Reflections on the Fourth of July
“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
-James Baldwin
On the Fourth of July, I noticed the now familiar conflict and complexity that fills my heart every year. The disparate feelings, the heaviness that hangs while fireworks fill the sky.
I have discovered that learning history is a funny thing in that the more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know. This has certainly been my experience over the last ten years as I have been lifting the veil on my socialization into whiteness and its centrality to all parts of US history.
I was educated in Western colonial institutions, meaning the history I learned focused on and favored my ancestors. In school, I learned that the founding fathers of our country were heroes, divinely inspired to create a new nation built on freedom and democracy. The school did not teach me that the vast majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were enslavers or that slavery was embedded in the Constitution to ensure the Southern votes needed for ratification. The founding fathers paternalistically deciding that another person’s freedom was the “price to pay” for our union.
It is precisely this history and, indeed, our history of genocide and colonization of stolen land that makes celebrating the Fourth feel incongruent.
James Baldwin’s quote above summarizes my nuanced relationship with this country. It invites me to see the flaws, wrongs, and the persistent and intractable white supremacy embedded in all of our institutions while also acknowledging America's growth, her people, and hope. Of course, the changes, growth, and hope have not come easily. They have not come from the benevolence of the people in power but from the resisters, the protestors, the dissenters, the revolutionaries, those brave enough to critique the status quo and demand something better. Those willing to say, " With fear for our democracy, I dissent."
So, on this fourth of July, those are the people I celebrate. The people who continue to stay engaged, who stand up, who protest, who vote, who demand to be heard, the people that rage and shout and yell while filling the streets, “this is what democracy looks like!”. The people that critique America perpetually in the hopes that we will finally live according to the principles set forth by the founding fathers.
What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead but a country that is waiting to be born?
-Valerie Kaur
