Today's Today

Happy 4th everybody

Buzz Aldrin

On Independence Day, what would those who lost loved ones in the Buffalo mass shooting have to say about justice in America? If we summoned Black women, who disproportionally experience death and trauma during childbirth, to reflect on the inalienable right to life, what hard truths might we hear about their fears for themselves and their unborn children? What musings about liberty could we expect from those who endure unjust sentencing or are pulled over for driving while Black?

Frederick Douglass Knew What False Patriotism Was

In 1852 Frederick Douglass delivered what may be his most famous address, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” This time of year, quotations from the speech dart around Black social media as a subtle pushback on uncomplicated celebrations of American independence.

Douglass wondered what the enslaved might say if they were called from the plantations to reflect on themes of liberty, justice and equality. How might their words differ from the prose of the free orators normally asked to comment on American ideals? There is a revolution in the reorientation of perspective, when the powerless are given space to speak. That hasn’t changed.

On Independence Day, what would those who lost loved ones in the Buffalo mass shooting have to say about justice in America? If we summoned Black women, who disproportionally experience death and trauma during childbirth, to reflect on the inalienable right to life, what hard truths might we hear about their fears for themselves and their unborn children? What musings about liberty could we expect from those who endure unjust sentencing or are pulled over for driving while Black?

Our nation’s problems and the litany of lingering injustices are not unknown to us, but there is a certain pressure to put our complaints aside around this holiday in particular. On the Fourth of July we are encouraged to unfurl our flags, belt out a rendition of “God Bless America” and grill burgers in humble gratitude.

Reflecting on the demand for patriotism, Douglass said, “As a people, Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor. It is a fact, that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans will be found by Americans.”

Our country wants a certain version of the American story told and will laud anyone willing to tell it. But uncritical celebration is a limited and false definition of patriotism. Instead, recounting the full story of America and asking it to be better than it is can be an expression of love.

Douglass challenged the idea that certain truths should be overlooked. He composed this speech in the aftermath of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required all escaped slaves to be returned to their enslavers. He said this act of Congress turned the nation into a “hunting ground for men” and marred the whole republic because “your lawmakers have commanded all good citizens to engage in this hellish sport.”

Douglass put his protest into conversation with the ideals celebrated on the Fourth. He recognized that the founding fathers were “great men” who “staked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on the cause of their country.”

The problem wasn’t the vision of the country we remember on this day. The fault lay in the fact that some got left out.

Douglass had the audacity to believe that America's story was not finished until the country kept all her promises. There is a hidden affection in the stinging words of rebuke.

Over 100 years later, in his “I Have a Dream” speech, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., would echo Douglass: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.”

Today if Americans protest systemic injustice or resist the efforts to remove the history of racial oppression from school curriculum, it is the demonstrators, not those invested in intentional forgetting, who some people deem anti-American.

Douglass’s patriotism was more than resistance. In the early years of the Civil War, he saw signs of unity and hope. In 1862 he delivered another July Fourth speech. As David Blight notes in his biography of Douglass, the orator’s language underwent a change from 1852 to 1862.

A decade prior, Douglass, speaking to white Americans, referred to the founders as “your fathers.” Douglass and other Blacks were outsiders. In 1862, he took ownership of them, including African Americans in the grand narrative of American history. The “you” of the American Revolution and its principles became a “we” during the battle against the Confederacy. Speaking of the Union effort in the Civil War, he said, “We are only continuing the tremendous struggle, which your fathers, and my fathers began eighty-six years ago.” Because white Americans had been willing to suffer for Black freedom during the Civil War, we were starting to live up to the idea that all men were created equal.

He understood that no great thing could be had without genuine effort and pain, and that holds true today. One cannot simply read more Black literature after violent and public deaths of African Americans. We have to do the hard work of reforming policing, undoing gerrymandered voting districts and eliminating myths about differences between Blacks and whites.

On Independence Day in 1875, Douglass took to the podium a third time. Echoing his first speech, he asked what Black people had to do with the Fourth of July. Now, years after the Civil War, Black people’s place in the American narrative is an established fact: “Colored people have had something to do with almost everything of vital im­portance in the life and progress of this great country.”

I don’t think we have to be proud of everything this country has done to be proud of our progress despite unrelenting opposition. The saga of Black people in America is not just a tragedy; it is also a triumph.

Douglass recognized that his version of the American story was not often recounted. So he called for a Black press to rise up and make it known. America had to face the truth and only those who had endured its hypocrisies but still maintained some hope had the perspective to tell it.

Douglass expanded the meaning of American patriotism. Rather than focusing on the gratitude the country demanded of us, he reminded the nation what it still owed its populace. The nation could not request songs of praise without including Black accomplishments in its lyrics. It could not laud the founders of this nation without following their example by continuing to fight for justice for all.

Our national tendency to see only the best of America was standing in the way of truly becoming great. He thought enough of this country to tell it the truth. We would be better off if more of us did the same.

Here It Comes

Today is the last day

some of us will have

two functioning eyes,

and a full set

of fingers and toes.

