Image credit: Mediamodifier

More sparks will be flying this Fourth of July, and not just the sparklers and fireworks variety. Since the orange-dusted despot took office for a second term, we have born witness to the dysfunction of the democracy machine in accelerated mode. Project 2025’s authoritarian agenda is the monkey wrench thrown in the works, causing said sparks. Given the circumstances and bearing in mind the US’s histories, does it make sense to give credence to the Fourth of July at all? And as we protest against the wannabe king, who and what is this holiday for? Some of our authors have a few words to say about it.

My Excessive Americanism

What I love most about our national excessiveness on the Fourth of July—Parades on every street! Pinwhirling fireworks! Snapping displays of flags!—is that it reminds me of my own excessive desire to live.

As a deaf woman in a society obsessed with physical perfection, I fight the assumption that my imperfect body not only isn’t useful but it’s ugly; and a body which is neither useful nor beautiful has no intrinsic value. So why don’t I just kill myself?

As a childless, queer woman in a straight society that seems dedicated to procreation and the superiority of men, I fight the assumption that I am an inferior being, queered out of my biological value. So why not just kill myself?

As an artist who struggles to find passion in life and translate that passion into performance, I fight the assumption that art should be a product like any other; and if I can’t create something easy, pleasurable, and fit for mass consumption, why not just kill myself?

Now that I’m aging, I fight the assumption that my body can no longer muster up the energy to generate money in the marketplace. Therefore, I have no worth. I’m just taking up space, using up valuable resources. So why not just kill myself?

So, you see, I’m fighting for my life when I fight the assumptions that have determined so much of my life from birth—that a deaf, unbeautiful, queered, female infant is not now and was never worth the baby talk it would take to keep her alive. So why should she persist in her “excessive” struggle to live?

But that excessiveness is the most American thing about me: the determination that I SHOULD matter, that I WILL matter, that I WAS created equal. Fourth of July with its glittering displays honoring our Yankee Doodle rag-tag, less-than-equal beginnings serves as my reminder that if any entity of power should try to shut me down, put me in my place, take away the rights I know are mine, I can depend on my own inner excessiveness to stand up to them, call them out, shout them down, kick the bastard bullies out.
—Terry Galloway, Mean Little deaf Queer: A Memoir 

In our recently released book, The Cost of Being Undocumented: One Woman’s Reckoning with America’s Inhumane Math, my coauthor, Alix Dick, recounts how loud sounds might trigger her anxiety:

“By the time I was a teenager, I was like most of my neighbors: I had normalized my near-constant anxiety. I would jump at loud noises from the TV, at a car engine roaring down the street, at the clatter of pans in the kitchen.”

Alix even connects the loud pops that filled her childhood skies to firework—for many, something that is part of a patriotic tradition during this time of year: “I’ve heard more shootings than I’ve seen fireworks. I’ve had to flatten myself on the floor of my Sunday school classroom as a debt was settled on the street outside.”

Throughout this section of our book, Alix describes the normality of cartel-related violence in her hometown in Sinaloa, Mexico. It is precisely this kind of violence and its threat to Alix’s family that lead to her immigrating to the United States more than a decade ago. Now, ironically, this same fear is ever more present in the US right now.

As I watch masked federal officers kidnap people of all ages and backgrounds on the streets right now—including the elderly, mothers, young children, and individuals who are US citizens—I cannot help but wonder: When it comes to US patriotism and the Fourth of July, what exactly are we celebrating in 2025?

While fireworks displays are to celebrate moments of independence for a fledgling nation, we are seeing the cycles of nativism, colonialism, and white supremacy violently reshape the neighborhoods where work and live in California.

