What to a Writer is the Fourth of July?

We get to decide when a story begins and what angle to view it. Keeping that that authority from authoritarian forces is a full-time job.

Jessica G. Smith Lennan, deputy director of the 11th Street Bridge Park, during an inspiring and futuristic stop on my cultural tour of D.C. on the Anacostia River this past April. Photo by Natalie Hopkinson.

This week I helped launch a journalism series marking America’s 250th birthday. I personally contributed two pieces: One is a conversation with writer Dave Zirin on his new biography of the inspiring, game-changing professor Howard Zinn. My other piece is a kind of “listicle” giving a cultural tour of Black history, rebellion, creativity and freedom in Washington, DC that begins in 1862.

I collaborated with my American University students on the series with The Washington City Paper.

I became determined to weigh in on this historic moment more than a year ago after I was invited to participate in a nonpartisan planning meeting for the July 4th, 2026 celebrations on the National Mall. The Zoom meeting took place days after the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump. Someone on the call suggested the current approach was “misreading the moment.”

I unmuted my computer. “What exactly do you mean by ‘the moment’?” It was a rhetorical question. I knew exactly what they meant. They were talking about the white rage: a backlash to “diversity, equity and inclusion” pledges that were being aggressively adopted across America as a cure for systemic racism after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd.

Powerful forces amplified white grievance by intercepting the acronym shorthand for this earnest and very much democratic effort. They flipped a switch. Any systematic attempt to include everyone in everything was widely vilified and even banned .

I told the group on the call that I reject any “moment” that shoves people like me out of the picture. Frankly, it’s un-American. As my son later pointed out to me, the entire premise of American democracy is based on DEI. In 1776, we were a collection of extremely different states with wildly varying accents, weather, population sizes, economies, colonial histories, topographies. Yet each state still gets roughly equal representation in the entity called the USA. The confusing Electoral College system that chooses our head of state? DEI.

In the year and half since that July 4th planning call, a House Congressional committee accused the White House of hijacking the 250th birthday to scam voters, harvest voter data, promote white nationalist Christian ideology and enrich their allies using the National Mall. The original bipartisan group that had been working on it since 2016 decamped to Philadelphia. Across the U.S., a shocking number of actual historians, writers and teachers tapped out of the 250th birthday celebrations, according to reporting in The New Yorker.

I have been helplessly watching this train wreck for months, and asking my students to grapple with these questions in the classroom. It truly raised my spirits to speak to Dave Zirin, the prolific sports writer I have long admired. He gave many reasons to be hopeful about America’s future in our conversation about his forthcoming book on his late mentor, the historian Howard Zinn.

I first read Zinn’s A Peoples’ History of the United States when I was an undergrad at Howard. It was transformative. Zinn set the beginning of America’s story at a different time and from a different perspective than I had ever seen. The first chapter time-travels to 1492, when Columbus initiates a savage genocide of the Arawak people. The next chapter begins in 1619 when the first enslaved African arrived in Virginia. And so on.

This is the power of the author. We get to decide when a story begins and what angle to view it. Keeping that that authority from authoritarian forces is a full-time job.

One of my former AU students, Isabella Brown, wrote the most consequential piece in the City Paper package: “1776 is a Blip in the History of the Piscataway Indian Nation.” She rewinds the tape to centuries before Columbus. She tells the story of the present-day Piscataway Indian Nation indigenous to the nation’s capital region. She reports on the current headwinds the tribe is facing in their effort to protect the sacred but endangered Potomac River that is under threats that we are not talking about enough.

Isabella floated above the pettiness and fray of the moment. She handed a microphone to people with a consequential past who are attempting to guard the future for all of us. Sounds patriotic to me. Happy Fourth!