And kids -

don't mess with fireworks.

Best if you leave it the adults

who've been drinking heavily

since about noon.

Today's Tweet

Nothing says "Let's celebrate American independence with family, and have some fun with explosives" ...

... followed closely by a trip to the local ER and a car insurance claim.

Ummmm. pic.twitter.com/XOESbiyjV9

— Cody (@new_orleansjazz) July 6, 2022

Today's Keith

Here's Keith Olbermann, being very Keith Olbermann-ey, but with a very good point: We deal with this shit now - even though "the racism thing" is hard to grapple with - or we deal with it later, when the racism thing is outa hand and damned near impossible.

And btw, appeasement of these assholes - looking the other way and just shrugging it off - will only get us a bunch of even more dangerous assholes. It's happening now, and this ass-hat parade in Philadelphia shows the problem is metastasizing.

Philadelphia Inquirer:

Watchdog groups warn that Patriot Front’s march through Philly reflects increasing recruitment, activity in the region

Armed with shields, smoke bombs and banners touting “Reclaim America,” a white supremacist group marched through Center City late Saturday into early Sunday, clashing with a few counterprotesters before leaving as abruptly as it arrived.

A Philadelphia police spokesperson said Sunday that there were no arrests or reports of vandalism from a demonstration by Patriot Front. The group of about 200 marched down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway toward Penn’s Landing, where members had parked a few rented Penske trucks.

Still, organizations monitoring extremist groups and hate speech are troubled by the appearance of a large contingent of Patriot Front members in such a public manner on Independence Day weekend. They say the group — which traces its roots to the violent 2017 riots in Charlottesville, Va. — has become increasingly active in Pennsylvania in recent months, and is staging actions such as Saturday night’s march in Philadelphia in an attempt to spread its message and bolster its ranks.

Shira Goodman, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Philadelphia chapter, said Patriot Front has embarked on an aggressive propaganda campaign, distributing leaflets, posting stickers, and spraying graffiti throughout the Philadelphia suburbs and Lehigh Valley, as well as conducting flash mob-like meetings with their members that they later post on social media to use as a recruitment tool.

- more -

Remember Karl Popper:

Today's Today

Before I get to the goofy pictures, I have to give a nod to something that's still going on - something we just don't get to hear about because of all the Yay America shit we have to put up with on days like today.

Don't get me wrong - I love this joint. This country is my everything. It's hard for me to see myself happy anywhere else.

And the revelation of some pretty ugly facts isn't going to change any of that.

I want to know about our founding, and the politics of a War For Independence, and the maneuvering that necessitated the 3/5 clause - and the exclusion of women - and about slavery and a civil war that was needed to end it. I want to know about the political fuckery that went on during Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow Era, and the real reason we put up all those stupid Confederate Participation Trophies, and and and.

I think I know most of the good stuff - shit, how can you not? - we scream our fool heads off bragging on ourselves.

That's the easy part.

I want to know about my country's warts and the failures too. Because I want to love my country warts and failures and all.

And when I see it for what it really is, and I know that I live in a country that can face up to itself - one that can build itself up, recognize the problems with how it was built, tear down the offending parts, and build it back up in a better way, then I know I live in a country worth loving.

"Head Of A Negro" - John Singleton Copley 1777-1778

WaPo:

In his famous Independence Day oration of 1852, Frederick Douglass asked, “What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?” If we turn that around and ask, “What to the Fourth of July were African Americans?,” we can only answer: “A lot.”

African Americans played a crucial, if often overlooked, role in their White owners’ and neighbors’ decision to declare independence from Britain.

Starting in November 1774 — five months before the Battles of Lexington and Concord — Blacks in the Virginia Piedmont gathered to assess how to use the impending conflict between colonists and crown to gain their own freedom. Over the next 12 months, African Americans all over the South made essentially this pitch to beleaguered royal officials: You are outnumbered, you need us — and we will fight for you if you will free us. At first the British refused, but eventually Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, began quietly welcoming African Americans to what he called his “Ethiopian Regiment.” On Nov. 15, 1775, Dunmore’s Black troops defeated a Patriot militia force, with the Patriot commander being captured by one of his own former enslaved men. Later that day, the governor issued an emancipation proclamation, promising freedom to rebels’ enslaved people who served in his army. With less fanfare, other colonial officials, especially Royal Navy captains, also accepted Black volunteers.

Until 1775, most White Americans had resisted parliamentary innovations like the Stamp Act and the tea tax but had shown little interest in independence. Yet when they heard that Blacks had forged an informal alliance with the British, Whites were furious. John H. Norton of Virginia denounced Dunmore’s “Damned, infernal, Diabolical proclamation declaring Freedom to all our Slaves who will join him.” Thomas Paine pronounced the Anglo-African alliance “hellish.” “Our Devil of a Governor goes on at a Devil of a rate indeed,” wrote Virginian Benjamin Harrison, who would later sign the Declaration of Independence.