As the sky fills with the sulfur-tinged smoke of patriotic bombast this July Fourth, do not turn away from the humanitarian crisis unfolding in every state of this nation right now. This is not a celebratory moment for many of us—all Americans—living in this country today.
—Antero García, The Cost of Being Undocumented: One Woman’s Reckoning with America’s Inhumane Math 

As an AfroLatina person of color born a US citizen, I have always had a complicated relationship with each July Fourth Independence Day celebration. The complication arises from wanting to celebrate the promise of our Declaration of Independence, assurance that “all [men] are created equal,” while living in a nation riddled with inequality. I am surely not alone in feeling this ambivalence, for as early as 1852, Frederick Douglass expressed the same dualism.

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. . . . Allow me to say, in conclusion . . . I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably, work the downfall of slavery. (Source: Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, by Frederick Douglass, July 5th, 1852 (Rochester: Lee, Mann & Co., 1852)).

Douglass’s hope for the abolition of slavery did come true. And so as I watch the work of the many committed so social justice, I too continue to hope in the potential for our pursuit of equality imbued in the Declaration’s conclusion.

“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
—Tanya Katerí Hernández, Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality 

“As someone trans and genderqueer, I find it difficult to celebrate a nation actively working to force me and those in my community back into the closets, the showers, or worse.”
—Laura A. Jacobs, LCSW-R, “You’re in the Wrong Bathroom!”: And 20 Other Myths and Misconceptions About Transgender and Gender Nonconforming People

The Fourth of July is a fascinating holiday. In my family, it was a day to eat bbq hot dogs and hamburgers, run around the neighborhood with friends and family, and end the night with some fireworks. Never, and I mean never, did we even consider it a holiday celebrating Amerikkka.

As an adult and now professor, I can’t stand this holiday. It’s basura. It represents Indigenous genocide and African enslavement masquerading as the promise of American ideals. It represents the colonial and racial fault lines that have shaped the contours of American democracy. At the same time, it represents the possibility of Black and Indigenous (and all oppressed peoples!) freedoms, because it is through our collective oppression where we can begin to imagine and put into practice the type of freedom we want, the freedom we desire. But kinship on the land is the way forward.
—Kyle T. Mays, An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States 

When I was a young kid growing up in a working-class (white) family in southern Colorado, the Fourth of July meant that my folks both had the day off; that neighbors would be out on their porches and yards; that we kids would take boxes of Diamond Kitchen Matches out to the sidewalk where we’d light up small black lumps of some chemical or other that would transform into long, curling strings of ash called “snakes” and wait for dark when moms supervised the waving of sparklers. The “real” fireworks—pinwheels nailed to trees, cone-shaped “fountains” that produced sparks, bottle rockets—would be set off by the dads. Our house always had an American flag flying from it, so the flying of flags on that day was nothing special.

When I was in college, supporting civil rights and the labor organizing rights of farmworkers and protesting the American war in Vietnam, I began to view the American flag, and the Fourth of July, as celebrations of US imperialism and oppression. My father told me I was a traitor to the United States and should be shot. He wasn’t kidding. I wasn’t either. Independence, liberty, and freedom? Yeah, right. For a few. Not for most people in the US or around the world. I saw promises of equality and justice as worse than empty shells; as rhetoric and lies meant to promote racism and violence.

Today, I dread the Fourth of July. It’s horrific for animals who are terrified by the cannon-like sounds and sights of fireworks and it’s a huge fire hazard in a time of global warming. Today, at the age of seventy-six, I am: still fighting for social and economic justice; still protesting US militarism and imperialism; still fighting the structural violence of policing and all forms of carceral brutality. Yet, I also found myself exhilarated by the waves of American flags carried by hundreds of thousands of people of good will participating in the “No Kings (since 1776)” marches and events on June 14, 2025. Not because the US doesn’t still stand for domination and imperialism; not because we’re not in a perilous, autocratic moment in which political violence wildly escalates. But because there is something good, I believe, in refusing to let the tyrants claim and define all of the nation’s symbols. And today, with all sorts of creative organizing underway to help people survive, I find reason to hope that the nation-state itself may one day—regrettably not in my lifetime—evolve into new community and civic formations in which celebrations of freedom, of justice, of peace finally—FINALLY!—mean something real. For everyone.
—Kay Whitlock, Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics and Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States