What would Frederick Douglass have to say about being black and American today?
What, to a black American in the age of Barack Obama, is the Fourth of July? I answer: the day that reveals to him, more than any other, how much America owes to blacks and their struggle for freedom. If it hadn't been for people like Frederick Douglass, this would not be a country worth living in. The lofty ideals of the Founding Fathers would have been no more than stirring but empty rhetoric.
I know that such sentiments go against the grain on a holiday dedicated to ritualized celebrations of the Declaration of Independence. But let's not kid ourselves. That stuff about all men being created equal was not meant to apply to people like us. If it had been, Douglass would never have had to ask the electrifying question in the famous speech he delivered in 1852: "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?" If the founders had really meant what they said, there would not have been any slaves.
A century and a half after Douglass' speech , there is much to celebrate because blacks and their allies took the Founders' words seriously and tried to make them real. Thanks to the centuries-long freedom struggle in which Douglass played such a key part, blacks--and other minorities and women--are no longer second-class citizens. One of us leads the nation, doing his best to resolve the manifold woes inherited from his feckless predecessors, all of them white males, like the Founding Fathers. The hopeful trope that got him elected is that these are the United States of America--one nation, one people, unified by a collective pursuit of a common dream.
But while the vibrant, multicolored, more mature and just society that Obama evokes has been born, it could still be choked in its cradle. Every stride toward freedom America has taken was against determined opposition. Even today, you can still get in trouble for criticizing America for not living up to its promises. (Think Jeremiah Wright or Thurgood Marshall.) One of our great political parties still bases much of its appeal on the age-old racial resentment of whites unnerved by the political emergence of people like us. Too many of our white fellow Americans still regard us as inferior and illegitimate. They don't want to share the nation's rewards and responsibilities with us. They want it back.
Most of us, on the other hand, yearn for the day when July Fourth does not invite the ambivalence we are feeling this weekend. We long for the day when we can cherish the country we love without feeling torn by the two-ness W.E.B. DuBois wrote about in The Souls of Black Folk. And just as Douglass accurately prophesied the death of slavery in his famous speech, that day is coming. It's coming because of the determination of true patriots, of all races, who believe in the Founding Fathers' beautiful promises more than the Founding Fathers did. It will be our birthday present to America.
Jack White is a regular contributor to The Root.
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This, anniversary of the Declaration of American Independence, has always been a difficult holiday for all thinking African Americans. The Declaration of Independence, steeped in words declaring the rights of mankind, while these same writers held slaves, under the most brutal slave system in world history, was such a hypocritical political exercise that it hard to fathom the depth of their hypocrisy. It took to hundred years of struggle, war and more protracted struggle to create democracy in America. Real democracy has only existed here for less than forty or so years, after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and The Immigration Reform Act of 1965. These laws, implemented over time, have created the American democracy we now have and love, not the hallow "Declaration of Independent adopted on July 4, 1776.
For me July 4th is no day to celebrate, but one to reflect on the hard won price of real freedom and democracy in America and to cherish those who fought long and hard to give meaning to the lofty words and ideals found in our founding documents.
John H. Armwood
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This, anniversary of the Declaration of American Independence, has always been a difficult holiday for all thinking African Americans. The Declaration of Independence, steeped in words declaring the rights of mankind, while these same writers held slaves, under the most brutal slave system in world history, was such a hypocritical political exercise that it hard to fathom the depth of their hypocrisy. It took to hundred years of struggle, war and more protracted struggle to create democracy in America. Real democracy has only existed here for less than forty or so years, after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and The Immigration Reform Act of 1965. These laws, implemented over time, have created the American democracy we now have and love, not the hallow "Declaration of Independent adopted on July 4, 1776.
For me July 4th is no day to celebrate, but one to reflect on the hard won price of real freedom and democracy in America and to cherish those who fought long and hard to give meaning to the lofty words and ideals found in our founding documents.
John H. Armwood
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