Whites’ fury at the British for casting their lot with enslaved people drove many to the fateful step of endorsing independence. In his rough draft of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson listed 25 grievances against George III but devoted three times as many words to one of those grievances as to any other. This was his claim that the king had first imposed enslaved Africans on White Americans and was now encouraging those same enslaved people “to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them.”

Soon after the adoption of the Declaration, Black freedom fighters set about transforming its meaning.

The Second Continental Congress’s most urgent motivation for declaring independence was to pave the way for a military alliance with France. That explains why the Declaration briefly mentions human rights but focuses on states’ (nations’) rights, specifically the right of entities like the 13 colonies to break away from their mother countries. And in the Declaration’s early years, as the literary scholar Eric Slauter has discovered, most Whites who quoted it went straight to its secessionist clauses, especially Congress’s pronouncement that “these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.”

Some who discussed the Declaration drew attention to a different section, as Slauter also notes: the part where Jefferson insists upon human equality and unalienable rights. These clauses proved useful to Congress’s critics as proof of the hypocrisy of Sons of Liberty who were also enslavers.

But other Americans drew inspiration from these same passages. Only a few months after July 4, 1776, Lemuel Haynes, a free Black soldier serving in the Continental Army, wrote an essay he called “Liberty Further Extended.” He opened it by quoting Jefferson’s insistence that “all men are created equal” and possess “certain unalienable rights.”

Soon, other abolitionists were spotlighting the Declaration’s equality and rights clauses. These passages also drew attention from 19th-century women’s rights advocates. The South Carolina-born abolitionist and feminist Sarah Grimké insisted in an 1837 essay that “Men and women were CREATED EQUAL.” And Elizabeth Cady Stanton patterned her Seneca Falls “Declaration of Sentiments” on the Declaration of Independence.

Congress’s Declaration did not achieve its goal of a military alliance with France. It would be nearly two more years before the first French battleships sailed into American waters. But by shifting the focus of the Declaration of Independence from states’ rights to human rights, abolitionists and feminists made it one of the most successful freedom documents ever composed.

Fighting alongside the British

By the time the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, hundreds of enslaved Americans had escaped to the British army, and thousands more would follow. This John Singleton Copley painting depicts an actual event: a British officer’s servant fighting the French in the January 1781 Battle of Jersey, just off the French coast.

Death Of Major Peirson - John Singleton Copley 1783

Lord Dunmore, object of hope or villainy

Dunmore’s emancipation proclamation enraged Whites. “Men of all ranks resent the pointing a dagger to their Throats thru the hands of their Slaves,” wrote Archibald Cary, a member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses. The proclamation would tend “more effectually to work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the Colonies,— than any other expedient, which could possibly have been thought of,” said Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, who became the Declaration’s youngest signer. On the other hand, a Black Philadelphian was accused of telling a White woman who wanted him to take the street side of the sidewalk: “Stay, you damned White bitch, till lord Dunmore and his Black regiment come, and then we will see who is to take the wall.”

Family ties and the end of slavery in Britain

One of White Americans’ many grievances against Britain was Lord Mansfield’s Somerset decision of 1772, widely interpreted as abolishing slavery in the mother country. Enslavers in North America and the Caribbean worried that their human property would steal off and stow away aboard ships sailing for England, where they could claim their freedom. A scholar found references to Somerset in six Southern newspapers. Enslavers denounced Mansfield’s decision, both privately and in print. The Black Britons benefiting from Somerset included Dido Elizabeth, Mansfield’s grandniece, adoptive daughter and frequent amanuensis. Having a beloved Black child in his household may have influenced Mansfield in enslaved people’s favor.

Free and resettled in Nova Scotia

British officers kept their promise to free African Americans who escaped to their lines during the Revolutionary War. Starting in 1783, the year of the Anglo-American peace treaty, more than 3,000 formerly enslaved Blacks resettled in Nova Scotia. Many of the freed people found work in the province’s thriving logging industry, but they suffered continuous abuse from Whites, and in 1792, more than 1,200 of them accepted a British offer to resettle once again, this time in the new British colony of Sierra Leone on the West African coast.

Black abolitionists’ influence

The Declaration focused on justifying the 13 colonies’ secession from Britain. But before the year 1776 was out, Lemuel Haynes, who later became the first Black man in the United States ordained a minister by a mainstream U.S. denomination, had written an essay that opened with Jefferson’s insistence that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Haynes thus set in motion a shift in the essential focus of the Declaration: from states’ rights to human rights. Other abolitionists, Black and White, carried on his campaign to highlight the Declaration’s insistence upon equality and rights. In a 1791 letter to Thomas Jefferson, who was then secretary of state, Benjamin Banneker reminded him what he had said in 1776. “This Sir, was a time in which you clearly saw into the injustice of a State of Slavery,” Banneker told Jefferson, before upbraiding him for “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression.” In the 19th century, feminists as well as abolitionists would focus the nation’s attention on the Declaration’s allusions to equality and unalienable rights.

And now - the goofy pictures:

You're nine kinds of fucked up,

America -

And we love you anyway

Today's Today

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

Here's that list:

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

Today's Today