When Their Freedom Wasn’t Ours: Grieving What July 4th Never Gave Us
Honoring the Grief of Liberation Withheld from Our Ancestors
Independence Day was written for some bodies, just not ours, not really.
When the document was signed, when the bells rang, and when the language of liberty and unalienable rights was first put to paper, the people who wrote it were not imagining your ancestors as included in its promise. Enslaved Africans were property under the very government declaring its independence. Indigenous nations were already being systematically displaced from the land that document claimed as newly free. The freedom celebrated on this day was real, and it was also, from its origin, a freedom with an asterisk, granted to some bodies and explicitly withheld from others.
That isn’t ancient history with no bearing on you because this is the architecture this country was built on, and the architecture doesn’t disappear simply because more time has passed. It shows up still, in different forms, in every generation since. It shows up in you, even now, even today, as you’re asked once again to celebrate a freedom that has never been fully and equally extended.
I just recently watched the documentary on Netflix about Thomas Jefferson of our the country’s founding fathers, and it was disappointing for him to share the vision that all men are created equal but believed my ancestors were less than and that Native Americans could be equivalent to Whites if they adapted the American culture…
This is grief and it deserves to be named as grief, not minimized as cynicism or political commentary.
The Erasure Worth Naming
There is a particular psychological and spiritual cost to being asked year after year to celebrate a holiday that wasn’t written with you in mind. To watch fireworks, cookouts, and flag displays that center a story of liberation your ancestors were actively excluded from at the moment it was declared. If you think about like this.
This isn’t a small discomfort. It’s a form of collective grief that BIPOC/BBIA communities have carried for generations, often without language for what it actually is. The grief of being asked to perform gratitude for a freedom that was never universal and watching a national narrative celebrate itself without ever fully computing with who that narrative left out, and who it’s still leaving out.
Naming this isn’t unpatriotic. It’s honesty and honesty is the only foundation that real healing has ever been built on.
This Lives in the Body, Not Just the History Books
I want to be specific about something, because it matters clinically and spiritually….the grief of liberation denied across generations is not abstract. It is somatic, it lives in the body, and it is passed down through the body, the same way every other form of ancestral and generational trauma is passed down.
Epigenetic research continues to confirm what ancestral traditions have always understood that the body remembers what the mind was never given language for. The tightness that shows up around certain holidays. The exhaustion that has no clear cause on a day that is supposed to be celebratory, and the low hum of something unresolved, present even when you cannot point to a single specific reason for it.
This is your lineage’s grief living within you. The people who built this country’s wealth without ever being granted its promised freedom. The Indigenous nations whose sovereignty was never honored, whose displacement is ongoing rather than historical. Their unprocessed grief didn’t disappear when they died. It moved forward, generation by generation, until it arrived in your body, on this day, asking finally to be acknowledged.
The Specific Weight of This Day
There is a particular kind of psychospiritual weight to being asked to celebrate freedom in a country that still, in the present tense, denies full liberty and bodily autonomy to Black, Indigenous, and brown communities.
Mass incarceration disproportionately removes liberty from Black and Brown bodies at rates that mirror, rather than break from, the patterns this country was founded on. Indigenous communities continue to navigate the ongoing, present-tense reality of land theft, broken treaties, and conditions that many historians and human rights organizations have named as continuing genocide, not a closed chapter. Reproductive autonomy, particularly for Black women, remains constrained by a healthcare system with well-documented, well-researched patterns of medical racism that cost lives.
Asking BIPOC/BBIA women to set this reality aside for a day of unqualified celebration is asking for a performance, not an authentic experience, and performing gratitude you don’t feel, year after year, takes a toll that accumulates.
What BIPOC and BBIA Women Carry on This Day
For BIPOC and BBIA women specifically, this day often asks for an additional layer of labor and perhaps the management of other people’s discomfort with your honesty about what the day actually represents.
You may have learned to perform enthusiasm you don’t feel, to attend the cookout and smile through the fireworks while something quieter and heavier sits underneath. You may have absorbed across your lifetime the subtle message that naming the gap between the promise of this day and the reality of your community’s experience makes you difficult, ungrateful, too political for a holiday.
This labor is exhausting because it requires you to manage your own grief in service of everyone else’s comfort. That’s not a small ask. In fact, it’s one more iteration of a demand that has been placed on BIPOC/BBIA women across generations. The necessity to hold your pain quietly so that others do not have to feel uncomfortable in its presence.
You are allowed to stop.
Reclaiming This Day on Your Own Terms
I want to offer something different than forced patriotism or performed celebration. I want to offer reclamation.
This July 4th, you’re invited to treat the day as one of ancestral acknowledgment rather than unqualified celebration. Light a candle for your ancestors who were denied the freedom this day claims to represent. Speak their names if you know them, or simply acknowledge their existence if you don’t. Let the day include grief alongside whatever else it includes for you, time with family, rest, food you enjoy. Both can be true in the same day.
You are allowed to skip the fireworks if they don’t serve you. You are allowed to spend the day in quiet remembrance instead of forced festivity. You are allowed to tell the people in your life, simply and without elaborate justification, that this day carries complicated weight for you and that you are choosing to honor that complexity rather than override it.
Intentional rest is itself a form of resistance and reclamation. Your ancestors who were denied rest, denied autonomy over their own bodies and time, would not begrudge you choosing rest on a day that claims to celebrate the very freedoms they were denied. Use the day to give yourself what they couldn’t access and understand that this isn’t a betrayal of the holiday. It may be the truest way to honor what was actually taken.
You Don’t Have to Hold This Alone
If this grief is landing somewhere real for you today, you do not have to carry it in isolation.
🌿 The Grief Sanctuary is an addition for women holding exactly this kind of collective, ancestral, and present-tense grief. Members receive monthly ritual practices, ongoing community support, and a space where naming this complexity is never treated as too much. [Join at $27/month and upgrade subscription]
✨ The Inner Circle is for women who are ready for deeper, more personalized ongoing support. Inner Circle members receive expanded access to Amber, priority scheduling for readings and consultations, and a more intimate level of guided practice for the women ready to go further in. [Upgrade membership]
📞 Grief/Spiritual Consultation: Schedule a free consultation for one-on-one support for processing the specific weight of ancestral and collective grief, available worldwide. [Book at www.healingwithamber.co]
🔮 For Clinicians: If you work with BIPOC/BBIA clients who carry this exact kind of historical and present-tense grief and you want a framework rigorous enough to hold it, the Psychospiritual Grief Method Training is open for enrollment. Six CEUs, small cohort. [Full details at www.healingwithamber.co/the-psychospiritual-grief-method-training]
With care and intention,
Amber
