We The Owners

My Contribution To An Anthology To Be Released On Juneteeth 2026

Cover art by Marc Murphy

We the Owners of the United States, in Order to preserve a Union that is perfect for us, maintain Discipline, insure domestic Passivity, provide for defense of our financial interests, promote our own Welfare, and secure favorable trading positions and our Prosperity, do ordain and establish this updated Constitution for the United States of America.”

The Founding Fathers wore wigs and makeup and we’ve been wearing masks ever since. From the beginning the United States projected an image that didn’t reflect its reality. Men who enslaved Black men, women, and children stood on a soapbox labeled “Liberty” and announced to the world they had created the Land of the Free.

To its own residents it sold the Native People’s land and a Destiny that was Manifest if you were White. They also sold them boots without bootstraps while assuring them that hard work alone would lead to riches. The riches, with deceptive exceptions that would become part of the National Mythology, would never be theirs.

We will now celebrate the 250th birthday of this nation and its core Mythology that All Men Are Created Equal while in the midst of a Great Revival the goal of which is to make so profound the nation’s racial and economic Inequalities that they will be, at long last, permanent. Like all revivals there’s a big tent that both includes and excludes. Inside the tent are the ultra- and relatively-wealthy and the no-longer-embarrassed racists. Often these are the same people. Everyone else is outside. You’re outside.

So in its 250th year the nation founded by its wealthiest Owners of property and human beings has finally and unabashedly outgrown its Mythology and after a few decades of progress that made its owners uncomfortable we are back to where we began. There has never been more wealth in America and the divide between its owners and the poor has never been greater. And as for the formerly enslaved who fought their way into full rather than 3/5 citizenship America’s favorite mask is still a white hood. In the Great Revival of 2026 the very institutions that should represent the America that could be have laid bare with a fervor the America that is. The courts, universities, law firms, and corporations decided that We The People means exactly what it meant in 1776. The white columns in front of the Supreme Court and on university campuses no longer merely echo those on the verandas of antebellum slave holding plantations they represent them. They are them.

In these two and a half centuries there were times when people of good faith tried to make the Owners keep the promises made in 1776. But they have been too few and too far between. When we celebrate America this summer, when we celebrate its “spirit of independence”, and its “pursuit of justice”, it’s clear now that we will really just be celebrating how it - how we - mostly just played along. Played along to a minstrel song written long ago but is still very much our real national anthem.