“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” — Frederick Douglass, 1852.
The Unlearned Truth of a Nation’s Lie
It is a national disgrace that Frederick Douglass’s thunderous 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, is not universally taught in American classrooms. But America is no stranger to disgrace. I, like many others, had to stumble upon Douglass’s magnum opus in adulthood, outside the whitewashed margins of a public education that preferred to sanitize this country’s sins rather than confront them.
In his address, Douglass dared to look the myth of American liberty squarely in the face and expose its grotesque hypocrisy. Speaking just decades before the Civil War, he condemned the celebration of “independence” while millions of Black Americans remained shackled by “the peculiar institution.” His speech wasn’t a polite critique—it was a scalpel, cutting deep into the moral rot at the heart of the American experiment.
Today, we face a different form of that rot. The promise that “all men are created equal” has not only continued to go unrealized. It has been completely abandoned. We are not simply grappling with hypocrisy. We are now living in a nation where fascism is no longer an emerging threat. It is here.
Donald Trump is a fascist. Created in the mold of Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo. And I don’t write this lightly. The facts dictate I not sugarcoat. Trump says the quiet parts out loud without fear or regret. His overt racism harkens back to a past that celebrates as if the Birth of a Nation was not a ruinous fiction. He praises dictators, targets political opponents, undermines democratic norms, and relies on violence and disinformation to stay in power. But let’s not delude ourselves: Trump did not create this system. He is merely its most honest reflection.
If democratically elected representatives are mirrors of the people, then America is a disgrace. We elected an openly fascist dictator wannabe because “eggs.” No, look at your reflection, America. If our elected officials are a mirror to the electorate, than the reflection is one of hatred, racism, cowardice, and evil.
America—the genocidal land that enslaved, lynched, interned, sterilized, and caged—is, and has long been, a fascist nation for those it deems disposable.
The Fourth of July: A Celebration of Illusions
So what, I ask, is the Fourth of July to the person with a conscience?
It is a date of mass distraction. A day of flags and fireworks masking the erosion of rights. A time when the air is thick with smoke—not just from explosives, but from the burning of truth. While white families gather on manicured lawns to toast “freedom,” immigrants are hunted in courts while following the law, trans kids are dehumanized as less thans, poor mothers are criminalized for seeking life-saving reproductive healthcare, black Americans are puled over for driving while black, and history is scrubbed clean in the name of “patriotism.”
The Fourth of July is not meaningless. That would be too generous. It is not neutral; it is a weapon. It is a narcotic meant to lull the privileged into celebration and the oppressed into silence.
Enjoy your fireworks. The booms are deafening enough to drown out the cries of the marginalized. The red glare is bright enough to blind us to the policies stealing food, shelter, rights, and lives from those most in need. It’s all very theatrical—bread and circuses for an empire on the brink.
The Unrealized Promise, Now Ashes
The founders of this nation spoke of a “more perfect union.” But the ink in which they wrote the Constitution was mixed with the blood of the enslaved. And still, some of us believed—believed that, perhaps, the arc of the moral universe bent toward justice.
But how long can you believe in a promise that’s never been kept? How many rights must be stripped? How many bodies buried? How many lies told before you accept that the arc bends only when people force it to?
There are those who tired to bend the arc. Abraham Lincoln, while not perfect, got us closer to realizing that promise. But an assassin’s bullet put a stop to any further progress. It helped lead to the second greatest sin of our nation – not ostracizing the traitorous Confederates after the war. We welcomed former enslavers and traitors back into the halls of Congress as if they were long lost cousins.
Elijah Parish Lovejoy tried. John W. Stephens tried. George W. Lee tried. Lamar Smith tried. Dr. Thomas H. Brewer tried. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner tried. Malcolm X tried. John F. Kennedy tried. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King tried. Robert F. Kennedy tried. Harvey Milk tried. Marsha P. Johnson tried. Thousands of others have tried.
What do they all have in common? They were all murdered for their belief that the world could be a better place. For their belief that “all men are created equal” meant something. For their belief that we could rise above and embrace the better angels of our nature.
Killing civil rights leaders is as American as apple pie and fireworks, which many will engage in this Fourth of July.
We are past the point of waiting for the system to save us. The institutions have collapsed inward. The courts are compromised. The elections are rigged by gerrymandering, voter suppression, and corporate money. The police protect property, not people. The press is shouted down as “fake news” when they try to ask tough questions. Other times, the media has collapsed in on themselves by cowardly retreating from any confrontation. And the truth? The truth has become the enemy of the state.
What Comes Next?
I do not know what comes next. But I do know this: The Fourth of July is not mine to celebrate. Not now. Perhaps not ever again, if ever again.
To the person with a conscience, it is a date of mourning. Mourning the dead promises. Mourning the silenced voices. Mourning a country that could have been, but chose, again and again, to embrace the darkest devils of our nature.
Let those without conscience wave their flags. Let them toast to freedom nonexistent while marching blissfully toward tyranny. But as for me—and those who refuse to forget, who choose to remember and to resist—we will light a different kind of fire. Not in celebration, but in clarity. In conscience. In the unwavering belief that even in the darkness, truth matters.
And if we are brave enough to speak it—perhaps one day this nation will deserve the fireworks it so loudly demands.
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