When President Joe Biden declared Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021, he told reporters that “all Americans can feel the power of this day.” He was right: Every American, whether descended from slaves or not, can and should celebrate the anniversary of emancipation.

This country was dedicated at its birth to the proposition that “all” people are entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” True, those words were written by flawed men, some of whom owned slaves themselves. But the founders were not trying to fix all injustices overnight; they were proclaiming what Abraham Lincoln would later call a “maxim for free society,” which would be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated” by future generations. That maxim is the source of our national identity, and that “constant labor” is cause for rejoicing.

How sad, then, that we are beset today by alleged champions of justice who seek not to reinforce but to undermine that maxim, not to realize the spirit of Juneteenth but to undermine it and instill the notion that people should be treated differently based on race. Those who vanquished slavery believed in realizing the American dream for everyone. But today’s race-politics leaders pursue the opposite goal: fracturing us into camps defined by ancestry.

The most obvious example is the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which asserts that America “was founded … as a slavocracy,” as project leader Nikole Hannah-Jones put it, with a Constitution that “preserved and protected slavery.”

Historically, that’s false. The founders openly admitted that slavery was incompatible with American principles. They created the world’s first anti-slavery society in 1775; Ben Franklin was a member. During the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson declared that “nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.” And John Adams, reading Jefferson’s anti-slavery words, said they were “worth diamonds.”

As for the Constitution, it didn’t even contain the word “slavery” — at the insistence of James Madison, who said it would be “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man.” Far from preserving the practice, it gave slavery no explicit protection, and abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass persuasively argued that the Constitution, properly interpreted, actually gave federal officials the power to abolish slavery, if they were willing. Douglass thought he’d been proven right when, in 1861, Southerners could only protect slavery by abandoning the Constitution and declaring independence.

But the 1619 Project’s real goal isn’t to rewrite history. Its purpose is to instill an attitude of separatism, persuading people that the American dream isn’t for black people. It claims that racism has generated “everything that has truly made America exceptional” and that white supremacy is inextricable from the country’s identity. Hannah-Jones’s ally, Ta-Nehisi Coates, is more direct: In his book Between the World and Me, he uses the word “dream” pejoratively, dismissing America’s self-conception as a nation conceived in liberty as a lie “concocted by Americans to justify themselves.”

In short, 1619 partisans advance an argument once heard only from members of white supremacist groups: that black people are disqualified from Americanness. They do this in hopes of harnessing resentment for political advantage. This is the motivation behind “reparations” schemes that redistribute wealth from people of other races to the descendants of slaves or racial preferences that give jobs or college enrollment to people based on ancestry, not merit. Their ideal is a world where people are treated differently based on skin color — allegedly for benign purposes, but discrimination is never benign.

Douglass wouldn’t have fallen for it. Separatism had its advocates in his day, too: white people who wanted to deport the black population and some black leaders who urged freedmen to abandon America for overseas colonies. Douglass considered this anathema because black people had every right to equal citizenship — indeed, they had fought for it harder than most whites. Separatism “tends to throw over the negro a mantle of despair,” he proclaimed , “to make him despondent and doubtful, where he should be made to feel assured and confident. It forces upon him the idea that he is forever doomed to be a stranger and sojourner in the land of his birth.” That only hampered the cause of equality.

Fortunately, people of all races seem to be rejecting the delusion of separatism. They’re rallying instead to the maxim that defines Americanness and to the effort to bring the American dream within everyone’s reach. That’s even the theme of a new children’s book, A Is for the American Dream , published this month by the Goldwater Institute, where I work. It reminds us that while there’s plenty of progress to be made, we can achieve that progress only if we remain faithful to the equality principle.

Juneteenth is the perfect day for Americans, whatever their ancestry, to honor that maxim — to look to it, labor for it, and work toward its attainment.

Timothy Sandefur is the vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute.