On this Fourth
of July, a day of independence for some but
not for Black people, there is no better time
to reflect on Frederick Douglass’ speech, “What to the Slave is
the Fourth of July?”
Delivered in Rochester, New
York, on July 5, 1852, on the 76th anniversary
of the signing of the Declaration of
Independence, the preeminent abolitionist,
statesman, writer and orator took the
opportunity not to celebrate America, but to
remind everyone that this nation is not a
place where Black folks are free.
“This Fourth of
July is yours, not mine. You may
rejoice, I must mourn,” Douglass said, then
asking the audience, “Do you mean, citizens,
to mock me, by asking me to speak today?”
Cutting like a knife nearly 170
years ago, Douglass’ words are just as
relevant and resonating to what Black people
are experiencing today.
After commemorating Juneteenth
just a few weeks ago, and as America
celebrates the independence of white colonists
from an oppressive British monarchy, an
oppressed Black America must always remind
white America that it has nothing to celebrate
on July 4 each year. Given the centuries-long
history of persecution against Black people —
much of which still permeates society in the
twenty-first century — there is no way we can
take pride in American freedom. This, as we
fight for our freedom at this very moment, as
we speak, in the so-called land of the free.
Back then, as now, America is
faced with two narratives: The myth of
American exceptionalism — that America is a
great nation, the best place and can do no
wrong — versus the reality that African people
have been held in bondage in what we have been
told is the cradle of liberty. Douglass called
out America for being two-faced.
“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,” Douglass said.
“To him, your celebration is a
sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license;
your national greatness, swelling vanity; your
sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless;
your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted
impudence; your shout 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,” he
added.
“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.”
We should go back to Africa if
we don’t like it here, we are told — our
people built both lands — with no mention of
the circumstances that brought us here in the
first place. From the first slave ship to
cross the Middle Passage, our story has been
one of a 400-year protest to get free.
Meanwhile, from day one, white America has
fought and continues to fight against our
freedom, fearing that when we are fully and
truly free, Black folks will pay back the
favor and get even — for our abduction, for
that perilous and deadly boat ride to the
forced labor camps and everything that has
happened since.
In a never-aired
ABC interview from 1979
that was too much for white people to
handle, James Baldwin laid it
all out, echoing Douglass.
“White people go around, it seems
to me, with a very carefully suppressed terror
of Black people, tremendous uneasiness. They
don’t know what the blackface hides,” he
noted. “They’re sure it’s hiding something.
What it’s hiding is American history, you
know. What it’s hiding is what white people
know they have done and are doing.”
“White people know very well one
thing. It’s the only thing they have to know.
They know this, everything else they say is a
lie,” Baldwin continued. “They know they would
not like to be Black here. They know that. Now
they know that, and they’re telling me lies.
They’re telling me and my children nothing but
lies.”
In a nation in denial over
systemic racism, freedom is elusive for the
descendants of the enslaved.
Black people need reparations
for centuries of intergenerational trauma,
forced labor, theft and torture. Police
continue to torture and murder Black bodies,
unable to separate from their slave patrol
origins. Whether Black people should have
equal voting rights is a question open for
debate, as Republicans enact Jim Crow voter
suppression laws in state legislatures, and
Democrats seek bipartisanship with white
supremacists on the federal level.
Congress just
voted to remove statues
of Confederate domestic terrorists from the
U.S. Capitol, over a century-and-a-half after
the end of the Civil War. And yet, there is
little-to-no accountability for the white
insurrectionists who planned, funded and
executed the Jan. 6 attack on the
Capitol. This, as the skeletons of Black
children and adults lynched in the Tulsa
Race Massacre are
unearthed after a century in unmarked mass
graves. And white nationalist politicians
gaslight us with laws prohibiting the teaching
of systemic racism, slavery and anything that
makes America look bad, makes white people
feel uncomfortable and causes the shedding of
white tears. Juneteenth is a federal holiday,
but teaching Juneteenth, or Tulsa, or Black
Lives Matter is forbidden in school. None of
this is meant to make sense.
Douglass condemned the Founding
Fathers for making “the right to hold and to
hunt slaves” a part of the Constitution and
attacked the American church for upholding
slavery and siding with the oppressor. He
understood the “right of the hunter to his
prey“ reigned supreme in America, and the
“hideous monster” of slavery had to be
destroyed.
“The existence of slavery in this
country brands your republicanism as a sham,
your humanity as a base pretense, and your
Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral
power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at
home … It is the antagonistic force in your
government, the only thing that seriously
disturbs and endangers your Union,” Douglass
said, warning “a horrible creature is nursing
at the tender breast of your youthful
republic.”
Even today, the nation has not
eradicated Black oppression. We experience
inequity and injustice everywhere. And the
greatest threat to the United States is white
supremacist domestic terror. Nothing to
celebrate here.
“I am not included within the
pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high
independence only reveals the immeasurable
distance between us. The blessings in which
you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in
common,” Douglass proclaimed. “The rich
inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity
and independence, bequeathed by your fathers,
is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that
brought life and healing to you, has brought
stripes and death to me.”
This commentary is also posted
on The
Grio.