Let's Celebrate a New Independence Day

For 244 years, Americans have celebrated its independence from Great Britain. We light fireworks. We barbeque. We drink beer, eat corn, drink soda, eat frankfurters. We lie on blankets and watch 20-minute firework displays.

The beer, the eats, the booms and crackles of fireworks obscure the greatest achievement made by any American, a sacrifice imposed on them.

The date is July 4th, the date when individuals such as Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe, and George Walton.Soon after these White men or associates, some slavers and other profiteers of slavery, began pounding out the Articles of Confederation. It became law of the land in 1781. It flopped. They rebooted. In 1789, they stumbled upon what has become known as our Constitution.

We weren't fighting only a war with Britain at the time. We were fighting our better angels, and they lost. It was during that 15-year period, Americans, meaning White Americans, codified racism. They stripped Africans of their humanity. They equated them with chattle. They were the property of European colonists (later European Americans), who could do as they wished with them, work them, punish them, torture them, rape them, kill them and sell them. Not for one generation, but for all generations. Their value on this planet was in the eyes of the White man.

It was not a new concept. By the time we declared war on Great Britain, European colonists had enslaved Africans for 157 years in the English colonies (longer in the Spanish). Each delegate knew slavery would remain a part of the United States after the war with Britain.

So on July 4th, we surrendered the freedom of people of African descent in order for European colonists to be free of Great Britain. We also surrendered our anti-colonialism furor for the remnants of colonialism's harshest realities.

On past Fourths of July, we--meaning European Americans--have ignored our compromises. We've forgotten those whom White Americans sacrificed for White American freedom. We've looked away from our ugliness. This year should be different.

July 4, 2020, should be a day of reflection and of penance for sacrificing the lives of a race. We should use this upcoming 24 hours to thank those men, women, and children and to ask their forgiveness for not making more of their sacrifice. We should grant them all citizenship, albeit post mortem.

Let's also celebrate the new America in people such as Maya Moore as captured by Kurt Streeter of the New York Times:

Still in her prime, Maya Moore sacrificed her career, stepping away as one of the greats in basketball for a long shot bid to help free a prisoner she was convinced had been wrongfully convicted.

There would be no fifth W.N.B.A. championship, no bid for another Olympic gold medal, no fans gasping at the perfect jump shot.

In a shock to the sport, she left the game — temporarily, she said — in early 2019 to free Jonathan Irons, a Missouri man who continuously claimed innocence as he served a 50-year prison sentence for burglary and assault with a gun.