Black women are intrinsic to the fabric of America. Grace Wisher, a Black girl from Baltimore, assisted in the creation of the American flag. Harriet Tubman led Union soldiers to victory at the Combahee Ferry Raid during the Civil War. There is no United States without Black people.
It was Black women and men who taught Americans how to be patriotic through their generations of activism and service, participation in the armed forces and military, and critique of America’s beliefs of freedom and liberty. “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me,” said Frederick Douglass in his keynote address at a Fourth of July celebration in 1862. “The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me.” The blood of Black women, and their descendants, are foundational to the red and white stripes that signify America’s independence.
Every war waged on American soil and abroad had Black infantry units. In the history of the United States, military service was a way for enslaved men to obtain their freedom. The cost of pledging oneself to be a protector of America and her ideals is a sacrificial act. For the Buffalo Soldiers, it was to serve America in her quest to enact Manifest destiny. The westward expansion of the U.S.A. that resulted in the genocide of Indigenous Americans, could not have been achieved withhout the efforts of Black soliders. The American flag that Wisher created is the same flag that brought forth waves of violence and harm to Brown people in Cuba, The Philippines, and Mexico.
For early Black Americans, the Fourth of July was “an opportunity to demonstrate their citizenship, patriotism and civic organizations.” But many celebrated on July 5 instead, to avoid the violence that often resulted from celebrating on the same day, and in the same streets, as white Americans. After the Civil War, Black people in Memphis used the Fourth of July, to poke fun at the “Confederacy’s defeat.” Like Thanksgiving, an American holiday that is mired in colonization and genocide, Black people use the day to spend time with their friends and loved ones over food, not to celebrate the arrival of settlers. (It is often said that America’s original sin is slavery, but that overlooks the way in which Indigenous people were terrorized by the thirteen colonies to become a nation.)
From the very beginning, Black Americans celebrating our country, its ideals, and its liberty, were doing so while also recognizing its shortcomings. Because without criticism, we can’t make this place better.
Thus is the tension of being African American, and it’s a duality and conflict that Beyoncé is attempting to articulate and explore on the Cowboy Carter tour. She’s wrapped herself in the American flag, in classic Texas imagery, and in Houston pride all while making a seething, emotional rebuke of some of our worst history. She’s celebrating that complexity by naming it. In doing so, she’s inspiring her fans to participate in a long, storied tradition.
One of the concertgoers last weekend in Houston wore a bright smile, a denim jacket winged in the American flag, and gold letters spelling out: “Everything you love about America is because of Black people.”
On a Juneteenth tour stop in Paris, the Grammy Award-winning artist wore a Buffalo Soldiers t-shirt in an attempt to bring an unsung part of American and Black history to light. However, the reception to her decision to pay homage to the Black military unit was met with criticism by scholars and historians, who accused the singer of perpetuating American nationalism. The recent actions of the Trump administration have resulted in a rise of global anti-Americanism. Immigration raids in Los Angeles, anti Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) demonstrations, and the U.S. involvement in Iran has led many Americans to cease Independence Day celebrations.
“This house was built with blood and bone, And it crumbled, yes, it crumbled,” Beyoncé sings on “Amen,” the closing track on Cowboy Carter. “The statues they made were beautiful
But they were lies of stone, they werе lies of stone.” The myths that once governed American life and history — the peaceful exchange between Pilgrims and Indigenous people at Thanksgiving, the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, and the shared belief in a democratic state — are falsehoods that were turned into truths, in order for the American Dream to be true.
In the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.” Black veterans, which make up 12% of the veteran population, have historically been excluded from benefit programs like the GI Bill, experience racial discrimination in health care, in addition to racially charged mistreatment upon their return from war. The military training they received proved to be extremely useful in the civil rights and Black liberation movements of the 1960s, where Black veterans played a key role. Even now, Black veterans are protesting against the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), enacted by President Trump’s executive orders.
This is not the first time where the American flag has been called into question under President Trump. When Colin Kaepernick began to protest the national anthem in 2016, Theodore R. Johnson, professor and Black veteran, wrote in support of him for Vox.
“Similarly, Kaepernick, and those he’s inspired, don’t kneel because they don’t believe in the promise of America or doesn’t value the founding principles; they kneel because the country has fallen short of these things.”
Pride is essential to American identity. But so is the desire to make this place better.
It is the right of every American to criticize — loudly, and in the street — the institutions that make up our country.
Like Kaepernick, Beyoncé is setting an example as a thought leader and an artist.
She’s using her rights as an American citizen to create national and international conversations about the rights and conditions of Black people in the United States, using American iconography to do so. In the American consciousness, Beyoncé is her own institution. One that is Black and American, in origin, so she too is worthy of critique.
Cowboy Carter is an invitation for those to participate in the interrogation of America and her ideals.
On July Fourth, as every day, it is a reminder of the part we have to play as citizens.