When Freedom Means Fireworks & Fear: The Irony of America’s Independence
Freedom in Ashes: The Boom, the Betrayal, and the Becoming
My Sister,
Let’s sit with this together.
Every Fourth of July, I’m struck by the same irony:
The sky explodes with fireworks, and you can hear two kinds of cries, the squeals of joy and screams of fear. One person sees bright lights and feels alive. Another hears the boom and drops for cover, their body remembering centuries of betrayal.
Freedom in America has always been a double-edged promise. Two sides of the same coin. For Indigenous and black people, that contradiction cuts deep.
The Cruel Irony
We’re told to stand for the anthem, to pledge allegiance to liberty and justice for all but that was fake. For our ancestors, “independence” never looked like that.
Freedom meant an end to the whip, the sale of our families, the ownership of our bodies. Freedom meant the chance to learn to read, to own ourselves. Freedom should have meant we’d finally belong.
But the Constitution counted us as three-fifths human with no rights, no protection and very little value past the physical labor provided. The Declaration of Independence promised liberty for all men but kept our people in chains.
Frederick Douglass asked it plain in 1852: “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
And still today, I find myself asking: What does it mean now, for us?
From Reagan to MAGA: The Never-Ending Betrayal
We can’t talk about fireworks and not talk about the smoke. From Ronald Reagan, the better-looking version of George Wallace, to the Tea Party, to this MAGA regime rewriting freedom to serve only a few. White nationalism. White supremacy. The lie that only certain people deserve to thrive here.
And now, we are experiencing Project 2025. Deportations. Book bans. Rollbacks of diversity, equity, inclusion and access. America says: “Be free!” but you can’t learn the truth about American history. You can’t study black history, hispanic history, women’s history or anything about the contributions of Muslims in the states. Why? Doesn’t freedom allow us to speak in truth?
How is white-washing American history freedom? Dismantling the progress of the civil rights that our ancestors fought and died for is not freedom.
What Did Freedom Really Mean for Us?
For the enslaved, freedom was the difference between life and death. If we tell the truth we will admit freedom was never the full promise. As you know, after 1776, some Northern states moved to end slavery but millions stayed in bondage.Free Black folks were still hunted, segregated, denied from wealth, land, and safety.
Juneteenth, our true Independence Day, didn’t arrive until 1865, two years late, whispered through Union soldiers. For so many of us, it’s still late.
What Do We Do With This Truth?
We tell it.
We stop letting America whitewash our pain. Remember, The Trail of Tears, Executive Order 9066, and Jim Crow for starters. We hold the paradox: tears of joy and tears of terror.
Maybe we say: “Yes, the sky lights up tonight but so does our memory. So does our resistance. So does our collective self-love”
💡 The Trail of Tears: America’s Original Betrayal
Let’s not skip past what happened on this soil, long before fireworks and anthems.
In the 1830s, the U.S. government forced entire Native nations, mostly the Cherokee, but also the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, off their ancestral lands in the Southeast.
Why?
Because white settlers and politicians wanted that fertile land.
Because Manifest Destiny said this country was “meant” to expand at any cost.
Because the gold in Georgia was worth more than Native lives.
The Indian Removal Act of 1830 made it all legal. President Andrew Jackson called it “progress.” Coerced treaties. Broken promises. Families rounded up by troops. Held in “round-up camps” before being forced to march west over mountains, through winter, starving and sick. Thousands died on that brutal journey to what is now Oklahoma of disease, exposure, hunger, heartbreak. Entire cultures torn from the soil that had sustained them for generations.
The Trail of Tears is not just a tragedy it’s a mirror of America. It’s a reminder that when greed and white supremacy work together, they clear entire nations out of the way. It’s the original blueprint for how America treats people it decides are “in the way.”
And it’s woven into the same soil we’re asked to celebrate as freedom.
I hold this remembering close because we cannot reimagine what freedom means for us Black, Indigenous, people of color unless we first tell the truth about what was stolen and who survived.
May we never forget whose bones line the road beneath our feet. May we honor their resilience every time we dare to dream of a world rooted in justice, sovereignty, and respect.
💡 Remembering Japanese American Internment: A Betrayal on American Soil
Let’s sit with another truth we’re rarely taught honestly:
In my grandmother’s childhood, right here on American soil, this country turned on its own people. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, fear and suspicion gave white supremacy permission to act. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, and just like that, over 120,000 Japanese Americans. It is true, most of those forced from their homes were American citizens.
They were rounded up, stripped of property and dignity, and sent to internment camps, called “relocation centers.” But let’s be clear: these were prisons built on prejudice.
The justification? Supposed threats of espionage and sabotage. The reality? Not a shred of evidence. Entire families locked away for years, their homes and businesses stolen or lost. Generations left with deep financial, emotional, spiritual scars.
This wasn’t ancient history either, my grandmother was a child when this happened.
This is part of the same soil my family grew from: a country quick to betray its own when fear becomes policy.
We remember so we never let them rewrite the story.
We remember so we can choose to do better and to hold each other close as allies in shared history of trauma by shared oppressors.
💡 Understanding Jim Crow: And Why It Still Echoes
Let’s tell the truth about what Jim Crow really was because this isn’t ancient history. Sis, it’s the roots under our feet. The name “Jim Crow” came from a cruel minstrel routine in the 1830s. Yes, a white man in blackface, mocking Black people as lazy and foolish, turning our humanity into a joke for cheap applause.
From that hateful caricature grew an entire system of segregation. Jim Crow laws touched everything: schools, buses, trains, restaurants, jobs, even hospitals. Separate but equal was the lie they told to keep us out but what we got was always less.
Voting rights? Those were stolen too with poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses. And if you pushed back, violence was waiting: lynchings, intimidation, terror, all to keep white supremacy standing tall.
It didn’t officially end until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and even then, the ghost of Jim Crow kept haunting our neighborhoods, our schools, our paychecks, our ballots.
Here’s why I share this: my mother was born in 1950 in Alabama, deep in Jim Crow’s grip. This was not that long ago. I am the first in my immediate family born with the legal right to vote. Think about that for a moment. That is how close this history is to our bones. I was born in 1968. We are not talking about ancient history here.
We carry it all these years but we are not bound by it. We remember so we can reimagine what freedom should mean for us.
💡 The American Slave Trade: The Root We Must Name
Before Jim Crow. Before the internment camps. Before the Trail of Tears my people were stolen and shackled in the belly of ships.
The American slave trade, that brutal, centuries-long system, ripped millions of Africans from their homes and families, chaining them in the dark holds of ships that crossed the Atlantic. This Middle Passage was a floating graveyard with disease, starvation, torture, and death. Those who survived were sold like cattle, bodies and futures bartered to build wealth they would never taste, feel or experience.
Even after the international trade was outlawed in 1808, the buying and selling didn’t stop. A domestic slave trade flourished tearing families apart again and again, moving Black bodies from the Upper South to the Deep South, feeding the cotton fields and tobacco plantations that made America rich.
Slavery wasn’t just an economic system it was a worldview. It was the lie that Black people were less than human. We were property to be logged in a revenue log. Most white people convinced themselves our suffering was “good” for the nation’s prosperity. That we should be grateful to survive.
As you know, the Civil War ended the institution, but not the idea. The legacy still snakes through every crack of this country:
Systematic oppression and marginalization. Generational wealth we were cut off from.
The justifications of our pain. The systems that say, “Stay in your place.”
And let’s tell the truth about what life on those plantations really was.
Forget the old lie they fed us in history books that our ancestors “learned a trade” and were “well cared for” by kind masters. That was propaganda to ease white guilt, not reality. The plantation was a prison camp. Families ripped apart and sold at the whim of profit. Mothers forced to bear children they knew could be stolen and sold.
Men and women whipped bloody for the smallest act of resistance, or no reason at all.
Bodies broken under the sun, working fields from can’t see dawn to can’t see dusk, with no pay, no freedom to leave, no legal protection for rape or murder.
Any scraps of education, faith, or family were stolen moments of defiance and a refusal to let their humanity be erased.
The Black family survived in secret corners, whispered lullabies and coded prayers, stolen time at night after the overseer’s shadow disappeared. They made family in the darkness because the law said they were property, not people. This is the root, Sis.
The brutality, the resilience, the lie and the truth all carried in our bones when we stand here now, dreaming and building in a country that once sold us like cattle.
Why This Belongs in Our Becoming
I hold this truth because it’s my bloodline. My ancestors survived the Middle Passage, the whip, the auction block, the forced breeding, the split families all so that I could sit here now and tell you: Our becoming was never up for their approval.
You can’t talk about America’s “freedom” without naming who built it, who paid for it in blood, and who still isn’t free. Our remembering is our resistance. Our brands, our ideas, our joy, they are our proof that they could never break us completely.
🦋 Soul-Work for Our Freedom Lineage
💡 Soul-Work:
Ask yourself: “What did my ancestors make possible that I’ve been afraid to claim?”
Write it down. Say it aloud. Let it remind you: you are not here by accident, you are here by endurance.
A Global Reminder
When I think of Ukrainians selling flowers during bombings, saying, “Love is victory, what else do we have?” When I think of Palestinians fighting to exist in an open-air prison. When I think of Latin American immigrants who came to this country in pursuit of the American Dream, that George Carlin, said you could only believe if you are asleep. When I think of our people in America, taught to shrink or be erased…
I know our freedom can’t be found in fireworks or flags. It lives in our audacity to keep loving, creating, imagining something more.
Your Soul-Work: Reimagining Joy
💡 Soul-Work:
Take one breath today and ask: “How can I hold my pain and still imagine joy?”
We must make room to dream beyond anger and despair.
To break free of America’s categories, the boxes, the whitewashing, the lies.
To build a life, a brand, a legacy that reflects our highest self and not just our struggle.
Your fireworks are yours to reclaim. Not as a spectacle of betrayal but as a reminder: you are becoming, unfinished and unstoppable.
Braided with Every Story
This is the through-line that binds it all:
- The Trail of Tears that cleared the land.
- The slave ships that filled the plantations.
- The Jim Crow laws that kept us “in our place.”
- The internment camps that showed how fear breeds cruelty on repeat.
- And now, the Latin American migrants, the essential workers who do the work no one else will, yet are hunted, detained, and deported like they are less than human.
This is the soil we stand on, Sister.
And it’s the truth we must name because only by telling it can we remember we come from people who never stopped loving, never stopped becoming, even when the world called them disposable.
💡 Soul-Work: Take one breath today. Place your hand on your heart. Ask yourself: “What did my ancestors’ survival make possible for me that I have yet to claim?”
Say it out loud. Write it down. Let it be your declaration of unfinished freedom on this and every July 4, America’s Independence Day.
The Becoming
May we break the shackles of America’s lies.
May we hold our rage and our hope in the same hands.
May we build brands, families, and futures that honor the bones beneath our feet and bloom far beyond them.
Your becoming is your birthright.
Your remembering is your revolution.
In light, love, and appreciating the fireworks,
Dray 🥂
Listen to The Becoming podcast episode wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
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