Whose ‘Independence Day’?
The America we have today was “inherited” from our ancestors, people we revere as innovators, pioneers and dissenters. Well, some of our ancestors. Some of our ancestors were brave but in bondage. Some were spiritual but pushed from their land. Some were risk-taking immigrants. Whether that’s good or bad depends on when and where they came from. In America, it’s our tradition to rebel, but we only like it when some people do it. July 4 celebrates one victory and cuts out every other narrative, even the ones of people who couldn’t enjoy freedom but bled for it anyway.
Let’s unpack this a bit.
In early March, I had the opportunity to visit The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC)for the first time while on a girl’s trip to D.C. with some great friends that live around the country. The impending fear of COVID made it easy for us to get day-of tickets, and we spent the morning before flying home reflecting on and discussing Black history. We didn’t know then that the museum would close a few days later, or that it would be the last trip any of us would take before quarantine.
Part of the magic of the museum is the journey of navigating your way through it. Guests start the tour of the permanent exhibit from the ground floor, traveling in time as the years count backward on the wall of the elevator during the decent into darkness. They then spend hours winding upward from the middle passage, through Jim Crow laws and into the unfinished story of today, where a peek of daylight can finally be seen.
Small beads and jewelry created in my home studio during quarantine
You know that feeling when you forget a word, but it’s on the tip of your tongue? That’s how I’ve always felt about my history. Many Black people in America have a collective understanding of the diaspora, but few of us have concrete knowledge of our family’s lineage, beyond our grandparents and maybe their grandparents if we’re lucky. Blame it on a largely oral tradition or literacy being illegal: our stories are told by others or not at all. Being in that space gave me the words to start understanding where I came from. Everything in that museum made my heart sing with pain and pride. I can’t decouple the two feelings, really. A few things stuck with me:
Black people in America came from a line of people that survived three weeks or more in the hull of a slave ship, laying motionless as the people they knew and loved defecated and sometimes died next to them; survived hundreds of years of abuse, labor, rape, singing, fighting; survived decades of overt discrimination and hate.
Emmett Till wouldn’t even be 80 if he was still alive today, and his mother - who held an open-casket funeral so Black people in Chicago could see the terrible things happening in the south - only died in 2003.
African people were bought by Europeans for beads, among other things that are relatively worthless today.
As a Black artist who makes jewelry, it weighs on me that a bead was once enough to purchase a life. My creative practice was the original sin that birthed generational curses. Is it redemptive, or ironic? I shared a video message for the museum archives about that very thought as I went through the exhibit.
Reaction shared with NMAAHC during my visit in March 2020
While the world has been in “time out” for a few months, my favorite pastime has been reflecting on norms that seem unchangeable and narratives (read: lies) that need to be examined, then retold. If a virus with no ability to believe, love or hate can instantly alter world systems, understand that people have plenty of opportunity to do the same; we choose not to. Equality is never - and never has been -high enough on the priority list.
I’ve had a lot of conversations with my parents about race over the past few weeks, dissecting our experiences. I recounted the first time I knew what race was – when a girl in my first grade class said “You can’t play with us, black girl.” I wasn’t good enough to be called by my name, but even as a young child Alexis knew how to weaponize my skin color to punctuate, if not rationalize, excluding me. My mother recently admitted that she was always at school with my sister and I when we were growing up because she wanted to make sure we – as well as the other Black kids whose parents couldn’t always be around – weren’t forgotten or labeled as bad children. I never realized that she viewed her presence as a duty, nor truly appreciated (until now) the impact that her actions likely had on our ability to succeed.
It’s also hard for me to fathom that Ruby Bridges, one of the first Black children to be integrated into an all-white elementary school in New Orleans, was is just a couple of years older than my mom. Less than 200 miles away, it took until 7th grade for my mother to be integrated in Lafayette, Louisiana. Even then public transportation was still segregated
Yesterday, I was having a hard time with the meaning of “Independence Day” in our divided world when I saw a great NPR video of Fredrick Douglas’ descendants reading his speech from 1852 - ‘What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?’ How had I never heard it? Why could his young great, great, great grandchildren still read it 150 years later with such passion and understanding? Why don’t I know enough about Fredrick Douglas’ history? Why isn’t he more celebrated? Why are Black people still pushing the same boulder up a hill?
If you’ve shared #BLM content and started a journey of unlearning the lies of our shared history, I implore you to sit with the heavy truth that the supposed independence we celebrate is also a lie. Our founding fathers clearly meant independence for some - not women, not slaves, not indigenous people, not the poor and not groups that were unrecognized or ostracized then and are still marginalized now, including LGBTQ people and other minorities. Teach your children about it. Have a hard conversation with your family while you’re still stuck in the house.
There is hope though in the fact that July 4 does celebrate the ability of people to move out from under their oppressors and make a new way. The oppressor now is ignorance, racist systems, militarized police, poor leadership and a handful of hateful yet powerful people that sit with their privilege and reinforce it. Frankly, the status quo sucks for a lot of people and I have no interest in maintaining it.
We have to do better and dream bigger for this nation. Educate equally. Learn objectively. Empathize more. Be strong allies. Until then, Independence Day doesn’t truly symbolize “liberty and justice for all” - does it?