Like most Americans, I took part in the festivities over America’s 250th birthday. I found it quite remarkable to reflect on that number. On one hand, America is 250 years old, with so much history. On the other hand, America is still a baby compared to many other countries. I found myself having to pause and think about what was nagging me about that number. Two hundred and fifty years.

Then the answer came to me. Two hundred and fifty years also marks how long race has played a role in this nation — and still does. Those who say race is as much a part of America as apple pie are not entirely wrong. We may not have the Klan riding through the streets, but I’m not talking about that kind of racism. I’m talking about government-sponsored racism. Our government has always tipped the scales when it comes to race. I found myself asking on America’s 250th birthday: Will we ever be free of our own government using race to divide us?

Here on the South Side, people like to point to redlining and blockbusting to explain what happened to our neighborhoods. And those things were real, and they were wrong. But that explanation conveniently stops in the 1950s, as if nothing happened after. Most of what devastated this community happened after, not from the 1960s backward, but from the 1960s forward. One well-intentioned program after another, engineered far from these streets by people who never had to live with the results, managed to produce a great deal of white virtue and precious little opportunity for the people who live here. I have watched the wreckage of that experiment my whole life. And I have learned this: there is no solution to be found in race. We do not find our minds in our skin.

AMERICA’S NEXT 250 YEARS DEPEND ON PASSING FAITH AND FREEDOM TO OUR CHILDREN

So when I reflect on America turning 250, that number lands heavier than a birthday should. Two hundred and fifty years of race in America, and people still keep shoving it down our throats, as if it is the only lens left to see each other through. I know the power of race is not what will lift a single child off these streets. These kids are human beings before they are a race, and it is racist to insist otherwise. They are individuals, with their own minds, their own spirits, and their own God-given talents. It is only by nourishing that individual seed, one child at a time, that we give them the one gift that actually matters: the freedom to become who they were made to be, rather than a statistic assigned to their skin.

There will always be people who resist that kind of progress, who need race to stay at the center of the conversation, because race, not development, not talent, not opportunity, is where their power lives. That has been true for 250 years, and I see no sign of it slowing down. Which means it falls to us. It must be us who resist it. It must be us who claim the American birthright of the individual and stop surrendering ground to those who profit from keeping us divided. 

 Our government has always tipped the scales when it comes to race. I found myself asking on America’s 250th birthday: Will we ever be free of our own government using race to divide us?

We have given up too much ground for too long, and that surrender is a large part of how we got here — a decline that, left unanswered, shows no sign of stopping on its own.

AMERICA’S NEXT 250 YEARS BEGIN IN THE CLASSROOM

So here is my answer, on this 250th birthday: Invest in opportunity the way we invest in crisis.

When something breaks in this neighborhood, when a window gets shattered, when violence erupts, when the cameras show up — suddenly there is a race hustler and there is money. Suddenly there is urgency. Suddenly everyone agrees something must be done immediately. But investment before the crisis, investment in a child’s future before he ever picks up a gun or gives up on school, never seems to carry that same urgency. We will spend on the emergency every time. And we hesitate on the opportunity to develop.

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I think about the community center we have spent years building on the South Side, almost ready to open its doors. That building is what opportunity looks like when you invest in it before the crisis, not after. It is a bet on individual kids — their talents, their minds, their futures — not a program built around their race. And I believe, with everything in me, that a fraction of what this nation has just spent celebrating its past 250 years could transform the next 250 years for neighborhoods like this one, if we spent it the same way: on people, one at a time, believed in before they ever have to prove it in a crisis.

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That is the American birthright I want for these kids. Not a hyphen. Not a category. Not a box checked on someone else’s form. Just the same shot at the pursuit of happiness that this country promised 250 years ago, earned on their own talent, their own will, and their own perseverance. 

We are Americans, first and only.

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