"To him, your celebration is a sham"

I blogged about Frederick Douglass' "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?" in 2017.

We continue to struggle with the issues that Douglass raised in that powerful and compelling oration.  The descendants of the enslaved people continue to be treated as less than equal, and all we can do is do our part to make sure that Black Lives Matter.

Meanwhile, the original people of this land, who were systematically wiped out by the settler whites, were put through another round of torture when tRump decided to hold a fireworks rally at Mt. Rushmore.  If you need a reminder on why that is painful site:

The insult of Rushmore to some Sioux is at least three-fold:
1. It was built on land the government took from them.
2. The Black Hills in particular are considered sacred ground.
3.The monument celebrates the European settlers who killed so many Native Americans and appropriated their land.

Sure, Washington and Jefferson owned human beings as property.  But, didn't Lincoln free the slaves?

Abraham Lincoln famously emancipated slaves, but he supported eradicating Indian tribes from western lands and approved America’s largest-ever mass execution, the hanging of 38 Dakota in Mankato for their alleged crimes in the 1862 war along the Minnesota River.
Teddy Roosevelt, in his “The Winning of the West,” wrote: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are … .”

All these bring me back to the Frederick Douglass speech.

Back in high school, my friend and classmate, Chandru, had a record player, in which he played for a couple of us who had gone over to his home an LP of a music group called ABBA.  And soon after that, I came to know the music of another group, Boney M, especially the one that began with "By the rivers of Babylon ..."  That opening line is from "a biblical Psalm – Psalm 137."

That tidbit is merely the starting point for my ignorance.  This essay begins with:

On the anniversary of America’s independence, the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass made a biblical Psalm – Psalm 137 – best known for its opening line, “By the Rivers of Babylon,” a centerpiece of his most famous speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”.
Douglass told the audience at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, that for a free black like himself, being expected to celebrate American independence was akin to the Judean captives being mockingly coerced to perform songs in praise of Jerusalem.
Not only did it inspire the famous abolitionist; this 2,500-year-old Hebrew psalm has long served as an uplifting historical analogy for a variety of oppressed and subjugated groups, including African Americans.

I read Douglass' speech. Or, at least most of it.

It is powerful. It is moving. It is a must-read.

It will be a gross injustice to excerpt even a single sentence from that speech.  With all the apologies, and my ignorance as an excuse, I will wrap up this post with the following lines from Frederick Douglass:

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 sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts 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. 

"Moonface" and "composite nationality"

While most of the country was asleep, my country's war-time President, Agent Orange, apparently went on a lengthy Twitter rant.

The Dear Leader, voted to power by 63 million, which includes a few of my neighbors and former commenters at this blog, was particularly upset at George Conway, who is married to the cheeto's lying aide.

The racist-in-chief knows all the racist usages out there, and he educates the rest of us who don't know that jargon.  The word today, boys and girls, is moonface.  Who knew there were such words that are used to insult!  He knows them all.

Source

Twitter immediately picked up on that, and Conway chimed in too:

I know you do.

— George Conway, Noble Committee Chair (@gtconway3d) May 5, 2020

Such is the behavior of the President who claims that he has been treated way worse than Abraham Lincoln was!

He and his racist base are trying their best to keep alive the racism and hate that has been a foundational aspect of these United States.  But, their days are numbered.  This is their final, dying, gasp.

What the racists fail to understand and appreciate is how easily immigrants create a “composite nationality" that Frederick Douglass envisioned.

In calling for a composite nationality, Douglass asserted that America’s strength lay in its capacity to welcome newcomers and make them Americans. Speaking at a time of growing hostility to Chinese immigration, he proclaimed that in America, immigrants added their talents, ideas, and energy, but in turn they were incorporated into the nation.

In a post slightly more than a year ago, which was a part of a series when reading Jill Lepore's These Truths, I blogged about Douglass and his open-door to immigration from anywhere.  The following is the unedited post from January 29, 2019:
*********************************

Since 1492, and since Mayflower, and since the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution, it has been one chaos after another for non-whites.  As we get more into the Jim Crow era in Jill Lepore's narration of the history of the United States, we will remind ourselves about what she is exploring in this book:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

And so far the evidence is ... awful!  The original inhabitants nearly wiped out. People from Africa imported, traded, and held as property.  An empire-building America provoked a war with Mexico and gobbled up the upper-third of its territory.  A horrible Civil War was fought in order to abolish slavery. Women were told that they shall not have rights to participate in politics.

