Imagine your average Fourth of July party. There are probably hot dogs on the grill, everyone is clad in red, white, and blue, and it culminates in a fireworks show. It may sound like a lovely way to spend a day off. But for a lot of Americans, the celebration, and the flag itself, are more complicated than that.

That’s the question that Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in show, is setting out to tackle this holiday weekend: What’s the relationship like between Black people and the American flag?

Specifically, one listener wanted to know, in the wake of the red-white-and-blue spectacle of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter and Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show, how that conversation has evolved over time.

This is something Ted Johnson thinks a lot about. Johnson, who is Black, is an adviser at the liberal think tank New America, a columnist at the Washington Post, and a retired US Navy commander. “The flag has sort of been hijacked by nationalists — folks who believe either America is perfect and exceptional, or at the very least, anything that it’s done wrong in the past should be excused by all the things that it’s done well,” Johnson told Vox. “And that is not my relationship with the flag. It’s much more complicated because there has been tons of harm done under that flag.”

How do Black Americans square that harm and that pride? And how has that relationship changed through the years? Below is an excerpt of the conversation with Johnson, edited for length and clarity.

You can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

One way to tease out this relationship between Black Americans and the flag is to talk about the experience of Black service members. What’s that history?

One of the earliest instances is the story of an enslaved man named Jehu Grant in Rhode Island during the Revolutionary War. The man that owned him was a loyalist to the Brits. Grant was afraid that he was going to be shipped off and sold to the Brits to fight for them. So he runs away, joins Washington’s army and fights in the Continental Army, and then his master shows up and says, “You’ve got my property, and I want it back.” And the Army turns him back over to the guy that owns him, where he serves for many years and eventually buys his........

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