Because the moral question is not what America can celebrate, but whether it can finally build a freedom as large as the equality it has always claimed.

How do we get out of this?

How does a country being overtaken by cruelty, corruption, authoritarian hunger, racial resentment and billionaire impunity rescue itself from the people profiting from the collapse?

That is the question beneath the speeches, the polling, the campaign slogans and the exhausted private conversations Americans keep having in kitchens, cars, group chats and grocery store aisles. Not the polite question. Not the televised question. The real one.

And at 250, America cannot answer it with mythology.

It cannot answer it with fireworks, nostalgia, founding fathers quoted like scripture, military spectacle in the streets or another round of civic theater pretending the house is not on fire. It cannot answer it by asking the vulnerable to be patient while the powerful loot the future in real time.

The moral question is not what America can celebrate, but whether it can finally build a freedom as large as the equality it has always claimed.

If there is a way out, it begins with telling the truth about the hierarchy this country keeps pretending not to see.

What we are living through is not simply a backlash against one election, one policy or one generation’s cultural discomfort. It is a strategic power play by a ruling movement that understands hierarchy as destiny. Its dream is not only national. It is civilizational. It wants to build a country, and eventually a world, where power is sorted by race, gender, wealth, religion, citizenship and obedience.

That is why the attacks seem to come from every direction at once.

The attacks on women.

The attacks on immigrants.

The attacks on Black political representation.

The attacks on public education.

The attacks on journalists.

The attacks on LGBTQ people.

The attacks on universities.

The attacks on voting rights.

The attacks on history itself.

These are not isolated fights. They are downstream of one organizing principle: some people are entitled to full citizenship, and others are entitled only to whatever the dominant group is willing to permit.

That is hierarchy masquerading as patriotism.

It does not always announce itself with white hoods or burning crosses. Sometimes it arrives in tailored suits, court filings, donor meetings, school board races, television panels and legislative language polished clean enough to pass as concern. It calls censorship “parental rights.” It calls racial backlash “merit.” It calls cruelty at the border “security.” It calls forced birth “life.” It calls billionaire rule “freedom.” It calls domination “order.”

But the project is legible if we are willing to look at what it keeps trying to control: women’s bodies, Black votes, immigrant movement, children’s education, workers’ power, queer visibility, public memory and the machinery of democratic representation.

Authoritarian movements rarely begin by asking how to improve a society. They begin by asking which people should count less within it.

So when I ask, “How do we get out of this?” I am not asking how we return to normal. Normal helped build this. I am asking how a genuine majority, across race, gender, class, faith, citizenship and conscience, becomes organized enough around shared human dignity to defeat a minority movement organized around hierarchy.

Women’s lives are not a side issue in the story of freedom. They are the measure of whether freedom is real at all.

There is a strange habit in public life of speaking about women as though we are a category to be consulted after the serious business has been handled. The economy is discussed first, then women’s wages. Democracy is discussed first, then women’s voting rights. Health care is discussed first, then maternal mortality. Violence is discussed first, then domestic violence. Work is discussed first, then care work. Rights are discussed first, then women’s rights, as if half the population were an amendment to the human condition.

That is what I mean when I say women are not a special interest.

The phrase is not decoration. It is not a slogan stitched onto cotton for the sake of being clever. It is a correction. Women’s lives are not a niche concern. Women’s safety, labor, leadership, health, education, bodily autonomy, economic power and representation are not secondary questions. They are central questions in any society that claims to value freedom.

A country can tell you what it believes by what it protects. It can recite its founding documents, raise flags over courthouses, polish its monuments and set fireworks loose over the sky. But if women cannot survive childbirth, if girls are taught to shrink before they are taught to think, if mothers are praised in speeches and abandoned in policy, if women are forced to ask the state for permission to live inside their own bodies, then the freedom being celebrated is narrower than the anthem suggests.

This is not abstraction. In 2024, the maternal mortality rate for Black women in the United States remained dramatically higher than the rates for white, Hispanic and Asian women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The earlier 2023 CDC data put the rate for Black women at 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, a figure that exposed not simply a medical crisis, but a moral one. A nation does not arrive at numbers like that by accident. It arrives there through neglect, disbelief, unequal care, economic strain, racism, policy failure and the old American habit of treating Black women’s pain as something that can be studied without being urgently answered.

