Is the 4th of July a White Holiday?

By white, I mean for white people in the U.S. And honestly, I can't say for sure. Some people in my life would answer, unequivocally, yes. Maybe if I tell you a little more about my own history with the 4th, as a white person in this country, it'll help explain why I'm even asking the question.

Photo by Bruno Ngarukiye on Unsplash

I was born on July 4th. So — a great big happy 250th to the U.S., and happy birthday to me. I can say without a doubt that the 4th has always been part of my life. And, I'm coming to understand, part of whiteness too.

My white mom says being born on the 4th is why I'm a such a "firecracker." When I was really young, my white grandpa convinced me the fireworks we watched every year were for me. So many of my birthday cakes growing up were decorated in red, white, and blue — not because I asked for it or even liked it, but because that's just how the cake makers (also white people) decided a July 4th birthday cake should look.

For most of my life, sharing my birthday with the day the U.S. celebrates its birth seemed pretty great. There was always a parade, a cookout, some gathering of festive white folks to be found. I can't remember spending even one birthday alone. I like freedom and liberation — things I learned the 4th is supposed to be all about. And honestly, from a distance, I can still appreciate a good fireworks show.

But in recent years, the 4th — a holiday I was told was about celebrating freedom and remembering liberation — has gotten complicated for me. Don't get me wrong, I'm still all about liberation. My problem is that the freedom I learned about growing up in the U.S. was never whole. It wasn't even true.

More and more, my lived experience — especially being partnered with a Black immigrant and parenting brown kids — has shown me this in ways I simply can't ignore. The freedom and liberation I inherited was a particular brand: U.S. white people's freedom, U.S. white people's liberation. And underneath it, I've come to believe, is a lie.

Here's something I've learned, both from my years as a therapist and just from being a human on this earth for a while: almost anything built on a lie usually makes you bound to defending that lie. It often doesn't matter how many truths get introduced that stand in direct opposition to it, or how many times it gets proven wrong. When a belief, an identity, a sense of belonging, or how you measure human beings are tangled up in a lie, you end up bound to that lie, whether you meant to be or not.

And if I'm honest, growing up, I absorbed that kind of lie — that being a white person in the U.S. meant being the most knowledgeable, most capable, most safe, most well-intentioned version of a human being. The most American. The ones we celebrated on the 4th of July.

There's probably a whole list of things standing between us and real freedom in this country. For me, one of the biggest is whiteness — what I learned, and still feel pressure to uphold, as a white person here. Whiteness taught me who I was by teaching me lies about where I stood in relation to people who weren't counted as white. And that place was above. More American.

Nobody sat me down and said it that plainly. It didn't need to be said. It was everywhere I looked, and nowhere was I encouraged to question it. Whiteness has long complicated my relationship with freedom and liberation. And lately I find myself asking: in striving for liberation, what do we even do with whiteness?

Here's what I'm realizing more and more — liberation isn't only about breaking free from something. It's also about what we build, and who we're becoming. It's about what we come out of and what we come into. That's the part the freedom I learned about was missing.

We talked a lot about what we came out of — the chains we told ourselves that we white people broke. But I'm recognizing more and more how our imagination for what we were building never included everyone. When a group of white men declared liberty for themselves in this country's earliest days, they set the tone for what liberation could look like here. The ideas of freedom that inspired this nation's birth had contradiction and domination baked into them from the start.

From what I can see, the freedom and liberation I was handed as a white person here is still tangled up in that same domination. And I didn't come to that on my own — it was reinforced by the white people around me: family, teachers, church folks, neighbors. It was modeled, expected, passed down. Perpetuating it seemed to be part of what belonging to whiteness meant.

Freedom, I learned, looked like white people, especially white men, holding power over others. Not equal footing. Power over.

The rules, the expectations, the quiet qualifications for keeping my place inside whiteness had me bound tighter than almost anything else in my life. I couldn't question whiteness openly, not without real consequences to my relationships, my sense of belonging, even my own self-worth. I knew being white meant something. I just didn't have the language for it, or anyone to talk it through with. That knowing-without-language or community left me insecure, isolated, defensive, and honestly, so fearful. None of that sounds like liberation to me. None of it feels like freedom.

