the fourth of july

July 4 was never a holiday I admired much. I liked the fireworks more than anything the date symbolized. This year's celebrations are even harder to stomach. Celebrate millions of people losing their healthcare? The staggering expansion of a lawless police force? The calling for all 65 million Latines in the country to be alligator food?

Yesterday I toured the home of Gerrit Smith, a prominent abolitionist from upstate new york. This morning I read Frederick Douglass' speech, "What to the American Slave is your Fourth of July?" It's 14 pages long, but here's an excerpt.

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 every day practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Read the whole speech. I liked the history and analysis from the National Museum of African American History & Culture. Here, Douglass' descendants read a portion of the speech.

Leo Herrera's poem Illegals is also staying with me this week.