Around the world, women continue to carry impossible burdens with too little protection and too little power. They hold families together in places where war, poverty, corruption, religious extremism, climate crisis and political collapse have made ordinary life fragile. They work in fields, factories, homes, classrooms, hospitals, offices and markets while being underpaid, unseen or denied basic rights. They are told to be modest, quiet, grateful, useful, obedient, forgiving and endlessly resilient. In too many places, girls are still denied education. Women are still punished for seeking independence. Bodies are still governed by men who do not have to live inside them.

There is no single story of womanhood, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. A woman in Sudan, a woman in Haiti, a woman in Iran, a woman in India, a woman in Palestine, a woman in Congo, a woman in Ukraine, a woman in Texas, a woman in Mississippi and a woman in a corporate boardroom are not living the same life. Race, class, caste, religion, geography, disability, citizenship and history shape what power looks like and how danger arrives. But across those differences runs a hard truth: when women are denied freedom, nations are not merely unfair. They are unstable.

This is why the question of women’s freedom cannot be separated from the larger question now haunting the country at 250: what kind of society is America still willing to become?

The United States is marking its semiquincentennial, a 250th anniversary officially framed through America250 as a national commemoration meant to engage Americans in the country’s founding and future. But anniversaries are dangerous when they become substitutes for memory. A birthday can become a performance. A celebration can become anesthesia. A nation can mistake the noise of commemoration for the harder discipline of reckoning.

At 250, America does not need more mythology. It needs a moral audit.

A nation reveals itself not only in its monuments, anthems and anniversaries, but in the lives it chooses to protect. It reveals itself in whether a woman can survive childbirth, whether a girl can learn without being made smaller, whether an immigrant can live without being hunted for political theater, whether a child can be fed, whether a worker can rest, whether a citizen can vote without obstruction and whether the vulnerable are treated as people or as bargaining chips in someone else’s campaign for power.

That is the interconnected reality America keeps trying to deny. Cruelty rarely stays in one room. A society that learns to control women’s bodies will eventually learn to control other bodies. A society that normalizes hatred toward immigrants will eventually expand the list of people it calls disposable. A society that tolerates racism as political strategy will not stop at rhetoric. A society that allows Christian nationalism to dress domination in the language of righteousness is not returning to morality. It is replacing democracy with hierarchy.

This is the part America prefers to soften. We are encouraged to talk about division as though it arrived like weather. We are told to describe authoritarianism as polarization, racism as resentment, sexism as tradition, corruption as disruption, cruelty as toughness and indifference as fatigue. But language is one of the first battlegrounds. When a nation loses the ability to name what is happening to it, it becomes easier to persuade people that collapse is simply change with sharper elbows.

The old story said America was a city on a hill. But a house can look luminous from a distance while its beams are rotting. For years, many people knew the damage was spreading inside the walls: the corruption, the racial backlash, the contempt for women, the hunger for authoritarian power, the ease with which the powerful called greed freedom and cruelty order. Now the rot is no longer hidden. It has broken through the surface. The wounds are public. The world can see them, and the world is asking whether the country that once sold itself as democracy’s great promise has become one of democracy’s warnings.

That question is not dramatic. It is global. Freedom House reported that global freedom declined for the 20th consecutive year in 2025, with more countries experiencing deterioration in political rights and civil liberties than improvement. America’s crisis is not isolated from that broader authoritarian weather system. It is part of it, and the world recognizes the pattern even when America pretends not to.

The city on the hill did not disappear overnight. It was sold in parcels, hollowed by men who called greed freedom, cruelty order and domination patriotism.

As a Black American woman, I have never had the luxury of mistaking America’s mythology for America itself. As a Black American woman, I also understand that womanhood does not arrive in America as a single, equal category. My skin is often read before my gender is understood. Blackness is categorized first, judged first, politicized first, feared first, dismissed first. Then gender arrives behind it, not as a separate burden, but as a force that compounds the first.

That means my view of this country is shaped by more than the fact of being a woman in a nation that still treats women’s freedom as negotiable. It is shaped by being a Black woman in a nation where race and gender together have long placed women like me near the bottom of America’s hierarchy of protection. Not the bottom of worth. Not the bottom of intelligence, labor, courage or contribution. But the bottom of the civic order this country has too often practiced: who is believed, who is defended, who is presumed innocent, who is allowed complexity, who is allowed rest, who is allowed anger, who is allowed to need help without being treated as a burden.