So let me try to make this more tangible, because the messages I absorbed about whiteness were rarely shouted. They were less obvious than that — something I was fully immersed in long before I could recognize it was happening.

It showed up in the "flesh-colored" crayon and the "nude" bandage that only ever matched skin like mine. It showed up in the doll aisle, where one doll was just "the doll," and every other one needed a qualifier in front of it — the Black doll, the Asian doll — as if mine was the neutral, default version of a person, and any other was some variation on it.

It showed up on TV too. Flip through the channels during my growing up, and white people were the ones front and center — the leads, the ones whose stories we followed. Anyone who wasn't white usually showed up as the sidekick, the neighbor, the background face in the crowd. The only shows I remember watching where the main cast was mostly or entirely people of color were Sanford and Son, The Cosby Show, and The Jeffersons — a small handful I can count on one hand.

And just like the dolls, some TV channels needed a label just to keep their spot on the dial — there was the one Spanish-language channel, and BET, the Black Entertainment channel. Meanwhile, the channels full of white faces, where English was assumed, didn’t need a label at all. They were just channels.

It showed up in Sunday school and Vacation Bible School, in the picture of Jesus on the wall who somehow looked like a lot of the white men I knew. It showed up in my history textbooks and classroom lessons, where "American history" mostly meant the story of people who looked like me discovering, founding, building, leading — while everyone else showed up as backdrop, obstacle, or afterthought. Or worse, as violent, as enemies, as people to be fought and pushed down and gotten rid of. Or as people who just weren't as good at "pulling themselves up" as we white Americans were.

It showed up in trickier ways too. In how a white person would attempt to compliment a Black person for being "so articulate," "so smart," "so pretty" — with a note of surprise in their voice. In how "that's a good neighborhood" and "that school has really gone downhill" were sentences that didn’t need race spelled out.

In how missing white kids made the news and missing kids of color so often didn't. In how a white immigrant's accent got called "charming," while a Black or brown person born and raised right here could still be asked, "no, but where are you really from?" In how American food just meant food — burgers, hot dogs, meatloaf, apple pie, casseroles — while everything else got filed under "ethnic," as if my own white family's cooking was the standard, and everyone else's was a detour from it.

It showed up on the mission and service trips too, the ones that weren't to Europe or any country we thought of as "white.". Only ever to Black and brown nations. We went because we believed we possessed the truth — the best way to educate children, build homes, provide medical care, practice faith, relate to God. The people we traveled to see, in our minds, just needed to hear us and follow us. White American folks.

This is what whiteness was built to do in this country — take a group of pale-skinned people and bind them together around a made-up sameness, for one very specific reason: to create and reproduce dominance. And now, the 4th of July feels less like a celebration of freedom to me. Less like anything to do with liberation. More like a reinforcement of dominance. More like a celebration of everything I learned from whiteness.

Growing up white, in a mostly white community, whiteness gave me a sense of identity and belonging. And I'm learning that belonging never came free. That kind of belonging doesn't actually liberate anyone — not even the people it claims to hold.

It's as if striving for liberation, letting go of whiteness and who I was taught counts as American, who counts as fully human, also means letting go of what connects me to a lot of the white people in my life. It's as if I have to learn a whole new way of relating to other white people. Whiteness feels so entrenched in how we connect with one another that I don't think we're actually free inside it. At least, it doesn't look like liberation to me. It doesn't feel like it either.

Especially now, after getting a real taste of what a more expansive liberation can feel like, and witnessing whiteness and power keep so many white people captive, I just can’t make room for it anymore. Not in me. Not in my multiracial family. 

These beliefs, these old ways of being in the world that I soaked up from whiteness — they cannot be the norm for how we love one another, how we care for one another, how we build our life together, how we become free. The version of whiteness I learned stands in direct opposition to the dignity, the worth, the full personhood of the people of color I love most in this world. And if I’m honest, it stands in the way of my own liberation too.

So on this July 4th, my birthday and the 250th celebration of the U.S., I wish freedom and liberation for all of us. Not a shallow or small kind. A real and expansive kind — the kind that leaves no one out of the imagining.

May we journey together. May we get closer, each of us, every day.