What, to the Black American, is Your 4th of July?

I make it a point, in this corridor between our celebration of Juneteenth and white America’s celebration of their liberation to read Frederick Douglass’ speech from July 5^th 1852.

I stopped being a flag waving, fireworks shooting, parade attending, red white and blue patriot, about ten years ago, the last time I heard a white man in public say the n-word.

Today I ask again — what is your 4th of July, and what is it to me?

I’m not the eloquent orator that Frederick Douglass was, nor could I deliver the speech the way James Earl Jones did a couple of years ago. If I was asked to write a speech, the 2026 version, borrowing lines from Mr. Frederick Douglass as a guide and measuring stick, this would be that speech:

Today, you celebrate America’s birthday, 250 years of nationalist independence and your political freedom. The very freedoms you would have people who look like me lose. This occasion to you is what Passover was to the emancipated people of God. The looming question still remains – whose God? The one you forced us to share conditionally or the Creator who helped you craft a fictional story. With a son who looked like you instead of me.

America 250 is a big deal, a country that is the eldest child of modern parenthood with younger siblings, Canada (159), Australia (125), and New Zealand (119). All watching how you move in the world, maybe embarrassed for you. 250 years would be an amazing feat. It is infancy in the life of a nation. America, I can tell you the adults in the room wish you would hurry up and get out of your terrible twos. The elder nations, although smaller, are letting you know it’s time to grow up or be treated like an orphan. But you America are finding out that the oldest countries in the world refuse to be dismissed and are tiring of your tantrums.

These nations may be guilty of sparing the rod – Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him – Proverbs 13:24. I bet the enslavers knew this one by heart.

Once the adults get sick of an insolent, petulant child who believes its superpower is the color of their skin, they start avoiding them and start getting together with the other adults and plan for a life without a child they didn’t give birth to, your parent, Great Britain is embarrassed.

America literally ran away from home to escape tyranny — unjust, unreasonable, oppressive government — only to become exactly that. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

America was born in direct contradiction of the very principles found in the book you’ve decided to use as both sword and shield.

You stole — ignoring the commandment not to — claiming a land that was not yours. You cannot discover a land already inhabited by people.

Thou shalt not kill – The commandment makes no exception — no clause reading ‘but they have something I believe is rightfully mine. Or I feared for my life.

Thou shalt not bear false witness — unless you need to accuse a Black man of touching or even looking at a white woman. Then ‘thou shalt not kill’ conveniently disappears as well.

Thou shalt not commit adultery - your Founding Fathers were rapists and pedophiles. Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” while owning over 600 enslaved people. He fathered children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who could not consent and could not leave. Even today, good Christian nationalists ignore this as a sin. So of course you can elect a person accused of it. The founders of this country raped and abused Black women and sometimes Black men. If your argument is that we were not considered human, then read Exodus 22:19 and Leviticus 20:15-16. Then go straight to hell.

I could tick off all of them but the only one you seem to abide by is not having any other Gods before yours. The reality of others destroys a system of oppression. And here is the kicker, your founding fathers were not Christian, which means America was never formally baptized. Tell me exactly when America converted? Next time you see Tom Emmer ask him that…

Frederick Douglass said of your forefathers perseverance against the “blindness which seems to be the unvarying characteristics of tyrants, since Pharaoh and his host were drowned in the Red Sea, the British government persisted in the exactions complained of.” America, the majority of Black and brown people feel the same way. Your Red Sea may very well be your own white Christian nationalism.

Douglass said that oppression makes a wise man mad. The good news for America is that Black people are not mad enough. Yet. Douglass meant mad in terms of sanity, Black people show the power of the mind by not going insane. He went on to say, “…with brave men there is always a remedy for oppression.” We as a people have allowed you to make us believe we are not brave enough. Yet. We thought desegregation, equality, and assimilation would solve for oppression, it never will but we keep hope alive. Hope is not an ingredient of bravery.

We are on the precipice of realization that those attainments are the antithesis of what white America wants. The goal has never been equality, or to have us dancing with you at your big birthday party. You don’t want us there — though you do want us as entertainment. Instead, you are stuck with Kid Rock.

What do I or my people have to do with your national independence? Douglass asked – are the principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, extended to us? If I had to answer today, it would be: maybe. For brief moments we have enjoyed ‘freedom’, we have seen what America could be for all people, reconstruction and the Voting Rights Act now actively and purposefully being dismantled one Supreme Court decision at a time. I, like Douglass, understand I’m not within the pale of this glorious anniversary. I used to think I was. Drinking America’s Kool-Aid, back when I was an African American elevated from being born a Negro. Now I’m Black in America, no longer encumbered by the moniker “Safe Negro”. No longer required to feign appreciation for the limited freedom you are actively trying to take away.

Racism. For it is not light that is needed to end it, but fire. It is not a gentle shower that will end it, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. Only then can we join the celebration, fireworks and all.

If you think about what is happening with the Supreme Court and the entire legal system today, Douglass called out the financial incentives embedded in the Fugitive Slave Act — judges were paid $10 for every enslaved person remanded and $5 if they ruled otherwise. His words still thunder: Let it be thundered around the world, the seats of justice are filled with judges, who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe and are bound, in deciding in the case of a man’s liberty, hear only his accusers.

Now that this government has the green light to start hunting down Haitians, I ask the question; First what color are the Haitians they will be looking for and what will be the recourse if they just target all Black people, let the accusers be the only ones heard and the judge gets paid no matter which way he decides.

Haiti, the only nation born from a successful slave rebellion. The only Black republic that defeated a European empire. And now America hunts them at the border. The message is clear - Black liberation, wherever it lives, will be pursued and punished.

In closing, Fredrick Douglass answers the question – A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

My answer: Black Americans or Blacks in America have always been in an abusive relationship, forced to accept the ongoing assaults from people who claim Christianity, ignoring love thy neighbor if he is Black and lives next door. America handed us a book that removed all thoughts of equality and told us to follow it, then had the audacity to write all man are created equal.

Steadfastly, we have endured trying to assimilate, worshiping the same God, and being told the American dream is white everything including the picket fence. A country that lost their shit when Marvel made Captain America, Disney made Ariel, and now Helen of Troy in the new Odessey, Black. A country that does not want us here. Remigration. Hates when we build our own. Tulsa (Black Wall Street).

We have endured enslavement, rape, torture, Jim Crow, the Klan, segregation, discrimination, voter suppression, and knees on our neck, and pure racism from the most dangerous people on earth and now you want us to celebrate your birthday. I will not!

Empires usually peak between 200-250 years so although America is in its infancy as a nation, it may be very old in the longevity of dominance and at the rate this administration is driving the moral decline, forcing a white nationalist agenda, and denying the past and how you got to this milestone in the first place, making it to 251 might be challenging at best.

James Baldwin famously said, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

I picture Kate Smith bellowing out “God bless America, land that I love!’ Both Baldwin and Smith expressing love that may be unrequited - he a gay Black man and she a white woman who understood her place. Ironically, Kate Smith herself was eventually canceled by the very institutions that once celebrated her, when her recordings of racist songs surfaced. Even white love for America has its limits.

I can’t recall any songs where America expresses her love for me.

If I did come to your party to help blow out the candles, I’d wish your daddy had worn a condom when he molested Mother Earth!

Dum dum da dum…