Who’s invited to the cookout?

I won second place in a hot dog eating contest on the Fourth of July in 2017. I was up against three grown men and eight hot dogs in buns. As a true patriot, I left the party with triumphant glory, gift cards, and mild indigestion.

A quarter millennium has passed since the United States’ Independence Day; 250 years, also known as a semi-quincentennial (say the word 3 times out loud for a tongue twister).

I have childhood memories of lying on a picnic blanket in the back of a pickup truck in New York State, smelling like bug spray while watching an explosive light show in the sky.

The dandiest sensory delights are found on this holiday. Smoked hamburger patties with grill lines, golden butter dripping off corn on the cob, bite mark souvenirs on crisp watermelon rinds. Grandma’s sweet promises of her favorite dessert- spongy shortcake topped with strawberries, blueberries and whipped cream for the good ‘ol red, white and blue.

And as Americans, we hold the inalienable right to take second and third helpings.

Freedom is spectacular when you’re invited to the party. But when you’re not? The fireworks sound different. The liberties proclaimed on Independence Day were largely reserved for the people the nation’s founders recognized as full participants in civic life. Enslaved people were excluded from those promises because they were not considered whole human beings.

Prior to the abolition of slavery, Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved man and one of the nation’s most influential abolitionists, delivered a speech called “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?“ that criticized the hypocrisy, inequality, and injustice woven into the stars and stripes of the nation’s jubilee.

In the early twentieth century, scholar W. E. B. Du Bois discussed the color line, the invisible boundary separating Americans from one another through law, custom, economics, and prejudice. He called it the nation’s greatest problem. More than a century later, the line has shifted but debates about opportunity, representation, and belonging suggest it has not entirely disappeared.

In 2021 Congress established Juneteenth as a federal holiday, celebrating when Union troops arrived at port in Galveston, Texas, announcing the end of slavery in 1865. The holiday is not about the legislative policy of emancipation, it is about the enforcement of the law to the people the constitutional amendment was made to protect.

The United States is a melting pot of people and is one of the boldest social experiments where people from different countries, ethnicities, religions, and cultures blend into a shared identity. From the folks who arrived with nothing but hope and an address scribbled on a scrap of paper, to refugees, to people seeking economic opportunity, education, and social mobility- the guest list keeps expanding.

The unfinished work of President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address refers to the fulfillment of America’s promise of equality and the universality of those ideals, and our responsibility to dedicate ourselves to the task.

So pull up a chair because we’re firing up the grill and there’s a seat at the table for everyone.