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Why Race Always Sits Underneath America’s National Celebrations
- smartbrowngirlllc
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
Every time the United States approaches a major national anniversary, the same tension seems to reappear. Some people want the occasion to focus on celebration, while others see it as an opportunity for reflection. Some argue that patriotism requires emphasizing the nation’s achievements and accomplishments, while others believe that genuine patriotism requires confronting the country’s failures honestly. Inevitably, someone asks why race has to enter the conversation at all.
After reading America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversary, by Eddie Glaude Jr. I think the answer is relatively straightforward. Race continues to appear in these moments because race has played a central role in shaping the country itself. It is difficult to explain American citizenship, voting rights, immigration policy, housing, education, policing, or even the meaning of freedom without eventually confronting the role that race has played in each of those areas. The history is simply too interconnected to separate cleanly, which is why these debates continue to resurface no matter how strongly some people wish to move beyond them.
The book examines several major American anniversaries and demonstrates how each reflected the racial politics of its era. The 1876 Centennial, for example, celebrated national unity at the very moment Reconstruction was collapsing across the South. Black Americans had recently gained citizenship and voting rights following the Civil War, yet white terrorist violence was intensifying, federal protections were weakening, racial massacres were spreading, and many white Americans were increasingly portraying Black political participation as illegitimate.
That contradiction was significant because the Centennial depended heavily on a narrative of reconciliation between white Americans in the North and South. Black freedom complicated that narrative because acknowledging ongoing racial violence would have required the nation to confront what the Civil War had actually been fought over and what Reconstruction was attempting to achieve. As a result, the celebration emphasized reunion and national healing while Black Americans were increasingly excluded from meaningful political participation.
A similar pattern emerged during the 1926 Sesquicentennial. By that point, the Ku Klux Klan had reemerged as a powerful political and cultural force, immigration restrictions had become more restrictive, and white Protestant nationalism was increasingly accepted within mainstream politics. Despite these realities, official patriotic celebrations continued to portray the United States as spiritually unified and morally exceptional. Race wasn’t simply a background issue during this period. The celebrations themselves helped define who was considered fully American and who remained outside the boundaries of that identity.
That observation forms one of the book’s most important arguments. Patriotism isn’t only about expressing love for one’s country. It’s also about determining whose experiences become central to the national story and whose experiences are treated as inconvenient, uncomfortable, or expendable. National celebrations do more than commemorate the past. They help shape collective memory and influence how future generations understand the country.
The 1976 Bicentennial introduced a different set of challenges because the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate had already exposed significant contradictions within American democracy. Even so, many official celebrations continued to rely on what Eddie Glaude describes as “storybook America,” a version of the nation that emphasizes innocence, progress, and national virtue while minimizing structural inequality, exclusion, and backlash.
That concept helps explain many contemporary political debates. Discussions about race often feel threatening to some Americans because those conversations challenge deeply held and emotionally comforting narratives about the country itself. This dynamic helps explain why debates over diversity initiatives, book bans, patriotic education, and projects such as the 1619 Project frequently become so emotionally charged. These conflicts aren’t merely disputes over curriculum. They are struggles over national memory and competing visions of what patriotism requires. At their core, they ask whether patriotism depends on protecting comforting myths or confronting historical realities honestly.
The book also argues that American history repeatedly follows a familiar cycle. Periods of racial injustice become impossible to ignore, reforms are implemented in response, backlash emerges against those reforms, demands for further change are portrayed as excessive, and the country attempts to restore a sense of normalcy without fully addressing the underlying problems. That cycle helps explain why these conversations never fully disappear.
The history remains unresolved because many of the systems and inequalities connected to that history never completely disappeared. As a result, the same questions continue resurfacing across generations, often in new forms but with familiar underlying tensions. Race remains present in these moments because the nation continues trying to celebrate ideals that it has struggled to fully realize.
Until the United States becomes more comfortable telling a fuller and more complex story about itself, these tensions will likely remain part of every major anniversary. The challenge isn’t that race keeps entering the conversation. The challenge is that the country’s history makes it impossible to tell the full story without it.
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