Trump’s Task Force 250 Is a Project of Collective Amnesia

The republic is now 250 years old and the pageant-industrial complex has ground to life: the commemorative coins, the staged concerts, the fireworks exploding over harbors from Boston to San Diego.

I find I cannot meet this occasion with either manufactured reverence or a reflexive sneer. Both are too easy, and both, in their way, are forms of forgetting.

What I have to offer this moment instead is the experience of three generations of Black educators — my grandfather, my mother, and myself — who learned the meaning of this country’s central promise not from monuments or milestones but from what it has cost us to fight for our freedom and thrive.