I’m referring, of course, to the famous 1852 speech by Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? Because, frankly, you could substitute Black for Slave throughout and it would still resonate.
Douglass decried the many ways America’s treatment of Black folks made a mockery of its Declaration of Independence and founding documents. That’s just one of many reasons why, with all due respect to the Founding Fathers (and to MLK), I rank Frederick Douglass as the greatest American ever.
Legacy of racism
But if Douglass feels too heavy for your Fourth of July mood, maybe Langston Hughes will do. His 1936 poem, “Let America Be America Again,” hits just as hard, especially with lines like:
America never was America to me…
There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’
Sadly, that’s how deeply the legacy of slavery — America’s original crime against humanity — still affects Black Americans today.
And nowhere is this more forebodingly so than in the way the Roberts Supreme Court keeps rolling back civil rights. In fact, Douglass could probably recycle his constitutional arguments against the Taney Court of the 1850s to condemn this Court’s opinions in 2022, especially when it comes to voting rights, affirmative action, and equal protection under the law.
If gas is so high, why are so many people driving?
But, on a much lighter note, July 4th is replete with many less serious contradictions. And none is more nationally expressed than the one playing out on highways across America today.
Because, to hear all the reports about record traffic congestion, you’d never know that gas prices have never been higher; or, more to the point, that Americans have never been more outraged by them.
And still they drive…
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