That is an altogether different category of American experience. It is not the same as being an immigrant, and it should not be collapsed into that story. But it is connected to the same machinery of exclusion. Anti-Blackness, misogyny, xenophobia, Christian nationalism, anti-immigrant cruelty, anti-poor resentment and anti-democratic politics do not operate as identical forces. They have different histories and different consequences. But they share a foundational belief: that society must have a top and a bottom, that power belongs naturally to some people and conditionally to others, and that those pushed to the margins should accept their place as the cost of order.

That is why this moment feels so dangerous. The question beneath so much of the current politics is not merely who gets which policy. It is who gets to belong without qualification. Who gets to be protected without proving usefulness. Who gets to make a mistake without becoming a symbol. Who gets to need care without being called weak. Who gets to cross a border, cast a ballot, give birth, refuse birth, teach history, speak plainly, survive poverty, demand wages, name racism, challenge power and still be treated as fully human.

This is the hierarchy America keeps pretending is not there. But Black women know its shape because we have lived beneath it, worked around it, organized against it and been asked, again and again, to save a democracy that has rarely placed us near the center of its protection.

That does not mean I do not love this country. It means I know the difference between love and flattery. I know the difference between a promise and its performance. I know the difference between a flag raised high and a right quietly removed.

This country is home. That is part of the wound and part of the responsibility. I am not writing from outside the house, pointing at the smoke. I am writing from inside a room the country built, used, underfunded, praised when convenient and ignored when inconvenient. Black Americans have always had to live inside the contradiction. We have been asked to believe in democracy while fighting to be included in it. We have been asked to defend a nation that has so often needed to be forced, law by law and generation by generation, to recognize our citizenship as more than a theory.

That vantage point gives a particular clarity. It is not mystical. It is historical. It is lived. It comes from watching America make promises to others while breaking them first on Black people, women, immigrants, workers and the poor. It comes from knowing that democratic erosion rarely begins with the powerful losing power. It begins with the vulnerable losing protection.

There are histories in this country I will not pretend to narrate as if they were mine to carry alone. The genocide, dispossession and ongoing mistreatment of Indigenous peoples are not side notes in the American story. They are part of its foundation. They matter immeasurably. But I cannot do that history justice by treating it as a sentence I insert for moral coverage. Some stories require more than acknowledgment. They require listening, study, relationship and the humility to know when one is speaking beside a wound rather than from inside it.

So I write from the place I can speak from truthfully: as a Black American woman whose life in this country has been shaped by the collision of race, gender, citizenship, labor, memory and power. That lens is not meant to eclipse anyone else’s. It is meant to be honest about where I am standing. From here, I can see certain things clearly: how hierarchy is built, how dehumanization travels, how a nation decides who belongs without condition and who must keep proving their right to be protected.

The hope is not to flatten every group into the same experience. The hope is to recognize that while our histories are not interchangeable, our futures are connected. Anti-Blackness, misogyny, misogynoir, Indigenous dispossession, xenophobia, anti-immigrant cruelty, religious domination, ableism, class contempt and the politics of exclusion do not share identical origins or consequences. But they are often protected by the same architecture: the belief that some lives are naturally closer to power, some lives are naturally closer to punishment, and some people should be grateful for whatever measure of safety they are allowed.

I do not need to claim every story to stand against the system that keeps ranking human beings. I only need to tell the truth from where I am, listen where I have not lived, and build toward a freedom large enough to make room for all of us.

Black Americans, especially in the South, have long understood that democracy can be praised in public while being strangled in procedure. A ballot can exist and still be made harder to use. A district can exist and still be drawn to weaken the people inside it. A law can claim neutrality while carrying the old scent of exclusion. Representation can be stripped without a single slur being spoken aloud.

The South is not a backward exception to America’s democratic story. It is one of the places where the country’s contradictions have been most openly rehearsed: slavery, Jim Crow, racial terror, voter suppression, gerrymandering, underfunded schools, environmental neglect, criminalization, economic abandonment and the stripping away of political representation. The disenfranchisement of Black Americans in the South is not a regional footnote. It is a national warning system.

When Black representation is diluted, restricted or erased, the injury is not only to Black voters. It is to democracy itself. In 2013, the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder weakened federal preclearance, a key protection of the Voting Rights Act, and voting rights groups have documented how that decision opened the door to restrictive voting laws and racially discriminatory redistricting tactics. The language of exclusion has grown cleaner. The machinery has not grown less dangerous.

