Racially Segregated Holidays Betray the Universalism of American Principles
By HanaLyn Colvin – July 30, 2021
The National Football League (NFL) has announced there will be two anthems performed before every game, a White National Anthem and a Black National Anthem.
The President signed into law a new National Independence Day for black people.
Celebrities call for a melanated version of the American flag to represent colored people.
Our flags, our anthems, our independence days: separate but equal.
No, this isn’t Jim Crow America. It’s Woke America 2021.
But this year, an idea that had been germinating along the radical fringes for years, began to take root in mainstream discourses about our shared national holidays, anthem, and symbols. It is an invasive idea, one that must be rooted out completely before it spreads and pollutes the entire landscape of our American consciousness. It is the idea that the Fourth of July only commemorates the freedom of white people and that black people do not and should not celebrate it, and that all symbols of America from the anthem to the flag, carry with them the stain of slavery.
The idea spread like kudzu on social media, with everyone from random users to blue checkmarks asking a paraphrase of Frederick Douglass’ famous question: “What, to black people, is your 4th of July?”
Black Lives Matter activist turned Congresswoman from Missouri, Cori Bush, tweeted, “When they say that the 4th of July is about American freedom, remember this: the freedom they’re referring to is for White people. This land is stolen land and Black people still aren’t free.”
On June 17th Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act. The holiday commemorates a significant event in our nation’s history and deserves to be celebrated. But by officially naming this a National Independence Day, the act not only recognizes Juneteenth as the traditional day celebrating the end of slavery in the United States, but it elevates the day as a competitor to July 4th, the day we celebrate our country’s founding.
Picking up on this political signaling, cultural critic Touré wrote a piece for The Grio entitled, “F**k Fourth of July: The only Independence day I recognize is Juneteenth.” Touré writes, “In a world where we officially recognize Juneteenth, that great new holiday sits on the calendar casting a long shadow over Independence Day, making it look like a hypocrite and a damn fool. Independence for who? It wasn’t independence for Black people, for our ancestors, so why would we celebrate the Fourth of July?”
He references Nikole Hannah Jones’ debunked claims from the 1619 Project that the Colonies only revolted against Britain out of fear that England was going to abolish slavery. The American Revolution, the entire American experiment, was undertaken for the purpose of preserving slavery, according to Jones’ discredited essay. Historians have pointed out that there is no basis for these claims, and that Britain didn’t abolish slavery in its colonies until 1833. It banned the slave trade in 1807, only one year before the United States did.
But this doesn’t stop Touré from repeating the specious argument that slavery wasn’t merely a vile institution that some founding fathers participated in, but rather that “slavery was completely wrapped up in the movement to become independent.” To celebrate the Fourth of July is to celebrate slavery and white supremacy. “America has never been the land of liberty and justice for all; those words have never meant anything to Black people,” Touré concludes.
There is one national holiday for whites and one national holiday for blacks.
The idea has metastasized beyond holidays. At the Capitol Fourth celebration, Renee Fleming performed the “Star Spangled Banner” and Vanessa Williams performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” The hymn has been referred to colloquially as the black national anthem, but USA Today described it as the song “which has served as the Black National Anthem,” conferring upon it an official status. A white singer performing the national anthem for white people and a black singer performing the national anthem for black people.
The NFL recently announced that they will begin each game by playing both versions, the White National Anthem and the Black National Anthem.
Separate but equal.
Singer Macy Gray has called for the American flag to be redesigned, dismissing it as “tattered, dated, divisive, and incorrect” and a symbol that “no longer represents democracy and freedom.” Mara Gay of the New York Times has also expressed the idea that the flag represents white supremacy or neo-Nazi ideology and that seeing a flag being flown makes black people fear for their safety. Gray proposes a new flag with “melanated stars” to reflect all skin tones. Apparently she believes the stars currently represent white skin color. She also suggests making the stripes off-white in color to represent impurity – because that’s how you want to represent your country, by all of its flaws and imperfections and not by its highest guiding principles.
All of this is not only farcical, but it dangerously betrays the universalism that is at the core of American principles of freedom and equality. The Declaration of Independence boldly proclaims: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
It was a revolutionary assertion, codified in America’s founding documents, this notion that ALL men were endowed by God with fundamental and equal rights. As Thomas Jefferson declared, “the God who gave us life gave us Liberty at the same time.” This principle is the cornerstone upon which all subsequent civil rights movements have been built.
It was a revolutionary assertion, codified in America’s founding documents, this notion that ALL men were endowed by God with fundamental and equal rights. As Thomas Jefferson declared, “the God who gave us life gave us Liberty at the same time.” This principle is the cornerstone upon which all subsequent civil rights movements have been built.
Far from being wrapped up in the founding of the country, slavery was given a death sentence by our Declaration. It did not happen all at once but it was inevitable. Once declared to be self-evident, these truths could not long be denied. The birth of America gave rise to a surge in abolition movements throughout the Western world. Black slaves in the North petitioned state legislatures for freedom on the basis of the Declaration. Vermont abolished slavery one year after the Declaration was signed, with other Northern states following suit. By the time the Constitution was ratified, five of the thirteen states that joined the Union had prohibited slavery. Slavery was also banned in the Northwest Territory, which had been ceded to the federal government from Virginia on the explicit condition of Thomas Jefferson that slavery be forbidden in perpetuity. It was the Declaration that laid the groundwork.
