Official commemorations of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence have now ended, with anticipated federally subsidized, countrywide conversations about the meaning of the U.S. never materializing. Instead, much of the commemorative and contemplative energy was consumed by a federal government temporarily captured by a White nationalist regime intent on narrowing rather than expanding both polity-wide memory and imagination.
The country's ongoing inability to either manufacture or negotiate consensus, or forcefully reject its resurgent and desperate White nationalist virus, tells us something more important about the moment itself. We are living through the end stages of a roughly five-century period of Western global strength. As the order it birthed becomes increasingly brittle, narratives that sustain its power require ever more aggressive forms of maintenance.
Donald Trump's Freedom 250 State Fair was a fitting illustration. Rather than presenting a negotiated national vision, it projected an anemic, market-driven EuroFuturism detached from the lived realities of the people being assaulted within and beyond it.
Against that thin and fitfully curated spectacle stands far more vibrant and complicated social worlds produced through Governance formations of family, community, Cultural Meaning Making, Movement, and Memory.
In Class With Carr has spent significant time displacing "250" as an anchoring historical marker, using an Africana Studies method and lens to break through narrowing Social Structure narratives in order to make space for self-determining forms of Governance, Ways of Knowing, and understanding time, belonging, and community.
That work makes it increasingly possible to say, publicly and without apology, that Western-style polities need not define or contain our common humanity while remaining fully engaged with the institutions and social formations with and through which we must still struggle.
Last week, in Session 330, we proposed moving "Beyond 250." Today, we use ongoing years of collective work informed by deep study and real-time responses to increasingly desperate acts of White political violence to engage in a thought exercise grounded in another way of organizing historical time.
The question is not simply what happened in 1776 or even in 1865. The deeper question is why those dates organize our thinking in the first place.
What are the odds that we can use this season of endings to harness a momentum of memory for a different and better collective purpose?
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