What comes to mind when you, foreigner or American, think of July 4th? Nationalism, patriotism, fireworks, barbecues, a football game, some might say. For a lot of people, like members of Native American tribes and African-Americans, the meaning of July 4th as a national holiday rings hollow. There’s a mythology to the founding of the United States that a lot of us Americans across races, genders and sexualities tell ourselves: whatever our problems, we were founded on democratic participation and electing our representatives.
That right there is a lie.
Ignoring the semantics of how we are technically a constutional republic, the United States was mostly the result of religious splinter factions colonizing Native land and enslaving people from mainly West Africa to build the financial backbone of the colonies. The “Revolutionary War” that our colonist Founding Fathers fought was about land and power between political elites, about an inadequate amount of white male representation in the British Parliament. The principles outlaid in the Bill of Rights (which was a constitutional afterthought to begin with and had to be updated to include Native Americans in 1968) were not written to benefit the masses - more than one scholar has stated that our founding principles are “profoundly undemocratic.” That it was not unconscionable to the Framers to compromise on slavery alone damns the mythology of progress in our country. Voting rights for women began with the 19th Amendment, not that our President has historically been chosen by popular vote anyways.
Do we need to go over how we imprisoned Japanese Americans on the racist suspicion that they’d betray the country to fascism? Or how our country has prisons upon prisons, criminalizing poverty? July 4th can’t mean too much when the “Patriot Act” was the legal manifestation of Islamophobic domestic policy, endangering Sikhs, Muslims, or anyone who looked like a “terrorist.” Honestly, I could go on, from the Stonewall Riots to the Black Panther self defense groups, to the MOVE Bombings, to the modern murders protested by the #BlackLivesMatter movement. There is something profoundly twisted in the makeup of our national identity. That is to say nothing of our foreign policy.
Having covered some basic historical inequalities, we also a few features baked into the system of representation such as the political bribery in the form of large corporations’ interest groups as well as gerrymandering entire electoral districts to ensure the continuing operation of our limited party system. We saw the Democratic Party insulate themselves from disdain and popular unrest by ignoring the demands of progressives within the party to move further left on issues such as Medicare, military spending, etc. They ignored the plight of the aforementioned imprisoned citizens who have a right to vote, and might vote for them, even though they were as culpable as the Republicans in building the mass incarceration complex.
The discussion of the concept of “freedom” within the context of the United States is a topic that deserves a fully argued essay past a few hundred words. But the primary question you all should be asking yourselves, us white folks, “How are we free? At what cost? What are our freedoms in the States, and who does that apply to?” Blindly reciting the pledge of allegiance and singing the national anthem (which again, has lyrics uplifting slavery) should not be the definition of freedom.
