Today as a senior Black man white America wants me to forget about its racist, terrible history and just unconsciously celebrate its 250 years of so-called democracy. They want me to have a flag in my hand; a sparkler, a hot dog, and a program full of fireworks.
They want me to stand shoulder to shoulder with them, eat barbeque and sing about the land of the free, the home of the brave, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, yeah a total bunch of hypocritical bullshit!
I ask you straight-up: 250 years of democracy for whom? In the words of the Black nationalist patriot Malcolm X, indeed I do not write to you today as a Democrat or a Republican. I do not come before you as an American in the way that word is meant when spoken with pride and comfort.
I come before you as a Black man whose people have lived in this land for over four hundred years and who, of the 250 being celebrated, have only been permitted to vote and to claim the protection of civil rights for 62 of them.
Sixty-two years out of two hundred and fifty. That is not a nation with an occasional stain on its record. That is a nation whose default condition, for the overwhelming majority of its existence, has been the legal, systematic exclusion of Black people from the very democracy it now asks us to applaud.
Do the arithmetic yourselves. Two hundred and fifty years of a republic. Two hundred and forty-six years of that republic touched by slavery, by Black Codes, by Jim Crow, by lynching, by disenfranchisement enforced with fire hoses, dogs, nooses, police, and the law. Sixty-two years of anything resembling the franchise being secure.
And even that sixty-two is not truly secure because in this very anniversary year, a right-wing authoritarian president who built his political career on stoking racial grievance is actively working to gut the Voting Rights Act's remaining protections, purge Black voters from rolls, dismantle the civil rights infrastructure built on the blood of marchers, and roll back the enforcement mechanisms that made those sixty-two years possible at all.
So when they ask me to celebrate two hundred and fifty years of democracy, understand: I am being asked to celebrate two centuries of systemic racial oppression, economic exploitation, social degradation, physical debilitation, and psychological exhaustion, followed by six decades of contested and now endangered inclusion, presided over today by a man actively trying to shrink that number further. This is not democracy triumphant; this is democracy on trial, with the defendant currently in the White House.
A Government That Has Never Stopped Fighting Black Freedom
Look honestly at the record, not the mythology. Every single time Black people in this country organized to free themselves, the government of the United States federal, state, or both moved to crush it.
The Underground Railroad was met with the Fugitive Slave Act, federal marshals, and bounty hunters empowered by Congress to drag free Black men and women back into bondage.
Reconstruction, the one brief moment when Black political power flourished, was abandoned by federal compromise in 1877 and replaced with a century of state-sanctioned terror that Washington chose not to stop.
The Black freedom movement of the twentieth century was met by COINTELPRO, a federal program that wiretapped, infiltrated, slandered, and helped assassinate Black leaders — Martin Luther King Jr. surveilled as a threat, Fred Hampton shot dead in his bed by police acting on FBI intelligence.
And when Black Lives Matter (BLM) rose in this century to say simply that our lives should not be extinguishable with impunity, it was labeled an extremist threat by federal law enforcement, its organizers surveilled, its protests met with military-grade force. From the Underground Railroad to BLM, the pattern is unbroken: when Black people organize for their own liberation, the American state treats that organizing as the danger, not the conditions that produced it.
Fighting Their Wars, Denied Our Rights
Black men have bled for this country in every war it has fought, from Crispus Attucks falling first in the Revolution, to the tens of thousands of United States Colored Troops in the Civil War, to the Harlem Hellfighters who spent more days in continuous combat than any other American unit in the First World War, to the Tuskegee Airmen, to the men who served two, three tours in Vietnam.
And in every one of those wars, they came home to a country that would not let them vote, would not serve them a meal at a lunch counter, would not sell them a home outside a redlined district, and in some cases lynched them still in uniform. A man good enough to die for democracy abroad was not good enough to exercise it at home. That contradiction is not incidental to American history. It is a through-line.
And when a Black man tried to protest that very contradiction not with a rifle or a riot, but by silently taking a knee during an anthem, on his own time, on a football field, he was cast as unpatriotic, blackballed from his profession, and turned into a national villain by the very apparatus of power he was peacefully confronting.
Colin Kaepernick knelt so that this country might look honestly at how it treats Black lives at the hands of police. For that, he lost his career. Meanwhile the conditions he knelt to protest have only worsened. That is what this country does with peaceful Black dissent: it destroys the messenger and preserves the message's target.
The Ledger of a Nightmare, Not a Dream
They speak of the American Dream. I am speaking of the American record, and the record is a ledger of disproportion that never seems to close. Black men are killed by law enforcement at a rate that dwarfs our share of the population; not occasionally, not anecdotally, but as a documented, persistent pattern stretching from slave patrols to today's police departments.
Behind that present-day statistic stands a historical mountain of terror: thousands of Black men and women lynched across this country, often with photographs sold as postcards, often with law enforcement standing by or leading the mob.
That terror did not simply end; it transformed into a system of mass incarceration that now holds Black men in cages at a rate unmatched anywhere on earth relative to our numbers, feeding a prison system that itself sprang from the very language of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery "except as a punishment for crime."
Black men are last hired and first fired. We carry the highest unemployment. We are overrepresented among the poor and the homeless in a country wealthy enough to end both. We suffer chronic illness and die earlier, not from some genetic inevitability, but from generations of environmental neglect, medical mistreatment, and stress that accumulates in the body like sediment.
Every category by which a society is judged to be caring for its people health, wealth, safety, longevity, freedom from cages, Black men lead in the wrong direction. That is not misfortune. That is design, maintained by policy, upheld by inertia, and now, under this administration, being actively deepened rather than repaired.
No Dream, Only a Nightmare Renewed
So again I ask: what to the Black man is the Fourth of July, 2026? It is a fireworks display over a house still on fire. It is a milestone measured in centuries by people who have only been allowed to stand fully inside its promise for the length of a single long lifetime and who are watching, in real time, an authoritarian racist president and his MAGA movement shorten that lifetime further.
It is a celebration of "democracy" that has spent two hundred fifty years defining, again and again, who counts as fully human within it, and has never once stopped resisting the moment Black people tried to answer that question for ourselves.
I do not stand here asking for inclusion in someone else's dream. I stand here asserting our right to determine our own future politically, economically, culturally spiritually; independent of whether this nation ever finishes reckoning with what it has done.
We do not need their permission to organize, to build, to protect our own, to educate our children in the truth of this history rather than the mythology of it. Self-determination is a rejection of America; it is a refusal to wait on a country that has shown, for two hundred fifty years running, precisely how long it is willing to make us wait.
Let the fireworks go up, let their anthem play, I will not pretend the democracy mountain has been climbed when I can still clearly see, from where I stand, the white supremacy shackles at its base and a racist fascist president Donald Trump at the summit today trying to successfully roll the whole Black nation back down toward them.
Yes, this is what the Fourth of July 2026 means to this Black man, no different in essence that it meant to Frederick Douglass in his famous 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, as Douglass remarked:
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; 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 sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy; a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”
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