Independence Day! For a naturalized American it is particularly poignant. It recalls the personal declarations of independence that, in a simple but transformational ceremony, subsume countless identities into the liberty, responsibility and possibility of United States citizenship under the law. I recall looking around that courtroom in Brooklyn 13 years ago and thinking simply: Here is America.

This magical capacity for reinvention lies at the root of American greatness. Other nations fetishize the past, rewrite it in blood; America’s genius is the facilitation of forgetfulness. To be unburdened of history, for many immigrants, enables the pursuit of happiness.

But not for all: That pursuit, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, was denied to blacks. They were not citizens but slaves. This, as Barack Obama put it, was America’s “original sin.” It would not be easily expurgated.

I began my July 4 by reading the words of a black poet, Langston Hughes, written in 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression. This, today, is not a good American moment. Truth is under attack. The law is under attack. The press is under attack. Moral depravity seeps from on high in a viscous torrent that infects everything and is hard to cleanse from the skin. It cloys. The White House stands for white males, above all, not 325 million Americans of every creed and color. I wanted to remind myself, again, of America’s spirit.