“O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?”
— Claude McKay, If We Must Die
As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, Americans are preparing for an extended seasonal celebration of liberty. There will be fireworks, historical reenactments, speeches about the Founding Fathers, and familiar invocations of freedom and democracy. But every national celebration of liberty forces Black Americans to revisit an older and more difficult question.
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This is not simply about Frederick Douglass’s famous query — “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” — but another question that lurks beneath it: What does kinship mean to a people who have historically been excluded from the family of the human? Claude McKay understood this dilemma a century ago.
When he wrote If We Must Die during the racial terror of the Red Summer of 1919, he did not simply call Black people to resistance. He called upon them as “kinsmen.”
“O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!”
The line appears simple enough, but it contains two profound philosophical questions. Who are Black people’s kin? And who — or what — is the common foe?
The first question is more difficult than it appears. For Orlando Patterson, slavery was not merely forced labor or legal subjugation. It was a condition of natal alienation. The enslaved were violently severed from ancestry, inheritance, genealogy and social belonging itself. They were transformed into what Patterson famously called “natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.” They were rendered socially dead.
Social death means more than exclusion from political rights. It signifies exclusion from the networks of recognition that constitute human beings. Family, lineage, citizenship, inheritance, and memory become unstable categories. The enslaved were not simply denied liberty. They were denied kinship.
A reckoning on the nation’s birthday
This is why national commemorations have always been uneasy occasions for Black America. Every Fourth of July, Black intellectual life performs a ritual. We circulate Douglass’s speech. We remind ourselves that the Declaration of Independence and chattel slavery were not contradictions, but companions. We return, almost liturgically, to the question of whether a nation founded on liberty ever intended Black people to be part of its human family.
The semiquincentennial — the nation’s 250th birthday — requires that same reckoning. Perhaps even more so. As Eddie Glaude writes in America, USA: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, “Whether we admit it or not during the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the nation, race rests at the center of the strange melancholy that haunts America.”
That melancholy is the lingering presence of social death. It is the realization that Black Americans have participated in every American project while never being fully incorporated into the nation’s mythology of kinship.
The miracle of Black life has always been that, despite social death, despite natal alienation, despite centuries of being rendered strangers to the human family, Black people insisted on becoming kindred to one another.
This is precisely the insight that animates Octavia Butler’s Kindred. It is no accident that Butler begins her novel in 1976, the nation’s bicentennial. The novel refuses the comforting fiction that slavery is safely buried in the past. Dana’s (the protagonist’s) repeated journeys backward establish what Afropessimist thinkers have long argued: that there exists a direct, uninterrupted line connecting the plantation to the present.
The celebration of national freedom unfolds in the shadow of slavery’s afterlife. The bicentennial was haunted by the plantation. The semiquincentennial will be too.
Ironically, the federal government has long recognized the danger of Black people imagining themselves as kin to one another. McKay’s poem became one of the many texts that drew the attention of the FBI. The Bureau’s surveillance of Black writers, organizers, and intellectuals culminated in the sprawling COINTELPRO operations exposed after the 1971 break-in at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania.
As historians have noted, the stolen documents revealed extensive surveillance of figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, while the FBI quietly assembled one of the largest collections of African American literature in the country. The irony is difficult to miss. The state that questioned Black humanity became one of the largest archivists of the (often radical) Black imagination.
Perhaps the bureau understood something that many Americans still struggle to grasp: that Black literature has always been a laboratory for creating kinship where civil society refused to provide it.
Juneteenth celebrates kinship
This brings me to Juneteenth. Juneteenth occupies a fundamentally different symbolic space than the Fourth of July. The Fourth commemorates a republic announcing its own freedom. Juneteenth commemorates enslaved people announcing freedom to one another. One holiday celebrates citizenship. The other celebrates kinship.
If July Fourth asks whether America has fulfilled its promises, Juneteenth asks how Black people managed to create forms of social life amid/within a regime of social death. In this sense, Juneteenth represents only a sliver of social life carved out of a vast sea of natal alienation.
It was not bestowed by the Founders. It was instantiated by the formerly enslaved themselves. It emerged from Black people becoming witnesses for one another’s humanity in a world organized around their exclusion.
All of this talk about kin – or the lack thereof points to the Philadelphia duo Kindred the Family Soul. The band’s name itself reads like a political manifesto. Kindred. Family. Soul. Each word names something slavery sought to destroy. The radical Black imagination has always been engaged in the impossible work of making family where law and civil society made orphans. Churches became families. Fraternities and sororities became families. Neighborhoods, freedom movements, and mutual aid societies became families.
The enslaved were not simply denied liberty. They were denied kinship.
Black people created kin because they were denied it. One of Kindred the Family Soul’s most beautiful refrains describes love as “the rhythm of life.” That line resonates differently when read through the history of slavery. Perhaps our desire for freedom itself has always been a dance—a fragile choreography performed against the machinery of social death. Perhaps survival has always depended upon Black people recognizing one another as kindred long before America did.
This is why Juneteenth must become more than a federal holiday. It must become an annual meditation on social death. The way Black communities ritualistically revisit Douglass every Fourth of July, we should return each Juneteenth to Patterson’s insight about natal alienation and ask ourselves what it means to build community in a world that once legally denied our humanity and still refuses to fully recognize it.
McKay’s question remains before us. Who are our kinsmen? And who is the common foe? Afropessimism offers one answer: the common foe is not merely racism, prejudice, or discrimination, but the deeper structures of violence that position Blackness outside the category of the fully human. Whether one accepts that conclusion entirely is almost beside the point.
The miracle of Black life has always been that, despite social death, despite natal alienation, despite centuries of being rendered strangers to the human family, Black people insisted on becoming kindred to one another. As America celebrates 250 years of liberty, that may be the most important freedom story of all.
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