"What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?".

[sheshe2]

Chauncey Devega: Independence Day and White America's Democracy Problem

There is searing truth:

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. — 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 Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

Then Douglass lays in the body blows:

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 denunciations 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 these United States, at this very hour.

Eventually I began to read "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" as political performance art and drama. As I learned and studied more, the naive optimism of Douglass's belief that white supremacy and racism would wither away as incompatible with a post-slavery America became more obvious and problematic. This too was a gift from Douglass: his hope reveals much about the contours and tensions within the black freedom struggle. Black folks are a hopeful people who all too often love a country which does not love us back. This is a special power. It is also a horrible curse.

But for all of the multiple valences of meaning in "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" there is one unifying theme. Douglass and his life are testimonies to the force of black Americans' love of freedom, and an unrelenting stubbornness to do all that is necessary to be fully equal and free citizens.

In the age of Donald Trump, when white supremacy is openly resurgent, and an unapologetic racist authoritarian is president, Douglass's "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" resonates even more. History has a dark sense of humor. There is something surreal about reading Frederick Douglass when the Republicans, once the party of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, is now fully owned by the ideological descendants of Confederate traitors like Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Read More: http://www.chaunceydevega.com/2018/07/independence-day-and-white-americas.html

[Igel]

1. You'd think we're forever in 1853.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/fourth-of-july-black-holiday/564320/

Things change. For good. For bad. But mostly they change.