What is happening now is not separate from that history. It is that history updated, televised, litigated and funded. The same country that once demanded poll taxes and literacy tests has learned the cleaner language of administrative burden, voter integrity, parental rights, religious liberty and anti-wokeness. The vocabulary changes. The project remains familiar.

Today’s authoritarian movement is not merely pursuing policy differences. It is advancing hierarchy: white over Black, men over women, Christian nationalism over pluralism, wealth over labor, punishment over care, domination over democracy. Its attack on representation is not incidental. It is structural. It understands that if Black voters, women, immigrants, young people and working people are fully represented, the politics of minority rule cannot survive.

Authoritarianism is not only tanks, uniforms and state violence. It also enters the intimate life. It decides who can give birth, who must give birth, whose pain is believed, whose history can be taught, whose marriage is valid, whose papers matter, whose body belongs to the state, whose labor is disposable and whose grief can be ignored. Democracy is not just elections. It is whether people can live without being hunted, controlled, erased or made afraid of their own government.

That is why the assault on women’s freedom cannot be understood as separate from the assault on voting rights, public education, honest history, immigration, labor, bodily autonomy and equal protection. These are not isolated attacks. They are rooms in the same house. The same politics that wants to control women’s bodies wants to control what children are allowed to learn. The same politics that calls immigrants invaders calls Black history indoctrination. The same politics that treats poverty as moral failure treats cruelty as discipline. The same politics that insists it is defending civilization often begins by deciding who counts as fully human.

Christian nationalism, racism, sexism, xenophobia and bigotry do not protect democracy. They replace it with hierarchy. They often arrive dressed as moral restoration, but their vision of order depends on submission: women subordinate, immigrants suspect, Black people disciplined, queer people erased, children indoctrinated, workers obedient and dissenters punished. It is not the restoration of national virtue. It is the old appetite for domination speaking in sanctified language.

Octavia Butler understood the pattern with terrifying precision. In Parable of the Talents, published in 1998, she imagined an America unraveling under a demagogue whose movement promised to “make America great again.” The point is not that fiction magically predicted the future. The phrase itself has a longer political history, and it has been used before. The point is that Butler recognized an American pattern: the way nostalgia can become a weapon, the way religious authoritarianism can dress itself as rescue, the way fear can be organized into obedience.

Butler was not a fortune teller. She was a witness with historical memory. She saw the pattern because she was trained, as so many Black women are trained, to see what polite society calls exaggeration until it becomes headline. Nations in decline often do not announce themselves as tyrannies. They announce themselves as restorations.

That is why the phrase “Listen to Black women” has begun to sound less like solidarity than indictment. People have chanted it, printed it, posted it and performed it. The phrase appears on signs, social media posts, campaign messaging and allyship language. But what does listening mean if the warnings are applauded, quoted, branded and then ignored?

Black women warned about authoritarianism. Black women warned about voter suppression. Black women warned about racism disguised as economic anxiety. Black women warned about the anti-democratic bargain being made with white grievance. Black women warned about reproductive control, police violence, the fragility of rights and the danger of treating cruelty as mere political style. The country heard the cadence and missed the content.

Listening is not the same as admiring the warning after refusing to heed it. If Black women were truly listened to, this country would not keep arriving at emergencies we named in advance.

Black women have been treated as the backbone of movements and the afterthought of policy. We are praised in speeches, studied in election-night analysis, courted in crisis and forgotten in recovery. That is not gratitude. That is extraction with better lighting.

Listening requires consequence. It requires changing strategy, shifting power, protecting representation, defending voting rights, funding institutions, believing lived expertise and refusing to treat Black women as emergency infrastructure for a democracy that will not repair itself.

But the failure to listen does not absolve us from speaking. It clarifies what speaking is for. The work now is not to be proven right by collapse. The work is to prevent collapse from becoming permanent.

That work requires telling the truth about America’s founding without surrendering the possibility of America’s future. This is where Juneteenth matters. This is where 1865 matters. Freedom in America has never arrived all at once. It has been announced before it was enforced, promised before it was protected, celebrated before it was made whole.

Juneteenth teaches us that the country’s official story has always required a second reading, one that includes the people excluded from the first draft. The Fourth of July asks us to honor independence. Juneteenth asks us to tell the truth about who was denied it. A mature nation should be able to hold both. A brave nation would insist on it.

