In 1852, Frederick Douglass stood before the Rochester Ladies Antislavery Society in New York and bestowed to us one of his most famous speeches, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.” I return to his words around this time of the year. Especially as I get older.
I can’t give you the precise year I stood over a grill and failed to find the romance in matchstick heads and charcoal pieces. I don’t know when I stopped dancing with sparklers in my driveway, wishing something else in this country burned. I can’t pinpoint the moment I saw an Uncle Sam hanging under an American flag, and could only find the word “bastard” at the tip of my tongue. But does that even matter?
I write this essay as a black millennial woman. The only presidential elections I’ve been able to vote in included and were won by an African American. I have more passport pages with stamps than without. And last week SCOTUS affirmed my right to marry another decolonized queer bae. Parts of me praise. Yet I am here left asking almost the exact same question to the virtual universe that Frederick did to a crowd of abolitionists over a century and a half ago:
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?
Indeed, what, to me — the great great granddaughter of American chattel — is the Fourth of July in the year 2015?
People will gather over grilled pork flesh and ground round today. Meanwhile, the ashes are still cooling from the scorched remains of seven black churches burned across the southeast. On one hand, these flames are conscribed into a matrix of common occurrences. On average, there are five church arsons per week in the U.S., according to the L.A. Times. As if to say, what is this self-proclaimed Christian nation but one that has grown accustomed to watching God burn without want for weeping?
On the other hand, each fire is waiting for its isolated extinguishment. Amongst the seven churches whose hymn books and bibles have been reduced to cinder, there is one in Greeleyville, SC, that, according to FBI, is not the victim of arson but of lightning. Maybe this is not false. But neither is the kin between this blackened corpse and Mother Emmanuel’s nine who have yet settled into their caskets, and the four black girls bombed in Birmingham who met those men and women on the other side.
But such ties will be abandoned, left alone without saying. Well into the 21st century, the church is still set to stand as a furnace, one that black people are expected to continue to seek refuge for at our peril. The precarious conditions under which we worship and seek communion with one another under the same supposed God of other Americans, or of the country itself, still remains unaddressed.
And amidst the silence, American flags fly. The Star-Spangled Banner greets, with little more than a fleeting remark upon its alliances. Over the past week, we have been asked to believe they are changing. An image has circulated of the Confederate flag lowering, and, in its place, the LGBT rainbow flag raised. Here, hate is being laid to rest as #lovewins. How is this true?
Bree Newsome made a fool of our slothful political bureaucracy by climbing and taking down the Confederate flag waving in front of the South Carolina capitol building just shy of 6 a.m. last Saturday. Within an hour, the flag flew again, and the banter about heritage without historical accountability raged. And as much as I wanted to celebrate the Supreme Court decision, last Sunday I stood in front of Mother Emanuel reading sign after sign, “Love will always win” wondering how love’s victory could be a victory for all when its future remains deferred for so many of us.
The government gave me the right to marry. But I am a woman who seeks a partner equally invested in making me laugh and cum as building institutions that affirm the right to be black, alive and living well. I am expected to abide by laws that deny my full dignity as a human being, not change them. What, then is an offering of tax breaks from a country that will meet me and my love as home-grown enemy combatants for standing up for our right to live in peace instead of pieces? What is a prospective marriage certificate when I can’t be sure I’ll survive, let alone to face an altar?
Today, as any other day, I am reminded of America’s hypocrisy where liberty and freedom ring, but only rhetorically. Once again, I am reminded of how much America’s independence depends on my demise. And today, like those past, I will not concede.
The Fourth of July is still not mine, and I will not celebrate today in hopes that (as it stands) it should be. What kind of freedom is to be glorified that continues to exist callously at my expense? What autonomy is there to be praised that demands assimilation into this madness? Five generations removed from slavery, and I am still expected to explain myself for being me. We are still the yet-to-be-United States of America. Black people have yet to find grace without a death sentence. All the while, the country has managed to congratulate itself for these self-evident facts and for imposing our hypocrisy on others abroad.
We deserve better than this — a different kind of Indepence Day. One that fully commemorates a liberation of all for all rather than only for a few. The latter has become customary, but former must become the norm and we cannot wait for that change to happen. Especially as the law of the land guts the voting rights act and allows police to search our premises despite our objections. The stakes are too high. The country’s potential must be taken from those who squander it. On the day when this occurs, and America as we know it is but a haunting memory of another kind of future open and thriving for and with everyone, freedom will be actualized.
I do not know on what day and year that moment will manifest itself, but I believe it is imminent, and only then, after we have put in our respective work to get there, will I set fireworks ablaze.
