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Friday briefing: The US at 250: who gets to tell the story?

In today’s newsletter: As official celebrations spotlight a narrow cast of ​white heroes, communities across the US are reclaiming the histories that Freedom 250 leaves out Good morning, and a very happy 250th birthday to the United States of America. If you prefer to celebrate with cage fighting on the White House lawn, an IndyCar rally through the streets of Washington DC, or simply by watching the president do his lonely bop to YMCA at a sparsely attended state fair , so much the better. It takes a special kind of someone to make the semiquincentennial birthday of a nation of 349 million people, from a whole variety of backgrounds, all about himself. But he wouldn’t be the only one centred on a very particular (white, male, Christian-centric) view of how the nation came to be. Remembrance is a political act, and I wanted to know what the 250th means to all Americans. But, as Melissa reported earlier this year , following Trump’s executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, in January the National Park Service used hand tools to pry off these plaques and, while the city of Philadelphia challenged the edict through the court, for now those information panels remain in storage. It’s what Princeton professor Eddie Glaude Jr describes in a recent Guardian interview as “active forgetting”. “What has to happen here in order to protect the innocence of the country? Aside from the Presidential hoopla, this birthday season finds the United States in a pessimistic mood: three in five believe the country’s best days are behind it, while seven-in-10 are dissatisfied with the way democracy is working in their country, according to a poll by Pew Research Centre. “The celebrations also come at a time when Americans are discontented with the ongoing war with Iran,” Melissa adds. “A recent poll showed that a majority of Americans think that the war has negatively affected our interests.” “There’s been a lot of pomp and circumstance around [the 250th], but then as it’s actually approached, it’s been pretty anti-climatic,” she sums up. “That’s also because we are in the midst of a record-setting heatwave,” Melissa reminds me, with forecasters predicting rising temperatures and high humidity across swathes of central and eastern US ahead of the Fourth of July weekend. “So a lot of the celebrations are either being delayed or they’re being massively amended.” The backdrop for the 250th, Melissa explains, is the gutting of the Voting Rights Act – when right wing supreme court justices dismantled what campaigners believe to be one of the main tools that protects minority voters from racial discrimination; alongside the cancellation of temporary protected status for Syrians and Haitians, with other country protections set to expire later this year; and the ongoing surveillance and violent aggression of ICE (immigration enforcement agency). Queer families in New York told the Guardian about the dissonance of celebrating this birthday at a moment when access to trans healthcare is being severely curtailed and June pride parades across the country were subject to heavy policing and arrests. “But we do also have wins,” Melissa reminds us: “the supreme court upheld birthright citizenship on Tuesday,” she says. That ruling affirmed that nearly all people born on US soil are American citizens, although Trump immediately threatened to abolish the right through Congress after the decision.