Honest question. Does America have the capacity to embrace all Americans? Can this country truly accept all its citizens as equal?
If that question catches you off guard, let me back up and tell you how I got here.
I just visited Washington, D.C. for the first time. I was invited to a conference, and I’ll admit I had no idea what I was walking into. I figured it would be a large nonprofit gathering, the kind where I could sharpen my strategy for Brothers to Brothers and maybe get in front of some folks about my IT company’s work supporting nonprofits and community organizations. I did neither of those things.
Instead, I found myself committing to help rebuild the nation. Yes, you read that right. They asked us to be re-founders of this country.
Before any of that could happen, we got a history lesson. We had to understand this country’s founding, the Constitution, the Reconstruction era, and what many historians call the Second Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. I wasn’t expecting a graduate-level American history seminar at this conference, but there we were, learning about the America before us, the one that shaped where we stand today, including the ongoing efforts on the far right to weaken the Constitution’s own protections.
I’m not here to argue the point. Some of you may disagree, and that’s fine, but you’re wrong. I wouldn’t have said that so plainly before this past week. The 14th and 15th Amendments are clear, and they are under real attack right now. Birthright citizenship, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment since 1868, has been the subject of executive orders and active court battles throughout 2026. The Supreme Court has already had to step in once to defend it. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s happening this year.
While in DC, we also visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture. If you haven’t been, go. As an American, you owe it to yourself, and you owe it to Black Americans.
And that brings me back to my question. That conference, that museum, that history lesson, all of it has me sitting with something I’ve turned over for years.
I have never felt like an American. I have never felt like this country loved me, so why would I love it back? I don’t hate America. Like a lot of Afro-Americans, my relationship with this country is complicated. I’ve loved the places I’ve lived. I value my heritage. But there’s no denying we’ve had to fight for everything we have, and that many of our ancestors died trying. Anti-Blackness still runs through this country today, even while Black American culture is one of the most loved, copied, and profited-from things in the world.
We’re loved on the football field and the basketball court. Our art makes other people millions. The way we move, the way we talk, the way we dance gets copied across the globe. And still, we’re not welcome in plenty of neighborhoods. Not trusted with normal financial transactions. Handed the worst medical care, the lowest wages, the poorest schools. Stripped of voting power. Pushed into ghettos. And that’s before we even get to the violence we’ve absorbed at the hands of other Americans, violence that hasn’t stopped.
So I sat in a room full of people who want to build a country that actually governs for everyone, and I have to ask: is that even possible? Can you build that on a foundation of anti-Blackness, when lynching still happens in this country today? When even in progressive spaces, my face alone can make people uncomfortable?
Or is the more honest answer that we may just be put on the front lines to be abused and killed, again, only to end up at the bottom of the American dream, lifting everyone else up while we take the scraps of this complicated relationship we call America?
I don’t have a clean answer. I just know the question is worth asking out loud.