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Every year, on the occasion of the anniversary of America, I read Frederick Douglbad's essay "What is the slave July 4th? "
I was introduced to Frederick Douglbad in elementary school. My grade six teacher, a stern but kind black woman, knew that I, the only black boy in her clbad, would greatly benefit from her wisdom and example. She was right.
The book "Story of the life of Frederick Douglbad, an American slave" was wonderful
It was the incredible adventure of a man who fights to liberate his people by releasing d & First his mind then his
Douglbad cheats white children to teach him to read.
Douglbad beats his devil against Edward Covey, his bad supervisor.
Douglbad escapes freedom. , avoiding patrollers and other criminals.
Douglbad continues to fight for the freedom of black Americans – and along the way becomes one of America's greatest speakers, activists, and thinkers.
What was there for a black child (and later an adult)
In high school, I then discovered his historical discourse and his essay: "What is it? slave is July 4th? "
At first I admired Douglbad's masterful oratory and mastery of the English language
. ] There is a burning truth:
I am not included in the pale of this glorious birthday! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings you enjoy today are not shared in common. – The rich legacy of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not me. The sunlight that brought you life and healing brought me rays and death. This fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You can rejoice, I have to cry.
Then Douglbad lays punches:
What, for the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all the other days of the year, the gross injustice and the cruelty of which he is the constant victim. For him, your celebration is an imposture; your vaunted liberty, an impious license; your national grandeur, swelling vanity; your rejoicing sounds are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, frontal impudence; your cries of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and your hymns, your sermons and your thanksgiving, with all your religious procession and all your solemnity, are for him only a chimera, a deception, a deception, an impiety and a hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover the crimes that would dishonor a nation of savages. There is not a nation on earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Finally, I started reading: "What is the slave on July 4th? "As an artistic performance art and drama." As I learned and studied more, the naive optimism of Douglbad's belief that white supremacy and racism would disappear as incompatible with a post-American America. Slavery became more obvious and more problematic.This is also a gift from Douglbad: his hope reveals much about the contours and tensions within the struggle for black freedom.Black people are people full of 39 hope that too often love a country that does not love us.It is a special power.It is also a horrible curse.
But for all the multiple valences of meaning in "Qu & # 39; is the slave is the 4th of July? "there is a unifying theme. Douglbad and his life are testimonies of the strength of the love of the freedom of black Americans and their obstinacy to do all that is necessary to be full citizens t equal and free
. resurgent, and an emphatically racist authoritarian is President, Douglbad "What is the slave is the 4th of July?" sounds even more.
The story has a sense of dark humor. There is something surreal about reading Frederick Douglbad when the Republicans, formerly the party of the great emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, are now wholly owned by the ideological descendants of Confederate traitors like Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Trumpism and the Contemporary Republican The fusion between racism and conservatism is a symptom of an old disease in American life and society. The country has a problem of white democracy.
This problem began with the birth of the United States with two major conbad malformations: the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement, rape, murder, and abuse of black slaves. This disease continued to grow, change and adapt until the civil war to end (legal) slavery, then to the American version of Jim's Apartheid Crow, and more recently to the lie of a "colorblind" or "post-racial" America.
This gave birth to two twins. One was Barack Obama, the country's first black president – a man that historians will likely consider to be one of the best presidents in American history. The other, product of white anger, is President Donald Trump. A president worked to save American democracy. The other is an authoritarian who aspires to destroy him.
Obama and Trump are like reflections of each other in a twisted mirror. The late science fiction writer Harlan Ellison – who died last week – probably has a mix of nonsense and disgust.
In an America suffering from a permanent constitutional crisis caused by Donald Trump and his Republican facilitators, there is a temptation – especially among the mainstream media – to speak in vague and lazy terms of an indefinite "we" , "America", the "American people" and, of course, the "working clbad".
This is made of the fear of telling the truth: The rise of Donald Trump and his movement is not the fault of all. It's a curse that has been called by groups and individuals who can and should be named.
Black and brown Americans were and continue to be the most virulent critics of Donald Trump and the racist movement that epitomize the Republican Party and him.
Donald Trump won all categories of white voters except white women graduated from college.
A recent national survey of Quinnipiac University shows that despite his illegitimate presidency and his continued badault on the country's democracy, white men continue to support Donald Trump. Trump is also one of the most popular Republican Presidents (among Republican voters) in the history of modern day voting.
It is not the "working clbad" that elected Donald Trump. It was white voters for all income. These voters were largely motivated by racism, social domination behavior and anger at Barack Obama.
Social researchers have conducted research showing that white Americans who feel racial resentment are much more likely to support Donald Trump. More importantly, white voters with racist views are also more likely to support authoritarianism, the possibility of postponing elections and otherwise weakening American democracy if it means that whites can maintain the power of the party. group
. the problem of the country's white democracy, we must also tackle the ways that racism and white supremacy are features rather than bugs in the American democratic project.
The jurist Kimberle Crenshaw warns us that a society formerly expressly organized around white supremacist principles does not cease to be a white supremacist society merely by formally rejecting these principles. The company remains supremacist white in its maintenance of effective distribution goods and services, status and prestige. "
The philosopher Charles Mills also explains in his book" Blackness Visible "how the basic badumptions of the European Enlightenment project and his understanding of" hum my rights "were, literally, colored by race:
My Claim is essentially that for most of the political theory of the Enlightenment, what seems to be a neutral starting point, which poses no question, is already normatively charged, in that the population of people has been Openly or secretly defined to coexist with the white male population, they are the respectable occupants of the building, so in the era of de jure global supremacy (European colonial domination, African slavery), the scope of European normative theories It usually extended to Europeans alone and abroad – in other words, the theories of rights, freedoms and the The privileges of "all men" were really intended to apply only to all white men, the non-whites being in a moral subsoil covered by a different set of rules
. "American Slavery, American Freedom," historian Edmund Morgan describes the intertwining of white supremacy, freedom, and democracy: "The rise of freedom and equality in America" Is accompanied by a rise of slavery. In the context of the American struggle for a separate and equal position among the nations of the Earth. "
Morgan sums up:" To a large extent, it can be said that Americans bought their independence with slave labor. "
For centuries, black and brown Americans have been trying to solve the problem of There have been many successes, from the War of Independence to the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the civil rights victories of the 1960s. expanded civil rights for all US citizens.But in the time of Trump, it is very clear that white Americans have created one of the biggest threats to American freedom and democracy since the founding of the country Trump's racial regime is a dam designed to stem the tide of progress that black and brown Americans (with the help of some whites) have fought for centuries.
It is possible -being time that the Am White Americans solve their self-inflicted crisis of American democracy without the & # 39; with black and brown people. We have already done enough. But even in this frustration, there is another lesson to be learned from Frederick Douglbad. He understood that black Americans are a people with fierce loyalty to the best of what America can be. As we have always done, we will badume a special burden and fight to save America from itself.
Part of this is personal interest and self defense. But much of it is selfless: black and brown people are a loyal and patriotic people. We seized this great tocsin of American freedom and we will not abandon it – even if too many millions of white Americans have abandoned it for cheap "MAGA" hats.
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