What, to the Oppressed, is Your Fourth of July?

172 Years After Frederick Douglass—A 2025 Remix

Photo by Gene Gallin on Unsplash

My subject, fellow citizens, is American freedom—so-called.

Your Fourth of July is a masterclass in selective memory. Y’all love to wax nostalgically about 1776, but not 1619. You’d rather forget that first shipload of enslaved Africans. Half of you probably don’t even know about 1852 when Frederick Douglass asked “What, to the slave, is your Fourth of July?

You remember tea in Boston Harbor but forget the millions of Black bodies thrown overboard in the Middle Passage.

You act like your Founding Fathers were saints. But they were enslavers. Rapists. Land thieves. Mass murderers. Lynchers. Tax cheats. Not freedom fighters, just refuse from Europe who built their freedom on other people’s stolen bodies and land.

You love to quote the Declaration of Independence but skip right over the parts where your freedom was built on other people’s stolen land, labor, and stolen lives. You want the mythology without the memory. The pride without the reckoning.

But I want to talk about this Fourth of July celebration from the point of view of people this country has never stopped trying to silence, cage, or erase.

Because from where I’m standing, with the descendants of the enslaved, the dispossessed, the kids whose schools you’re defunding, the migrants you keep snatching from worksites and schools, the families you’re locking in ICE detention, the protestors you’re arresting in wheelchairs, the people choosing between insulin and rent . . . this country looks ugly AF to me on this Fourth of July.

You really expect us to stand up, hand on heart, while you rip healthcare away from 17 million people? Watch you gut DEI and K-12 resources so the next generation of Black and brown kids stays exactly where you want them? While you cut food assistance and kick children off school lunches? Yeah, nah.

You want us to sing “America the Beautiful” while you try to erase queer and trans kids from public life? While you force ten-year-old rape victims and brain dead women to carry pregnancies? While you make it harder to vote if you’re Black, Brown, poor, or young? While you hand out corporate tax breaks as everyone else drowns in student debt, gets sick and dies slowly under your strategic murder policies wrapped in the guise of fiscal responsibility?

You want us to sing “God Bless America” while politicians green light bombs over the Middle East and sign blank checks to continue leveling neighborhoods and killing children in Gaza? While you give cops military weapons to patrol neighborhoods you’ve starved of opportunity? While you blame immigrants for everything, so nobody notices billionaires robbing us blind?

America is false to its past, false to its present, and committed to lying about its future.

You love quoting the Constitution but ignore the parts you don’t like. You tell us to celebrate freedom while you’re gutting voting rights, banning books about my ancestors, and criminalizing teachers for telling the truth about this country’s history.

Don’t act like you don’t know exactly who you’re targeting. It’s not white suburbs getting voter ID laws. It’s not rich zip codes losing polling places. Nobody’s banning the cherry tree myth or your precious Constitution lessons. Hell, George Washington’s rotten-ass teeth will likely stay safe in the curriculum forever.

Don’t lecture us about democracy while you cheer for a twice-impeached, convicted felon, coup-plotting rapist who’s carrying out his promise to rule like a dictator from “day one.” This is the same man who bragged on tape about grabbing women “by the pussy,” who stole classified documents and lied about it, who tried to blackmail election officials into “finding votes.”

The same man who wants to round up immigrants into concentration camps unless they work on farms and at hotels owned by his rich buddies. The same man whotries to punish his political enemies with sham prosecutions, and has pardoned January 6th terrorists. The man who has gutted the civil service so only loyalists can hold government jobs and make the DOJ his personal revenge squad. You call that freedom?

Please. Don’t insult our intelligence while you sell the country to a wannabe Mussolini with a burnt sienna spray tan.

And don’t think I forgot about your Supreme Court.

Y’all preach about “checks and balances” while the stacked bench is full of partisan hacks who treat billionaires like personal ATMs, gut voting rights, kill affirmative action, kneecap environmental protections, reverse the Constitution, and laugh while states ban abortion outright. Don’t keep telling us to respect institutions that don’t respect our humanity.

You make sure corporations can poison our air and water with impunity. Spill oil, dump chemicals, choke neighborhoods with smoke and nobody’s going to jail. You write them a fine so small it’s just the cost of doing business.

Climate change. The catastrophe you’re so eager to ignore while the planet literally burns, floods, and starves people out. You fuckers want it.

You want disasters to destroy everything so you can buy up what’s left for pennies. You’re not afraid of the world ending. You’re betting on it, figuring you can build private bunkers, fly your kids to Mars, and leave the rest of us to drown or choke on the smoke. And you call that freedom or prosperity?

It’s theft on a planetary scale. It’s mass murder with a stock ticker. Your Fourth of July is a scam. Your liberty is conditional as hell. Your greatness is marketing copy. Your fireworks try to distract from the sound of bombs dropping overseas, ICE vans rolling up to homes, and entire neighborhoods being erased in Gaza.

Fellow citizens, America’s greed and racism doesn’t make its democracy a lie. No, actually let’s be honest. It’s not a lie at all. It’s exactly what it was built to be. This isn’t some broken system that failed to live up to its ideals. It’s a system working exactly as designed: to protect power, hoard wealth, and keep Black, brown, poor, and marginalized people in their place. This is the plan.

The voter suppression, the mass incarceration, the gutting of schools, the looting of the planet is not an accident or a glitch. It is the system. And it will keep running exactly this way. And yet, despite all this, there are people out here fighting to make America honest enough to be worth saving. Trying to make this country honest enough to be worth staying in.

So, I’ll ask again . . . What, to the oppressed, is your Fourth of July?

It’s a costume party. A big, gaudy production number designed to make people forget how this country was built and who paid the price.

You grill your nitrate-laced hot dogs on land stolen from Native people. You toast to liberty in a country with the highest incarceration rate on earth. You set off fireworks that sound like gunshots in neighborhoods that know that sound too well.

And you call that shit freedom.

You call it democracy.

Nah, it’s a hustle. It’s delusion.

So no, I’m not celebrating your Fourth of July. Not while people sleep in tents under billion-dollar stadiums. Not while cops get away with murder. Not while this government supports genocide. Not while teachers get death threats for telling the truth. Not while politicians turn immigrants into scapegoats to distract you from the fact they’re robbing us blind. Not while legions of people are set to suffer and die slowly.

If you want me to celebrate, then give me something worth celebrating. Tell the truth about the past. Do right in the present. Make good on the promise for the future.

Frederick Douglass asked 173 years ago: What, to the oppressed, is your Fourth of July? What is there to celebrate when the promise of freedom was never meant for all of us, and you’re working overtime to make sure it never will be?

My ancestors built this country while being treated like disposable chattel. We’ve carried America further than it ever deserved to go. We’re the reason it’s come as close as it has to its own ideals.

So go ahead, light your fireworks. Hang your flags. Sing them anthems. Gobble up those mystery meat franks, wash them down with cheap beer, and enjoy the indigestion while you terrify every dog in town and trigger PTSD in the very veterans you claim to honor.

Celebrate the freedom to look away from everyone you’re crushing. Just know some of us see it for exactly what it is and we’re not buying the red, white, and bullshit.

If you appreciated this, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support not only keeps this work going, it also helps fund opportunities for HBCU journalism students. Let’s build a more honest, fearless, and liberated media together.