S E1331: In Class with Carr, Ep. 330: “Belonging Beyond 1776: The Semiquincentennial Blues”

As the United States notes the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, it confronts its deepest crisis of structural political integrity since its Civil War and Reconstruction. The ritual corridor between Juneteenth and July 4 exposes the widening gap between US founding mythologies and its lived political realities. This year’s observance arrives amid the Trump administration’s transformation of the government’s America250 commemoration into a religio-fascist, cult of personality-driven “Freedom 250” spectacle, while the Supreme Court’s 6-3/5-4 Birthright Citizenship ruling in Trump v. Barbara saw four justices prepared to abandon the Reconstruction/Second Founding itself by effectively rewriting the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Taken together with renewed efforts to restrict immigration, weaken the administrative state, and redefine citizenship, these developments raise the central question of this year’s semiquincentennial: what becomes of a polity built on competing definitions of belonging when its white nationalist-fueled authority permanently fractures?

Using the Africana Studies framework, today’s session continues the work of reframing the semi-quincentennial not as a celebration of 1776 but as an opportunity to rethink time, citizenship, and political community through the last 250 years of African self-determination. Provoked in part by the competing constitutional visions of Black Justices Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson and Clarence Thomas, we examine citizenship as both shield and struggle, contrasting narratives of inclusion, fealty, and liberation. From the Negro Convention Movement and Reconstruction to today’s battles over birthright citizenship, the SAVE Act, and the policing of bodies and borders, we ask whether the US is entering a post-white nationalist era of rebirth or the final stage of an empire unable to survive its founding contradictions. By tracing Africana Governance work in fifty-year intervals, we use this symbolic anniversary to connect movements, rituals, institutions, and ideas that reveal far deeper meaning than any official national narrative,, laying the foundation for the remaining part of this year’s continuing exploration of liberation, governance, memory, and self-determination.

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