Opinion, by Clifford Jackson
James Baldwin said, “America’s history is the history of the negro and it is not a pretty one!” Frederick Douglass, in a blistering speech on the fourth of July, said on July 5th, 1852, ” What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? A day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice, cruelty, and false Christianity that he is the victim of. The fourth of July is yours, not mine; you may rejoice, I must mourn.
To my fellow slaves and me, your celebration is a sham, your boasted liberty an unholy license, your national greatness, swelling vanity, your sounds of rejoicing empty and heartless. Your shouts of liberty and equality hollow mockery. Your religious solemnity and parade to the african slave are bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes to disgrace a nation of savages”.
David Walker, a fellow abolitionist, wrote “David Walker’s Appeal” in 1829, a pamphlet that exposed America’s glaring hypocrisy and the fraud of the Declaration of Independence, which stated that “all men are created equal.” Yet America had more slaves than any other country on earth. “
He said that the founding fathers were criminals with the millions that they had enslaved and killed between African Americans and native Americans. He condemned Christianity in no uncertain terms in this country, in particular, so-called Christian slave owners who” treated black people worse than any other heathen nation.”
This is what the 250th birthday celebration of this country’s birthday leaves out. The reason why this is being left out because the celebration and the so-called founding principles of freedom , democracy and justice are predicated on an egregious lie that the aforementioned statements made crystal clear. America and its story tellers of its so-called greatness have a pathology and sickness that is reflected in the denial of the crimes of this country as well as the perversion of terms like freedom and democracy .
How, by any stretch of the imagination, do you call a country that wiped out and disemboweled 90 percent of the native American population with a viciousness and brutality that is almost unmatched in human history great? That pathology is expressed with the fact that after slavery supposedly ended in 1863, a new form of slavery was initiated with Jim Crow that lasted 100 years. African-Americans’ right to vote, as Louis Farrakhan astutely articulated in an interview with Mike Wallace in 1996, has only existed for roughly 30 years against a backdrop of 190 years of white violence and terror that made the 15th Amendment vacuous.
There are so many things you can write or say about America’s crimes. The constant theme that I see is how much of a lie and a myth of the greatness of this country is, and it is due to the deep and profound pathology that most Americans have when it comes to understanding this country’s history, where evidence of its criminality is overwhelming. That pathology and malaise is entrenched in the black community who have been one of the biggest victims of Americanism.
That malaise is deep within the black and brown communities whose identities have been wiped out and cocooned into whiteness, especially in terms of the allegiance of black people and people of color towards a very perverted Christianity. Tim Scott, Byron Reynolds, Mark Robinson, Clarence Thomas, and Charles Payne are glaring examples of white people with dark skin. This malaise is particularly sickening where all of these men are sycophants for Trump and his administration’s unending level of corruption and racism.
When Barack Obama claimed that he didn’t know what was being said by his former Christian pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who said America was going to hell for all of its crimes, Wright said, ” Barack Obama is a politician.” What he meant was that politicians are particularly mendacious. He was right, Barack Obama is a part of that malaise when he says, “This is the greatest country in the world that has the greatest military in the world.” He certainly, in light of this country’s bloody and violent history, is especially dishonest.
Would Sitting Bull, Chief Gaul, Geronimo, Tecumseh, the Iroquois Nation that governed what is now NY, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, say what Barack Obama said? Here in America,” calling the poor lazy,” saying that blacks are lazy, even though the wealth of this nation, as Lincoln said, is based upon the unrequited toil and work of African slaves for 246 years. Many of the crime dens, especially in communities of color, whether it is the Bronx, Memphis, or Chicago, are the direct result of not just poverty but the criminalization of the humanity of people of color throughout American history. As well as the brutal aspects of an economic system where money has always been the real God and not anything that you would find in the Old Testament, the Talmud, or the koran.
This is why Dr. King said, ” We are integrating into a burning house.”
Clifford Jackson, Larchmont
