By Bryon L. Garner, PhD
America’s 250th anniversary should be more than a national birthday party. It should be a moral audit.
That became painfully clear when a Confederate flag appeared in the North Carolina exhibit at the Great American State Fair on Washington’s National Mall, an event connected to America’s 250th celebration. According to Spectrum News, a video board in the exhibit displayed a Confederate flag on June 26, 2026; the video was later removed, and a spokesperson for the pavilion reportedly described the image as “unapproved.” North Carolina Governor Josh Stein’s office condemned the display, stating that “America 250 is about unity” and that glorifying the Confederate symbol does the opposite. Mt. Olive Pickle Company, one of the sponsors, withdrew from the exhibit after saying it had not known the Confederate flag was included. (Spectrum Local News)
Some will say the flag was merely an error. I think it revealed something deeper. A Confederate flag inside an America 250 celebration is not simply a mistake in event production. It is a diagnostic event. It tells us how easily some Americans still confuse heritage with domination, nostalgia with history, and patriotism with white innocence.
That symbol appearing inside a national commemoration says all we need to know about the state of American patriotism today. Not because it tells the whole story, but because it exposes the structure of the story we are still being asked to accept. The country wants unity, but too often it wants unity without historical accountability. It wants service, but not the testimony of those who served under unequal conditions. It wants Black sacrifice in the national story, but not always Black judgment about what that sacrifice cost.
I learned that lesson personally in 1991, when I returned from the Gulf War. I had served this country in the U.S. Navy in Southwest Asia. I had worn the uniform. I had participated in one of the clearest rituals of national belonging available in American life: military service. Yet after returning home, I saw a Confederate flag on a car.
That moment stayed with me.
The Confederate flag was not just a piece of cloth. It was a message. It told me that the uniform did not settle the question of belonging. It told me that one could serve the nation abroad and still return to a country where symbols of Black subordination remained publicly available as badges of regional pride, political grievance, or racial defiance. It told me that American patriotism had always been double-coded: one meaning for those whose belonging is presumed, another for those whose loyalty must be proven repeatedly.
That is the ethical problem at the center of American patriotism. The question is not simply whether one loves the country. I do. This is the nation of my birth, the nation of my ancestors, and the nation in which multiple generations of my family have served. The deeper question is what kind of love America demands, what kind of truth it can tolerate, and whose account of the nation it is willing to believe.
For Black veterans, patriotism has always carried both promise and injury.
The good is real. Military service can create discipline, purpose, fellowship, pride, and a claim on the nation that cannot be dismissed. Black veterans have helped defend the country’s ideals even when the country denied those ideals to them. They have modeled courage under pressure, commitment under contradiction, and public service under conditions that were often racially unequal. Their stories are not marginal to America. They are among the clearest evidence that the democratic promise has survived because excluded people kept forcing the nation to answer to it.
But the bad is also real. Black veterans have repeatedly been asked to embody the nation’s highest ideals while being denied full recognition within the very national community those ideals supposedly protect. They have returned from war to segregation, racial violence, economic exclusion, blocked opportunity, institutional neglect, and symbolic insult. They have been celebrated as evidence of American greatness while their testimony about American betrayal has too often been treated as ingratitude.
That is what I call Black Veteranality: the historical and theoretical intersection of Blackness, military service, civic sacrifice, and institutional betrayal. Black Veteranality names the condition of being asked to fight for a nation that does not always fight for you, to defend freedoms that remain unevenly distributed, and to accept patriotic gratitude that often stops short of structural repair.
I wrote in my book Black Veteranality: Military Service and the Illusion of Inclusive Patriotism: “America’s systemic betrayal of Black veterans is not merely a historical footnote; it is a persistent and unbroken pattern, echoing through generations into the present. What is truly astonishing is not the betrayal itself but the audacity to expect each new generation of Black Americans to overlook this painful legacy—willfully permitting the cycle of broken promises and denied opportunities to persist unchallenged—while still demanding that we embrace a glorified, distorted version of American exceptionalism.”
That is the core contradiction. America often wants Black veterans as symbols, but not as witnesses. It wants their images in parades, memorials, recruitment materials, and anniversary programming. It wants their service to prove that the nation is inclusive. But when Black veterans interpret their own service through the lens of exclusion, racism, and betrayal, the nation often becomes defensive. Their sacrifice is welcomed. Their knowledge is contested.
This is why Black veteran stories are indispensable to America 250.
America 250 cannot be credible if it becomes another exercise in celebratory abstraction. The official language of commemoration often emphasizes unity, service, sacrifice, and shared national inheritance. Those words matter. But they become ethically thin when they do not ask who paid the cost of that unity, whose sacrifice was recognized, whose service was exploited, and whose freedom was deferred. Even current America 250 programming recognizes that Black veterans and Black freedom fighters fought for liberty, equality, and democratic promise while being denied the full benefits of those ideals. North Carolina’s America 250 “Stories of NC Black Veterans” project, for example, highlights Black freedom fighters and veterans whose courage and resilience shaped the nation even as they were denied full democratic inclusion. (America250)
That is the kind of public memory America 250 needs. Not patriotic pageantry alone. Not flags without context. Not military flyovers that turn sacrifice into spectacle. America 250 needs stories that force the nation to confront the unequal conditions under which American freedom was built, defended, contested, and expanded.
