The United States of America was founded with utopian aspirations, a willingness to stake a claim that all men were created equal and endowed with unalienable rights.
Shortly after this Declaration, America abandoned that claim and has made little effort to reclaim it.
No longer were all men created equal; some men were allowed to own others, and the state facilitated a genocide of the indigenous population.
Even in the brief moments when members of the founding political class of America highlighted this hypocrisy, they still tended to forget the large number of humans that are not men.
This cycle of aspiration and abandonment of the downtrodden would repeat and is perhaps the heart of the grand American experiment as it exists instead of as it was conceived.
However, there were still those who believed in the aspiration, and when it came time to reconstruct the republic following the Civil War, the rhetoric of the Declaration returned.
Congressmen once again borrowed the language of the radicals who stood opposed to the monarchy a century before; once again they advocated for a wider swath of men, once again believing that there were rights that were inherent to the humanity of these folks.
Then Reconstruction fell apart under the weight of trying to both maintain and reform a white supremacist system, and as it did, the language of equality faded.
The belief that all men were created equal fell under the assault of radical white supremacists who had bided their time and maintained their power despite treason.
Those of us, white and Black, man and woman and non-binary, transgender and cisgender, heterosexual and queer, who still believe that all people are created equal and are endowed with inalienable rights are treated as radicals.
It is those who oppress, those who separate, and those who exploit who have radically abandoned what America was supposed to be and exist instead in the grand tradition of what America is.
Join with us in our belief in radical freedom for the oppressed, rather than the radical oppression of the system as it exists. An America that believes all its citizens are created equal is a radical departure from the America that exists today, and it will require us to embrace a revolutionary future of equality.