African people will still be more moved by the death of Jesus on the cross than by the death of their ancestors hanging from trees.
What's wrong with us?
This image holds two histories side by side. One taken from land, the other taken from freedom.
Together they tell a truth often separated but deeply connected.
What was built came at a cost that still echoes
On July 4, 1776, while white America celebrated its declaration of independence, approximately 500,000 enslaved Africans and their descendants remained in chains in the thirteen colonies. They made up roughly 20% of the colonial population of 2.5 million people, human beings denied the very liberty proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.
๐นPress play and let the song speak truth.
For my ancestors, there was no freedom to celebrate. There was no liberty. There was no justice. There was no equality. They were bought, sold, raped, whipped, branded, exploited, and treated as property while a nation declared that โall men are created equal.โ
Today, there is a determined effort to sanitize that history, to pretend slavery was merely an unfortunate chapter, that enslavers were simply โmen of their time,โ and that the brutality of chattel slavery should be viewed through a softer lens. No. There is nothing ordinary about owning another human being. There is nothing admirable about building wealth and a nation on stolen labor, stolen lives, and stolen futures.
We do not celebrate July 4 because we were not free. Independence Day was not independence for Black people. Our ancestors remained enslaved for nearly another century. Then came Black Codes, Jim Crow, racial terror lynchings, legalized segregation, disenfranchisement, redlining, mass incarceration, and the ongoing struggle to be recognized as fully human. Our fight for freedom did not end in 1776, or even in 1865. In many ways, it continues today.
That is why Frederick Douglass asked, โWhat to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?โ His question still confronts Americaโs conscience.
So today I ask another question:
What to Black people today is the Fourth of July?
Until liberty, justice, and equality are more than promises on paper, it remains a day that reminds us not only of Americaโs stated founding ideals, but of Americaโs unfinished work to actualize them 250 years later.
#IndependenceDay #4thOfJuly #America250