Today, in Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship.

The Court affirmed that children born in the United States to parents who are undocumented or temporarily present are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment. It protected a constitutional promise that political belonging cannot be distributed according to bloodline, wealth, race, parental status, or the convenience of those in power.

Birthright citizenship emerged from one of the deepest ruptures in the history of this country. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified after slavery, in response to a legal order that had denied Black people full personhood and citizenship. It established a different principle: those born here belong here.

A true American tradition is embodied in the assertion of somebodiness, as Martin Luther King Jr. affirmed. From the articulation of individual freedom to the right of self-determination, Black people have modeled for this country and for the world the power of a new kind of freedom: the freedom to create.

This is the freedom to make life, culture, language, beauty, family, institutions, strategy, and possibility under conditions meant to deny them. People sometimes call this making lemonade. Yet the phrase can understate the brilliance, labor, and collective intelligence involved. This is not simply survival. It is the creation of something sustaining from conditions intended to produce deprivation.

From the Haudenosaunee, we learn that governance across difference is not only possible, but pragmatic and life-affirming. There is room for togetherness and separateness in the effort to make life possible. Distinct nations can retain their own authority, particularity, and responsibility while joining one another in matters that affect them collectively.

These traditions are among the best of us. They will shape our collective future as a country.

We are living through a terrible and awesome time. We are being stripped down to bare bones collectively. In the midst of that stripping, we are being given an opportunity to become more deliberately the shape we choose to be.

Today’s decision matters because the effort to end birthright citizenship was never only about legal interpretation. It was an effort to make belonging conditional. It was an effort to create a class of children born in this country who could be treated as permanently suspect because of who their parents are, where their families came from, or how the state understands their migration.

For many people across our communities, this decision lands with relief, grief, vigilance, and exhaustion all at once.

Relief, because a constitutional protection held.

Grief, because so many families have had to live under the threat that their children’s belonging could be withdrawn.

Vigilance, because detention, deportation, family separation, surveillance, exclusion, and racial classification remain active structures in this country.

And exhaustion, because communities who make life possible every day have once again had to fight for what should never have been placed in doubt.

Still, today is worth marking.

Rights = responsibilities.

A right is never only something granted to us or secured in court. It also creates an obligation in us. When the right to belong is affirmed, we are called to become more responsible for the conditions of belonging around us.

We need to understand ourselves as responsible for the creation of a loving future regardless of our political positionalities. The future cannot be left only to courts, elected officials, movements, institutions, or any one group of people. Each of us participates in the conditions that make belonging more fragile or more possible.

Will we organize our public life around fear, exclusion, and the management of one another? Or will we learn from the people who have already shown us that freedom can be creative, that governance across difference can be life-affirming, and that rights carry responsibilities?

A loving future requires practices of recognition, care, courage, creation, and mutual responsibility strong enough to hold one another across difference.

Today, we honor the people who fought for this decision, the families who carried the fear of its possible loss, and the generations whose insistence made this constitutional promise real.

The work continues.