Celebrating?
BreakingRanksBlog | Big-Sarge.blog
There will be fireworks. There will be speeches. There will be a National Garden of American Heroes and a student art contest and an 85-page document called “At-a-Glance Biographies of 250 American Heroes,” published by Freedom 250 and underwritten by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Go read it.
The word “slave” appears once. “Slavery” appears once. “Racism” does not appear at all.
Frederick Douglass is in there. So is Harriet Tubman. So is Rosa Parks. They made the list. So did Medgar Evers. So did Sojourner Truth and Booker T. Washington and Coretta Scott King.
Their names are on the page. Their pain is not.
What’s also not on the page: the auction. The separation of mothers from children on Virginia courthouse steps while white men in frock coats recorded the transaction like a land deed. The two hundred and forty-six years — from 1619 to 1865 — during which the labor, the bodies, and the futures of Black people built the wealth this country will spend the next month celebrating. The Reconstruction governments that actually worked, until white terror burned them down. The grandfathers who came home from World War II in uniform and couldn’t vote in the states they defended. The four little girls in Birmingham. The fire hoses. The clubs. The dogs.
None of that is in the document. The document has a “can-do spirit.”
That phrase is the insult made plain. “Can-do spirit” is what you say about someone who turned lemons into lemonade. What Harriet Tubman did was not make lemonade. She moved through darkness, hunted, on foot, in winter, and brought people out of a system that classified them as property. Frederick Douglass did not succeed because of optimism. He taught himself to read in secret because reading was illegal for him, wrote his own story when the country refused to write it honestly, and spent his life holding America to a standard it had already written down and refused to meet. Rosa Parks did not sit down on a Montgomery bus because she had a “can-do spirit.” She sat down because she was tired — tired in a way the document cannot explain without using the words it refuses to use.
When you strip that history out and hand us back our heroes as feel-good symbols, you are not honoring them. You are using them. You are taking the most costly human beings in American history — people who paid in blood, in chains, in exile, in assassination — and converting them into mascots for a country that still has not reckoned with what it did to them.
That is what a costume is. It is the thing that looks like the person without being the person. You can put Harriet Tubman’s name in a government document and simultaneously work to dismantle the voting rights she never lived to have. You can print Frederick Douglass’s biography and erase the word “slavery” from the same page. You can celebrate Rosa Parks and close the polling places in the counties where Black people live.
The costume fits. The person underneath it has been erased.
That is not oversight. It is a choice. And it is a choice that tells Black Americans exactly what this celebration is — and exactly who it is for.
So the question is not whether Donald Trump is celebrating America’s 250th birthday. He is. The question is which America he’s celebrating. The one that includes all of us, or the one that’s more comfortable when we’re scenery.
The answer is not in the brochure. It’s in the receipts.
On January 22, 2026, the National Park Service removed the slavery interpretive panels from Philadelphia’s President’s House Site — the place where George Washington kept nine enslaved people while serving as the nation’s first president. A federal court ordered them restored. The Interior Department said it would appeal. Let that sit.
On March 27, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The order reinstated the 1776 Commission — the body whose report the American Historical Association called a “partisan attempt to restrict historical pedagogy” — and directed federal agencies to stop funding education that treats America’s racial history as anything other than a footnote to a success story. Park rangers at the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home were directed to remove the word “racist” from descriptions of the Klansman who murdered Medgar Evers in his driveway in 1963.
That is not a clerical correction. That is the government deciding what happened.
He told Black people he was going to help them. “Nobody has done more for Black Americans than me.” He said it at rallies, in debates, in social media posts issued at 2 a.m. like scripture. Some people believed it. Let’s look at what “help” looked like.
On July 4, 2025 — Independence Day — Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The Congressional Budget Office scored the Medicaid cuts alone at $1.02 trillion over a decade. The Kaiser Family Foundation called it “the largest cut in the program’s history.” Black Americans rely on Medicaid at higher rates than white Americans. The Urban Institute estimated 760,000 Black people will lose insurance when the enhanced premium tax credits expire. By 2034, the CBO projects 10 million more uninsured Americans. That number will not be distributed evenly.
