I quote from Frederick Douglass‘s speech of July 5, 1852. In that day, freed Africans in America feared being out on July 4 as lynchings usually spiked then. Those Black folk that cared to celebrated on the 5th.
The featured image is of a map of the indigenous peoples of the U.S. made by Aaron Carapella over at Tribal Nations Maps. I’ll gladly send you a $25 map if you submit a comment on this post or make a contribution to Aaron’s Go Fund Me. Offer is to the first poster 🙂
The original keepers of this land are still fighting to protect their identity, land, and existence. In the last few years, we have witnessed the removal of the basic voting protections accorded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It has been argued that this move has resulted in voter suppression and other actions to disenfranchise (again) African Americans and other marginalized groups. Most recently with the Supreme Court ruling that gerrymandering, even when it plainly dilutes the vote of marginalized communities, is ok and is in fact beyond the purview of the court. We are now witnessing a human rights crisis at the U.S. southern border in which internment camps for asylum seekers subject indigenous and LatinX men, women, and children to unlivable conditions — 24 persons having died in these facilities since the current administration took office.
All of these abuses and more call into question the vision of the U.S. that we are celebrating. There has always it feels been a tension between two visions. One is that of a republic that welcomes all and enables all to live the life they wish to their potential — in that vision, the language, religion, color, gender identity, physical ability of an individual are all strengths and part of the fabric that enables a unique society to flourish. The other vision is that of melting pot, a country for and by white Christian men. These are extreme caricatures, but you need only contrast Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” vision with tweets of the current administration.
It is hard to make sense of these polarities, but thinking it through, wrestling with this through reading, discussion, reflection, is essential to the existence of the country. As a start, I would challenge readers to take on the book Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram Kendi.
I sometimes wonder what staying in the British orbit would have meant for the people of color now living in the U.S. Would it just have meant another Canada? Canada, aside from being cold, isn’t so bad a place — a functional democracy. Britain ended slavery in 1833 with the Slavery Abolition Act. The U.K. has for several decades provided subsidized health care and education for all its citizens. On the other (bloody) hand, both Canada and Great Britain continue to grapple with the genocides of indigenous peoples. India, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa — the list of nations still dealing with the scars and trauma of racialized British imperialism spans the globe. Africa is still shedding the anti-LGBTQ legacy of British rule.
I think it’s a better mental effort to think through what living in government and societies created in concert with the protectors could have looked like, and what it could still be. Here’s a zoom in on the area of what would have been the United States as of 1783 (the year the U.S. actually came into existence).
Charles write here 