Glenn Loury: July Fourth 2021 – the case for unabashed Black patriotism on this Independence Day weekend

Black Americans’ birthright citizenship in what is arguably history’s greatest republic is an inheritance of immense value.

Indeed, a case can be made that the correct narrative to adopt today is one of unabashed Black patriotism—a forthright embrace of American nationalism by Black people. Black Americans’ birthright citizenship in what is arguably history’s greatest republic is an inheritance of immense value. My answer for Black Americans to Frederick Douglass’s famous question—"Whose Fourth of July?"—is, "Ours!" Some 40 million strong, Black Americans are the richest and most powerful population of African descent on the planet.  Are we going to look through the dark lens of the U.S. as a racist, genocidal, white supremacist, illegitimate force? Or are we going to see it for what it has become over the course of the last three centuries: the greatest force for human liberty on the planet?  Is this a venal, immoral, and rapacious bandit-society of plundering white supremacists, founded in genocide and slavery and propelled by capitalist greed, or a good country that affords boundless opportunity to all fortunate enough to enjoy the privileges and bear the responsibilities of citizenship? Of course, there is some warrant in the historical record for both sentiments, but the weight of the evidence overwhelmingly favors the latter.  The founding of the United States of America was a world-historic event by means of which Enlightenment ideals about the rights of individual persons and the legitimacy of state power were instantiated for the first time in real institutions.