This is not a request for guilt as ritual. Guilt, by itself, changes very little. The question is not whether America can feel appropriately solemn before returning to its habits. The question is whether the country can become honest enough to repair what the myth concealed. At 250, the nation does not need citizens who worship the founding as a flawless birth. It needs citizens mature enough to understand that a country can be loved without being lied for.

Hope has to begin there, not in denial, but in truth.

Still, despair is not a strategy. It may be an honest feeling, but it is not a plan. Hope, if it is to mean anything now, cannot be the soft refusal to see what is happening. Hope has to become a discipline. It has to become protection, memory, organizing, voting, teaching, sheltering, feeding, writing, building and refusing to let cruelty become ordinary.

Hope is not pretending the house is not burning. Hope is deciding what can still be carried out, what must be rebuilt, what should never be rebuilt in the same shape and who must be protected while the smoke is still rising.

This is where the future begins to look less like an inspirational poster and more like work. We can save memory. We can save truth. We can save the vote. We can save local institutions, schools, libraries, mutual aid, independent journalism, unions, reproductive freedom, public education, equal protection, humane immigration, civil rights law, community care, the dignity of work and the moral imagination required to build a more honest democracy.

We can regain rights by organizing, litigating, voting, teaching, striking, boycotting, creating, protecting one another and refusing the normalization of cruelty. We can flatten myths that were never true: the myth that America was innocent, that progress is automatic and flows in a straight line, that rights protect themselves, that politeness can defeat authoritarianism, that the vulnerable can be sacrificed for comfort, that Black women can save democracy while remaining unprotected by it, that democracy can survive without representation.

We can build anew from truth, not nostalgia.

For people who feel afraid, overwhelmed, unsure or paralyzed, that fear is not irrational. It is a rational response to institutions shaking, rights narrowing and cruelty becoming policy. But paralysis is what authoritarian movements hope fear will produce. They do not need every person to become a true believer. They only need enough people to become exhausted, quiet, cynical or convinced that nothing they do can matter.

The answer is not for every person to do everything. That is impossible, and impossible demands are another kind of defeat. The answer is for each person to do something real, sustained and connected to others. Protect a neighbor. Fund a legal defense. Support local journalism. Vote in every election. Know your school board. Help someone get documents. Buy from businesses that build community. Tell the truth out loud. Refuse dehumanizing language. Teach children history. Make art. Preserve records. Feed people. Organize where you are.

Do not underestimate the civic force of ordinary acts done with intention. Authoritarianism feeds on isolation. It wants people suspicious of one another, exhausted by spectacle and convinced that public life belongs only to the powerful. Every act of care that rebuilds trust is therefore political in the deepest sense. Not partisan theater. Not branding. Political because it concerns how people live together.

This is also why language matters. What we are willing to say out loud matters. What we refuse to normalize matters. The words we carry into rooms, teach to children, write in public, whisper to the frightened and speak back to power all belong to the moral atmosphere of a society. Language can soften cruelty until it sounds administrative. It can also restore clarity where propaganda has tried to make the truth feel impolite.

Culture is one of the places where people rehearse courage. What we read, wear, say, teach, remember, fund and refuse all shape the world we are preparing to live in. Democracy is not defended only in courtrooms and legislatures. It is also defended in kitchens, classrooms, union halls, churches, group chats, school board meetings, small businesses, local newspapers, family conversations and the quiet decisions people make when cruelty asks to be normalized.

America at 250 does not need flattery. It needs truth. It does not need citizens who worship the myth. It needs people willing to repair the republic without lying about the damage.

We may not be able to return to the dream America told about itself. Perhaps we should not want that dream untouched. Too many people were excluded from it the first time. But we can build toward something truer: a democracy that measures freedom not by the comfort of the powerful, but by the safety, dignity and possibility available to women, children, immigrants, citizens, workers, Black people, disabled people, elders and the living world we are still responsible for protecting.

That is not sentimental. That is survival with a blueprint.

And if America is to have a future worth marking after 250 years, it will not be because the country finally learned how to praise itself more beautifully. It will be because enough of us decided to tell the truth, protect one another and build a freedom that does not require anyone’s humanity to wait outside the door.

 

Editor’s note: This essay is published alongside Simply Edyn & Co.’s Freedom Day Collection, including Women Are Not a Special Interest, Women Make Nations, Make It. Protect It. Pass It On., Build the Dream. Keep the Promise. and the 1865 Freedom Day tee. These pieces were created as wearable statements of memory, dignity and civic hope.