On this 247th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, nothing comes to mind so much as Frederick Douglass’ famous 1852 speech, “What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July?” After this last dispiriting week of decisions from the Supreme Court, in 2023, Black people find ourselves asking the same question— what does the Fourth of July mean to us?
From the time we were first dragged here against our will in 1619, Black people have been fighting a two-front war—famously shedding the first blood in the American Revolution and fighting our white countrymen for the right to be recognized and treated as human beings “endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights.”
Of course, the Declaration was a lie from the start. Inalienable literally means unable to be bought and sold, yet the venerable Founders who wrote and co-signed those words blithely owned, bought and sold Black human beings.
Despite the glaring contradiction, we have collectively bought into this blinkered myth, in a country that refuses to compensate Black people for the unpaid physical labor that built this country or the unpaid intellectual labor that forced this country to live up, grudgingly and in fits and starts, to the flowery sentiments in its founding documents.
If we are being honest, Black freedom movements are the foundation on which the rights of other marginalized Americans are built— often by Black people with intersectional identities—like Marsha P. Johnson and Pauli Murray. The misguided individual Asian American plaintiffs who allowed themselves to be used by the forces of white supremacy in the case of Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard didn’t just betray Black people. They betrayed the decades of coalitions between Asian American and Black activists who understood that we rise and fall together. They betrayed the 70% of Asian Americans who support affirmative action and they dishonored freedom fighters like Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama. Like the protagonist of James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” they have “sold their soul for a mess of pottage. “Happy” Independence Day to us all.
* Originally posted on Facebook on July 4, 2023