Right now, during this moment in which lots of racial tensions and realities are boiling to the surface of society, I'm feeling trapped. I'm stuck between people who feel a USA without white supremacy wouldn't be worth it, and people who think the USA is an irredeemably bad idea to begin with. Between people who've either shut their minds to the laments of hundreds of years of subjugation and people who only see America as a criminal enterprise.
I am about to head out to a march, one of the dying embers of this summer's explosive Floyd / BLM moment, and I'm steeling myself for a lot of criticism of the Fourth of July. I get defensive around this topic. I don't really identify as a "patriot" — I don't think "patriotism" is necessarily a good thing, I refer you to Emma Goldman — but I have an immense pride in what the United States represents as a paragon of Enlightenment statecraft and human cooperation. For all the talk of revolution and revolt and rebellion and liberation and all the cant you hear at these marches, very few people actually pull it off. The Founders did.
I understand that to people at the permanent bottom of this country's social hierarchy, America is an abuser. A criminal. Celebrating the founding of a country that has always hated you and condemned you to generations of being fodder for their enterprises is not only unnatural, but painful. It's made more painful, yet, by the mocking name "Independence Day." Whose independence? Whose freedom?
OK. But what is Independence Day celebrating? That's the key question to me.
Is it celebrating white supremacy in North America? No, that preceded 1776 by a few hundred years. If any holiday memorializes that, it's Columbus Day, which should be abolished. Is it celebrating militarism or any of the predations that define this empire in the modern era? No, we have other holidays for that shit, and with any luck, it will not continue to define America forever.
What Independence Day commemorates is the ratification of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: a document that, radically, established the new nation not as the culmination of a power struggle but as the beginning of a moral struggle.
Independence Day, for all its triumphalist overtones, is a challenge to be better. We know that America has never lived up to its founding promise — we do not treat all people as though they are created equal — but we are challenged, to borrow a line from the Constitution, to become "more perfect."
Moreover, what the Declaration enshrines is a government made up of people, with legitimacy derived from the consent of the governed. Not of institutions, not of systems, but of people. The people.
I read a book once by Frank Wilderson, a film theorist who called himself an "afropessimist." He held that the United States was a "structural antagonism," a system in which racial reconciliation was no more possible than a chess game in which the black queen and the white queen formed an alliance.
I disagree. I think progress is possible.
The main reason for my hope is that, thanks to the Declaration, the core of the United States is people. And people can change.
People can be made to understand the humanity of fellow people. Improvement is part of the narrative of human life, even if it is not necessarily part of institutional life. Typically, institutions crack and crumble before they change. And to that reality, the Declaration of Independence says: good. Crumble away. Dissolve the bonds that don't serve you. Revolt in perpetuity until the government serves you, not the other way around.
The holes you can poke in the Fourth of July are obvious. These sentiments were written by a slaveholder and enshrined the rights of a very small slice of the population, namely, white property-owning men. Moreover, I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that, yes they fought a war for their political independence, but also, who doesn't want to create a new thing if you'll be the one to control it? The goals of every Founding Father were probably more venal than pure. In that imperfection, they join every other human being. In being born with original sin, the United States resembles all of us.
But to me, the Declaration's challenge stands outside of time and the incidents of history. It is a command to do, basically, what the protesters are doing. Actually, it's a command for them to do way more. By the Declaration's standard, walking around with cardboard signs is weak in the extreme, if the laments about the insufficiency of this country to meet their needs are true.
In other words, I have never felt more American than I have during these protests, and that construct — the legitimacy of opposing oppression — is here today because of what the Fourth of July commemorates.
Acknowledging the hypocrisy of the United States' founding moral command is necessary. No one captured it better than Langston Hughes in "Let America Be America Again." But as he says in that poem, "America never was America to me / And yet I swear this oath / America will be!"
It is possible. And as long as people keep fighting, the challenge of Independence Day, piece by piece, will be met.
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