This is where my Patriotism Audit framework becomes necessary.
A Patriotism Audit asks institutions, educators, public officials, veteran organizations, museums, and citizens to test patriotic practice against ethical standards rather than emotional comfort. It asks: Whose loyalty is presumed, and whose loyalty must be proven? Whose sacrifice is made publicly legible, and whose is absorbed into silence? Whose testimony about the nation is treated as credible knowledge? What does the nation owe to those from whom it has demanded service? What forms of memory are being celebrated, and what forms are being suppressed? What repair follows commemoration?
Those questions matter because patriotism is not only a feeling. It is a credibility system. It organizes who gets believed. It tells citizens which griefs count as national griefs and which are dismissed as divisive. It tells us whose anger is patriotic urgency and whose anger is a threat. It tells us which symbols can be called “heritage” and which protests are condemned as disrespect.
A Confederate flag at a state pavilion during an America 250 celebration fails that audit immediately.
It fails the credibility test because it treats Black historical memory as negotiable. It fails the recognition test because it places a symbol of racial domination inside a space supposedly dedicated to national unity. It fails the obligation test because it asks Black citizens and Black veterans to absorb yet another insult in the name of “moving on.” It fails the memory test because it smuggles Confederate nostalgia into a commemoration of American independence. And it fails the repair test unless the response goes beyond removal and apology toward a deeper public reckoning with how that symbol became imaginable there in the first place.
This is not only a problem on the Right.
The Right’s failure is often obvious. It too frequently treats patriotism as reverence without accountability. It treats national symbols as instruments of discipline rather than invitations to democratic responsibility. It equates criticism with disloyalty and imagines unity as obedience. In that framework, the flag becomes a shield against truth. The country is loved for refusing to hear what it has done, which is why removing portraits of Black generals like US Air Force Daniel “Chappie” James from the Pentagon is so easy for them.
But the Left has its own failure. Too often, the Left either abandons patriotism altogether or treats it as a messaging problem to be solved before elections. Some progressives assume that national attachment is inherently reactionary. Others attempt to “reclaim” patriotism by appealing to a better version of the American story without reconstructing the racial conditions under which that story has been told. Not acknowledging the influence of race on the conceptualization of American patriotism is ignoring the truth of the matter: It produces a conditional national belonging, and it is a familiar burden for many Black veterans.
Both approaches are inadequate.
The next 250 years require more than reclaimed patriotism. They require reconstructed patriotism.
A reconstructed patriotism would not ask citizens to choose between love and judgment. It would understand truthful criticism as civic labor. It would recognize that those who have been most excluded from the promises of the nation often possess the clearest insight into what those promises require. It would treat Black critique not as anti-American, but as one of the most rigorous traditions of American democratic thought.
It would also change how America listens to veterans.
Veterans are often invoked as proof of national greatness. But the real ethical test is not whether America can thank veterans. The test is whether America can hear them when their stories complicate national innocence. Can America hear Black veterans when they speak of discrimination inside the ranks? Can it hear them when they speak of returning from war to racism at home? Can it hear them when they insist that military service did not erase the unequal conditions of Black citizenship?
If America cannot hear that testimony, then its patriotism is immature. It is defensive. It confuses gratitude with justice and ceremony with repair.
The Confederate flag I saw in 1991 and the Confederate flag displayed during the Great American State Fair in 2026 belong to the same moral archive. They are not identical events, but they are connected by a recurring American pattern: the nation demands Black service while permitting symbols that deny Black belonging to remain publicly respectable. That contradiction is not incidental to American patriotism. It has helped shape American patriotism.
So, as America turns 250, the question is not whether we can stage a larger celebration. The question is whether we can tell a truer story.
A truer story would honor veterans without turning them into props. It would include Black veterans not as decorative proof of diversity, but as authoritative witnesses to the nation’s moral contradictions. It would recognize that service does not silence critique; it sharpens it. It would understand that patriotism without accountability is not love of country. It is loyalty to a myth.
America 250 should therefore be judged not by the number of flags displayed, speeches delivered, or ceremonies staged. It should be judged by whether the nation has the courage to submit itself to audit.
Who has been asked to sacrifice?
Who has been believed?
Who has been erased?
Who has been thanked without being repaired?
Who has loved the country while being forced to survive its betrayals?
Those are patriotic questions. They are not attacks on America. They are demands that America become ethically serious about its own claims.
The next 250 years cannot be built on distorted exceptionalism. They cannot be built on Confederate nostalgia disguised as heritage. They cannot be built on a patriotism that honors Black veterans in ceremony while discounting their testimony in policy, memory, and public life.
If patriotism is to have meaning in the next 250 years, both the Left and the Right must relinquish their inadequate versions of it. The Right must give up reverence without accountability. The Left must give up the fantasy that patriotism can be either abandoned or recovered without reconstruction.
What we need is a patriotism disciplined by truth, accountable to history, and transformed by the testimony of those the nation has too often betrayed.
Black veterans do not weaken American patriotism by telling the truth. They reveal what patriotism must become if America is to deserve the love it so often demands.