"This Fourth of July holiday is one of the most humbling in our history."

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"Even at the height of world wars or the Great Depression, America inspired. But, today, the United States is destroying the moral authority it once had. There will still be fireworks. And the Statue of Liberty still towers over New York Harbor. But it is harder today to convince others that Americans embrace—or practice—the ideals that Lady Liberty represents."

Says Robin Wright in "To the World, We’re Now America the Racist and Pitiful" (The New Yorker).

I'm surprised to encounter reverence for the Fourth of July holiday. If we're going to take this year's events as seriously as Wright wants us to take them, isn't the Fourth racist? Isn't it white supremacy? Why is she calling on us to be truer to its values?

We've had the 1619 Project to instruct us. Shouldn't there now be a call to abolish the Fourth of July as a national holiday? Should we even be calling holidays "national"?

I'm not seeing that suggestion — abolish the holiday. Not yet. It must be brewing out there, though, don't you think? I'm seeing articles that look like they're anticipating that idea and pushing it back before it emerges — aborting it, pre-born.

I'm talking about things like that Robin Wright article, and, more conspicuously, at WaPo — by historian Jonathan Lande — "The Fourth of July is a Black American holiday/Black Americans have long used the holiday to crusade for equality."

Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, black Americans sparsely celebrated the day, as they were routinely shunned or attacked in public, but by the late 1840s, black abolitionists had developed genius techniques to lampoon and lament American commitments to freedom amid rampant unfreedoms and inequalities. This included celebrating independence. They understood the day of freedom festivals served as the best moment to challenge Americans, especially white Americans, to reflect on subjects too often ignored: slavery and racism.

Black abolitionists organized celebrations... Frederick Douglass joined this movement... In 1852, he famously commemorated the signing of the Declaration of Independence... “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?,” Douglass asked the packed hall of white abolitionists. “I answer,” he continued: It is “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.”...

He closed his oration venerating the Constitution as a “GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT” and pushed for reforms to end bondage and inequality....

Black Americans... knew the hypocrisy embedded within the nation’s celebration of freedom and justice. But they, like those celebrated signatories of the Declaration, grasped the country’s potential for progress and that only dedicated, persistent protests and activism could deliver the nation from the ever-present tyranny of slavery and racism. Today, as protesters again assemble to challenge injustices, it is again time to imagine how we can better the country.

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