How Are You Celebrating July 4th?

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The July 4th holiday is upon us. How are you marking the day? Frequent News & Notes guest Melissa Harris-Lacewell offers this perspective on TheRoot.com:

I don't know about you, but I have mixed emotions about this holiday. I love any chance to have friends over to cookout. (By the way are you coming over on Friday?) But the 4th always forces me to carefully consider how I feel about our country.

I am an American. I genuinely love many things about this country. As any of my students can tell you, I am passionately obsessed with the Declaration of Independence. It is astonishing that Thomas Jefferson, a man who owned his own children in slavery, wrote "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

In 1776, a period of monarchy, colonialism, slavery and gender inequality, it certainly was not self-evident that all persons were endowed with fundamental equality and that governments existed to serve the just interests of the people. But Jefferson, as limited as he was as a human being, looked beyond his own circumstances and crafted a document of great vision, flexibility and higher purpose. That is worth celebrating.

On the other hand, we cannot ignore Frederick Douglass' admonition that the 4th of July does not mark freedom or self-determination for black Americans. Langston Hughes wrote, "America never was America to me." And Martin Luther King Jr. called Jefferson's document the nation's promissory note and said that the country had bounced its check to African Americans. So any celebration of the 4th also needsto be tempered with a sober reflection on our nation's sins: genocide and land theft perpetrated against Native Americans, chattel slavery and Jim Crow against African Americans, second class citizenship for white women, internment camps for Japanese Americans, brutal labor practices against Chinese immigrants, imperial aggression in Latin America and the Middle East.

What do you think?

Flashback: "What to the Slave is Fourth of July?"

Geoffrey Bennett

Tags: Frederick Douglass | July 4th

6:09 PM ET | 07- 3-2008 | permalink

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