Finding real national pride on America’s 250th birthday

This article Finding real national pride on America’s 250th birthday was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

During this year of celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary, I’ve been experiencing an unexpected emotion: pride.

For months, it’s been something far different — a mixture of disappointment, disbelief and disgust at the undermining of our freedoms, our wellbeing, our children’s futures and even our prospects for survival.

But recently, something shifted for me. I saw the excitement and global unity of World Cup fans. I talked to small business owners here in my small town in Washington state who were placing signs in their windows to let immigrants know they are welcome. I saw my community come together to march and rally on Juneteenth, with speakers reminding us that all people deserve freedom — and that we still have work to do to achieve that founding aspiration of our nation. I watched gay and straight neighbors at a joyful and defiant Pride parade in Seattle.

So many people are choosing courage and freedom for all, doing the risky, heroic work of resisting a would-be dictator and his sycophantic henchmen. I am feeling more confident that the courage and strength of the American people will get us through this period of darkness — but only if we reckon honestly with how we got here.

That means doing exactly the work the Trump regime is working so desperately to prevent: coming to terms with our nation’s history of race-based violence, exclusion and displacement, beginning with the killing, land grabs and cultural suppression of the Indigenous peoples who were the original caretakers of this continent, and continuing with the cruel enslavement of people whose forced labor built the nation’s wealth.

The work we need to do is more than an anti-bias workshop. It is the deeper and long-overdue work our nation and institutions need. Instead of papering over inconvenient history and its continued harm, we can do the work that begins with the truth, allows healing, strengthens a culture of integrity and builds the solidarity needed to face the enormous challenges before us.

The conviction that this work is necessary led me to create a free zine, “Community Reckoning,” that offers a process for reckoning with our history. We don’t need to wait for leadership from Washington, D.C. to take on this challenge. We can start now in our communities, congregations, universities, civic groups and other organizations. “Community Reckoning” offers a path to doing this work together.

The framework is simple: Stop the harm. Tell the truth. Acknowledge. Repair. The STAR acronym echoes the North Star that guided enslaved people escaping bondage.

This framework grew out of lived experience when I co-led, along with an Indigenous tribal elder, a community group formed after the 2001 desecration of Suquamish Chief Seattle’s grave. Over several years, Native and non-Native residents countered the political influence of a property owners’ group that had been actively hostile toward the Suquamish Tribe (Stop the Harm). We learned and shared the tribe’s history (Tell the Truth). We acknowledged the harms done when tribal land was taken and the tribe’s very existence was under assault, and celebrated those working to improve relationships between the Native and non-Native communities  (Acknowledge). Finally, working alongside the tribal government, we helped win the return of land that had once been the center of the tribe’s village, where Chief Seattle had lived most of his life (Repair). The trust and transformation that resulted from this collaboration rippled outward for years.

The STAR path can also be seen in Georgetown University’s reckoning with the 1838 sale of more than 270 enslaved people to pay the university’s debts. Students and alumni who researched this history discovered that — contrary to the story the university had told — thousands of descendants of these families were still alive. Apologies followed: Rev. Timothy Kesicki, S.J., said, “The Society of Jesus which helped to establish Georgetown University and whose leaders enslaved and mercilessly sold your ancestors, stands before you to say that we have greatly sinned. … We are profoundly sorry.” Former President of Georgetown John J. DeGioia said, “Slavery remains the original evil of our Republic — an evil that our university was complicit in.”

The students persuaded the administration to rename two university buildings that had been named for the Jesuit leaders who arranged for this sale, and assessed themselves a fee in honor of those whose lives financed the institution’s existence.

The Jesuit order has donated and raised funds for a Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, which is now giving $10,000 scholarships to descendants, supporting modest home improvements to allow aged descendants to remain at home and sponsoring educational events and dialogues on racial justice.

These stories and others, along with practical tools, resources and inspiration from wise leaders, are contained in the zine.

The zine is built around practical ways communities can begin this work: learning local history, acknowledging harms, preventing ongoing injustice and working toward meaningful repair. Every community’s path will be different. But every community has one, and the integrity and deepened relationships that result are well worth the hard work.

Integrity is the reward

Some people say we should put this reckoning off yet again — that there are more urgent matters as we face an authoritarian regime committed to entrenching its power, and other existential crises.

But we will only achieve sustainable progress when we heal our nation’s foundational wounds — a process that can’t wait for some ideal future.

Previous Coverage

We need to build a movement that heals our nation’s traumas

For centuries, politicians and economic elites have used racial resentment to prevent working people of different backgrounds from joining together to win real improvements. They’ve turned natural allies into rivals while they consolidate power and ever-larger shares of our nation’s wealth.

The result is an increasingly powerful group of the ultra-rich supporting the right-wing surge in the United States and elsewhere. People of every race — but especially people of color — struggle to afford housing, education, health care, gas and even food, things most people in wealthy countries take for granted. Politicians answer to big money and to the lobbyists who flood the centers of power. The monied interests get their way, not us.

If we’re going to build power, we can only build it on a foundation of solidarity. And solidarity is only possible in movements that are fully inclusive — and have done the work of racial reckoning. Without it, internal fault lines caused by unaddressed trauma, unrecognized privilege and unintended harms will continue to undermine trust.

True reckoning means we don’t wait for a fracture. The burden doesn’t fall on people of color to identify the flaws or the injuries of institutions that have yet to reckon with their own history, biases and privilege. Instead, we collectively take on the needed work.

National healing

The benefits of this work go even further — they include the possibility of profound healing for all of us. Instead of accepting lies and half-truths, we build a foundation based on honest reckoning and the integrity that comes from insisting on the truth.

A person, an institution or a nation that papers over a traumatic and unresolved story doesn’t make it go away. The consequences of the falseness keep showing up.

We might prefer to tell ourselves we’re the greatest country on earth, the most free, the most exceptional; we might not want to think about what that greatness was built on.

Maybe what looks like American confidence — the swagger, the entitlement, the insistence that we have nothing to apologize for — is really a brittle facade. It’s what shame looks like when it doesn’t get named.

A university, a denomination, a nation that hasn’t told the truth about its own past has to keep defending a story that doesn’t hold up — and that takes energy and vigilance, and sometimes results in anger at any who would challenge the facade.

The good news is that the alternative to living with half-truths isn’t shame. It’s something better than both swagger and shame. It’s integrity. A person, an institution or a nation that has told the truth about its own history no longer needs to defend a false story. It can simply stand on what’s true. That’s a sturdier foundation than any myth.

Our history has been one of atrocities — and extraordinary courage. An honest accounting of our nation’s founding injustices gives us the opportunity to make them right. When we do, we won’t need the swagger anymore, because we’ll have something sturdier: the real thing. We can be unified in pride for this country, and unstoppable in coming together to build what could truly be a more perfect union.

The zine, “Community Reckoning” is free to download, print and share here.

This article Finding real national pride on America’s 250th birthday was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/07/zine-for-repair-on-americas-250th-birthday/