” on this 250^th?

It cannot be that the U.S. is a land of “freedom and justice for all.” Not with voting rights being stripped away from majority Black and brown communities through gerrymandering, increased obstructions to voting access and opportunity, and through restrictions and punishments for exercising the “right to protest,” as guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Nor can we be “celebrating” a nation that believes (as is on the Statue of Liberty) “..give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Not with the Supreme Court’s decisions to not only end deportation protections that will disproportionately and detrimentally impact Black and brown immigrants, but to also block immigrants (again, disproportionately Black and brown) from seeking asylum.

Are we “celebrating” that white voters were the only racial group whose majority voted for  an administration that seems to go against the very values on which the U.S. – at least on paper – was “founded” (only true if one denies land theft, forced displacements, massacres, etc., of Native American peoples)?

The concept of “America” being mythologized by current (and past) national narratives has never been a reality. The closest it has come to being that reality is for those classified as “white.”

And even that obscures the reality that –- at the beginning –- only white men who “owned” land (stolen from Native Americans) could vote or be socially accepted into that concept. For the first 80 years of this country’s white history, white men who did not “own” land could not.

Native Americans were not accepted in the concept of America – especially not into that most American privilege and right of voting — until the Snyder Act was passed in 1924. 

From 1776 until 1964/1965 – a total of 188/89 years — African Americans were denied access and opportunity to not only the right to vote without obstruction, but to the right of any social and professional life without the obstruction of legal discrimination. It has only been from 1965 until 2024 that African Americans have had the legal right of fuller (not full) citizenship – only fifty-nine of the 250 years being celebrated. Since 2024, we have seen many of those rights systematically eviscerated. “Celebrating” America’s 250^th requires Black and non-Black people of color to overlook the generations of exclusions, atrocities, terrorism, and current backward movement that the majority of white voters voted FOR in 2024. It requires their “celebration” of a vote that supported U.S. recodification of laws and policies that  “make America great” – for white people.

It requires that every racial group not classified as “white” gaslight themselves regarding these racialized histories –- all in the name of advancing a false narrative that erases them.

During America’s 250^th, everyone committed to the concept of “America” ought to study the histories of those racial groups who are being targeted and whose contributions to U.S. society are now being erased. U.S. history confirms that “America” has not offered freedom and equality to all. In fact, for many it has always functionally been “AmeriKKKa” (NOTE: Many white Americans think of the KKK as a fringe group that operated outside of “regular” society and law.  Many African Americans understand that the term “AmeriKKKa” refers to a U.S. that for the majority of its history upheld the values of the KKK as mainstream policies and law.)

There is a cognitive dissonance about the expectation that we “celebrate” a country and Constitution that almost every day offers an atrocity, SCOTUS decision, or attempt to rewrite, reshape, or dismantle the very things this 250^th demands “celebration” of.

In 1935, Langston Hughes wrote “Let America Be America Again.” This poem reminds us not only of the truth of U.S. history, but also of the hope that one day it might finally become an  America that lives up to  “E pluribus unum” (out of many, one).