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You’re probably not in the best mood right now to celebrate white America’s birthday, unless you’re Clarence Thomas grilling unicorn steaks at Harlan Crow’s private island. The rest of us are rightfully grumpy, and that’s before some dumbass frightens the neighborhood pets with illegal fireworks.
Shortly after America won the Revolutionary War, Black people celebrated the Fourth of July in the hope that freedom would eventually come their way. But it was soon clear that the Southern enslaver states had no interest in ending human bondage. By the 1830s, many Black people across the nation celebrated “Independence Day” on
July 5th as a form of protest. In 1838, a black paper suggested that on July 4th a slave ship should replace the stars and stripes on the flag. One black weekly called it “the bleakest day of the year. We wish we could blot it from the calendar.” This is some hardcore rhetoric for the time.
It was fitting that activist and author Frederick Douglass delivered his blistering speech “What To The Slave Is The 4th Of July?” to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in New York on July 5. Here is my favorite passage:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
Douglass predicted a racial reckoning that perhaps extends beyond the Civil War, which Douglass would live through, and looms large today: “For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder,” he said. “We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.”
Every July 4, I watch the 2003 HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner’s
Angels in America. In the past, I’ve shared the scene when Belize (Jeffrey Wright) confronts Louis (Ben Shenkman) about his self-serving white liberal patriotism.
I hate America. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come to room 1013 over at the hospital, I’ll show you America. Terminal, crazy and mean. I live in America, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s got to love something.
“Terminal, crazy, and mean” accurately defines the America that right-wingers want to impose on us. However, we have always fought for a better reality, and, as Langston Hughes once said, we, too, are America.
So, this year, I leave us with Prior Walter’s final monologue from my favorite play.
The fountain’s not flowing now, they turn it off in the winter. Ice in the pipes. But in the summer…it’s a sight to see, and I want to be around to see it. I plan to be, I hope to be. This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all. And the dead will be commemorated, and will struggle on with the living and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward, we will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now, you are fabulous each and every one and I bless you. More life, the great work begins.
Let’s follow Prior’s lead and choose “more life,” no matter what they throw at us.
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