What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?

Revolution #007, June 26, 2005, posted at revcom.us

In 1852 Frederick Douglass, a former slave and a leader in the fight against slavery wrote:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?

I answer: 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 national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; 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.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

[alphafemale]

1. Frederick Douglas had stones

That's one of the great American oratories.

[Droopy]

2. Pretty powerful stuff

Are you sure you meant to post in the lounge?

We've got a long way to go when it comes to being a nation of the just. I posted something in here the other night suggesting that maybe we haven't come very far when it comes to attitudes about race or racism. I thought when the current war was starting up that there may be a racist undertone to what was going on. I still think that is the case.

3. May be?

I think it's a certainty that there is a racist "undertone".