Civil rights leaders of the past understood this truth. On July 4, 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a sermon in which he quoted the Declaration of Independence. “This is a dream,” he expounded. “It’s a great dream. The first saying we notice in this dream is an amazing universalism. It doesn’t say ‘some men’; it says ‘all men.’ It doesn’t say ‘all white men’; it says ‘all men,’ which includes black men.”
American Independence Day, King asserted, is a reminder that “every man is an heir” to the legacy of this dream, this promise. The Declaration of Independence, he famously said, was the promissory note upon which America was founded and which entitled black Americans to petition for their rights to be guaranteed and protected under law.
Throughout American history, ethnic minorities have fought to be included in the rights guaranteed in the Declaration on the basis of that very document. They fought against the racist notion that this was a white nation. Now Progressive activists argue for the segregationist creed: black people are NOT included. America is a white nation and always has been. Black people have no rights which the white man is bound to respect. Coverage of any Trump rally will always conflate “America” with “whiteness,” as if black people are not also American. When Touré writes about white people in his article, he refers to them as “the people of America,” strangely detaching himself from membership in his own country, as if he is rejecting the inheritance that so many brave men and women before him fought and sacrificed to secure for future generations.
No one should be fighting to be excluded from the rights and protections of their own society. And yet when Juneteenth was officially declared a national holiday, celebratory shirts and merchandise abounded that said “Free-ish since 1865,” the idea being that no black people were free before 1865 and that black people are not free now.
Without diminishing in any way the significance of emancipation, our discussions about the history of slavery nevertheless cannot be so myopic as to ignore completely the legacy of free black people in this country. People who fought and died on the Revolutionary War battlefields. The tree of Liberty was nourished with the blood of black patriots as well as white. The Fourth of July meant something to them. Let us not erase their sacrifices to the founding of this nation for the purpose of promoting a narrative centered only on oppression and victimization.
The full story of American history is complex. To say that blacks were never free, to speak of them as only oppressed bodies that have been acted upon, is to lose sight of the invaluable contributions that black people have made to the development of our nation. And to say that black people are not free now is to denigrate the heroic sacrifices made by Americans of all races to make real the promises set forth at our country’s founding. It also ignores the experiences of millions of new black immigrants whose ancestors have never been slaves in America.
The tree of Liberty was nourished with the blood of black patriots as well as white. The Fourth of July meant something to them. Let us not erase their sacrifices to the founding of this nation for the purpose of promoting a narrative centered only on oppression and victimization.
The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theorists would have us believe, as Derrick Bell maintained, that all racial progress in this country is an illusion and that white people have only allowed that illusion to exist to the extent that it continues to benefit them. If that isn’t one of the most white-centric views of American history – give black people some credit! The abolition movement was successful in ending slavery. The civil rights movement was successful in achieving equal rights. Don’t deny victory where it is due in order to fetishize victimhood.
I recently watched an episode of “Finding Your Roots.” The three black guests all expected to learn that their roots traced back to slavery with maybe a white slaveowner back in the line somewhere. Instead they discovered between the three of them lineages that descended from generations of free blacks living in America since the 1700s, black plantation slaveowners, white German immigrants, and free black relatives who fought for the Confederate army. One woman looked like she had been gut-punched to learn she had no enslaved ancestors. It was as if she had built her entire identity upon a grievance narrative and she did not know who she was without it. The answer, at this point in time, is that we are all American. And we all have a claim to our shared history.
Radicals of today quote Frederick Douglass when he thundered, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” But they never quote his answer in full:
“I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ringbolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles…” He continues further, “The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too… Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defense. Mark them!”
The Fourth of July may have been a mockery to the slave, but to the FREE man, it is his birthright. The question today is whether people choose to see themselves as free or as slaves.
The Fourth of July may have been a mockery to the slave, but to the FREE man, it is his birthright. The question today is whether people choose to see themselves as free or as slaves.
One thing is certain. We cannot continue as a country if we think of ourselves as two nations segregated by race, with separate histories and anthems and holidays. The Fourth of July is a celebration of our nation’s declaration of independence. It marks the founding of our country. Every American is included in the celebration. Juneteenth is a celebration of the end of slavery, a cause for which black and white Americans shed their blood. Every American is included in the celebration.
One cannot exist without the other. The Declaration of Independence is a hollow self-mockery without Juneteenth. And Juneteenth is impossible without the Declaration. They are bound to each other by the very principles they embody. And they bind us to each other – black and white, Asian and Latino – in our shared identity as Americans with a common heritage, united under one flag.
Watch HANALYN:
Episode 1
For more on this topic, watch HanaLyn’s premiere episode where she tackles the contentious issue of social justice segregation and asks do we want to be a nation of separate ethnostates or one nation indivisible?