WIC — the nutrition program that feeds low-income pregnant women, new mothers, and children under five — was targeted in both the FY2026 and FY2027 budgets. The proposal cut the fruit-and-vegetable cash benefit for breastfeeding mothers from $52 a month to $13. Congress blocked it for FY2026. It came back for FY2027. Black families make up nearly half of WIC enrollment. The administration keeps swinging at the same program.
The Social Security Administration, gutted by DOGE — roughly 7,000 workers cut in the largest staffing reduction in SSA history — is now so backlogged that people who have already been approved for disability benefits cannot get their cases processed. Black Americans have higher rates of work-related disability. The wait is not an accident. It’s a policy outcome dressed up as efficiency.
In February 2025, Trump fired General Charles Q. Brown Jr., Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Brown was only the second Black general to hold that role in the history of the United States military. He was fired without stated cause. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had been public about his intentions: anyone involved in “DEI/woke s—” was going to go. Brown went. So did Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Admiral Linda Fagan, Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield, and others. The military didn’t get more capable that day. It got a message about who belongs at the top.
DOGE cut roughly 277,000 federal jobs since January 2025. Black workers made up 18.5% of the federal workforce — nearly six points above their share of the overall labor market. The agencies hit hardest included the Department of Education, where Black women held more than a quarter of the positions. The OPM data tool that tracked the racial composition of the federal workforce was eliminated under Executive Order 14151. They cut the workers and then cut the count.
By December 2025, Black unemployment had climbed from 6.2% to 7.5% — peaking at 8.2% in November, the highest since October 2021. Between February and July 2025, Black women lost 319,000 jobs. In the same period, white men gained 365,000. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies called it a “Black recession.” The White House called the economy historic.
On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Court reworked the 40-year-old framework that defined when states could be required to create majority-Black congressional districts. Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent: “Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter.” She added: “The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave.”
Louisiana had, for the first time in its history, elected two Black members of Congress. Under the new map that decision enabled, that will not last.
This is not a new fight. Shelby County v. Holder dismantled preclearance in 2013. States that had required federal approval before changing their voting rules were suddenly free to change them without asking anyone. Polling places closed. Voter rolls were purged. Georgia’s SB 202 — signed after Black voters in Atlanta delivered the 2020 election to Joe Biden — slashed drop boxes by 77% in majority-minority counties and added documentation requirements that left nearly 130,000 Black voters without matching IDs. Mail-ballot use among Black Georgians fell from 29% in 2020 to 5% in 2024.
None of that happened by accident. Suppression is a strategy. It always has been.
So yes. America is turning 250. The Freedom 250 document has 244 heroes — a count that includes 34 Black Americans. Their names are there. Their history is not.
That is the tell.
You cannot celebrate the achievement without naming what it was achieved against. You cannot put Harriet Tubman in a document about American heroes and leave out the people who hunted her. You cannot print Frederick Douglass’s name and erase the word “slavery.” You cannot fire the second Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, cut the Medicaid that keeps Black families alive, gut the federal workforce that Black Americans built careers in, and kill the voting rights that put Black representation on the map — and then hand us a brochure and call it a celebration.
That is not a birthday party for all of America. That is a reunion for some of it.
I’ve been writing about this for years at big-sarge.blog and BreakingRanksBlog. I’m not going to stop. But writing about it is not enough. Reading about it is not enough.
The vote is still the most direct instrument Black Americans have. It is also the one this administration has worked hardest to take away. If that’s not reason enough to use it, I don’t know what is.
Check your registration. Confirm your polling place. Bring somebody with you.
If they’re trying to take it, that tells you exactly what it’s worth.
— Big Sarge
Wayne Ince is a retired U.S. Air Force SMSgt, combat veteran, PTSD survivor, and the author behind Breaking Ranks Books and BreakingRanksBlog. He writes on race, justice, and the military at big-sarge.blog.
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