The Trump administration announced its celebration of America’s semiquincentennial with a tweet.
“TONIGHT,” an official White House X account declared last New Year’s Eve, “The Illumination of America on the Washington Monument kicks off the celebration of America’s 250th birthday year.”
For the next week, visitors to the monument would see a “projection-mapping spectacle” that aimed, said the spectacle’s organizers, to narrate the “Nation’s discovery, expansion, independence, and vision for the future.” The displays showed images of settlers, soldiers, cowboys and astronauts — archetypal figures drawn from our national mythology.
As deployed by this White House, each archetype emphasizes masculine conquest, national expansion and manifest destiny — it is freedom as the power to dominate others. But there are other freedoms in the American experience, and as we reflect on the 250th anniversary of the nation — as we think through the United States’ ideals and identity — we might look to an archetype that stands for something different. A figure in American history that was of great significance to our national story but one that never quite found a place in our popular culture.
That figure is the fugitive slave.