Political equality? Natural rights? Sovereignty of people?

It was time to go after yet another group: Chinese immigrants.

Following the gold rush, "Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in large numbers during the 1850s."

Given the track record of white supremacy from 1492, it is easy to predict that the Chinese would have been attacked, killed, imprisoned, and their citizenship questioned, right?

It is incredible how when I was in the 8th or 9th grade, when Mr. Venkatesan taught (he was a horrible teacher anyway!) history, we were somehow led to understand that it was a glorious American political experiment, in which the only blemish was slavery, which too was corrected by Lincoln after the Civil War. And it was happily ever after!

So, people immigrated from China.

Chinese workers began settling in Boise in 1865 and only five years later constituted a third of Idaho's settlers and nearly 60 percent of its miners. In 1870, Chinese immigrants and their children made up nearly 9 percent of the population of California, and one-quarter of the state's wage earners.

Imagine white settlers looking across and seeing hardworking Chinese.   Oregon and California tightly restricted the rights of Chinese. 

Frederick Douglass was consistent in his view of human rights:

Again, this is the Douglass about whom the current president knew nothing!

As I noted in this post back in September, the United States passed a law to exclude the Chinese. To strip them of their citizenship. And the US Supreme Court even upheld this law in 1889!

Let's ask ourselves, again:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

Apartheid in America

In 1492, Columbus "discovered" India.

Jill Lepore's narration of the story of the United States from that moment is compelling.  Deeply disturbing, even if the facts are not always new.  To read them all in a single-volume book is immensely more powerful than I had imagined.

The 400 year anniversary was during the post-war Reconstruction.  The original inhabitants had been practically wiped out, and most of the rest driven out of their lands.  Humans from Africa had been imported, traded, held as property, and finally proclaimed to be free by Lincoln.  A destructive Civil War was fought, in which the slave states lost.  Meanwhile, Mexicans and Chinese were also given the rough treatment.

Throughout all these, while the citizenship of the European settlers and their descendants was assumed as a given, the citizenship of non-whites was, well, unresolved.  (This is, of course, an ongoing issue as well, with the party of whites desperately trying to deny citizenship to non-whites.)

The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed freed slaves equal protection and due process of law, yes, but they were considered to be "Separate" in the post-war era.  Jill Lepore writes about the irony of the Fourteenth Amendment--business used that to further cement a legal fiction that corporations are persons!

In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that over the course of fifty years, "only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.

It shouldn't surprise us that today's Party of Lincoln champions business interests more than human interests, especially the interests of disadvantaged non-white humans.  As Lepore comments, "rights proffered to the people were proffered, instead, to corporations."

In 1892, the country hosted "the largest-ever world's fair" in Chicago.  Frederick Douglass was the only eminent African American invited to address.  Otherwise, "as if to shame the Negro, they exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage."

When the day came for Douglass to deliver his talk, "he arrived to find the fair decked out with watermelons, and white hecklers waiting for him."

That reminds me about the time when a white friend "joked" about how to get Obama to quit the presidency. (This friend--a born again evangelical Christian--is a GOP loyalist.)  This white friend "joked" that a trail of watermelons leading out of the White House would do the trick.  I gave that white friend the benefit of doubt, and considered that a reflection of his puke-worthy taste in humor.  But, in retrospect, I should have served the quit notice right then. Mea culpa.

Douglass offered his blunt assessment:

The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution.

This is how we can even frame the problem that we now have with trump's voters and enablers: Do they have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution?  So far, the answer is a clear NO! :(

Four years after the 400-year anniversary of Columbus, in 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of yet another atrocity, in Plessy v. Ferguson.  The court ruled that separate accommodations for blacks and whites were not unequal accommodations.  Separate but equal became the law of the land for more than half a century.

Jill Lepore sums it up well: "The Confederacy had lost the war, but it had won the peace."

Native Americans. Africans. Mexicans. And now? Chinese!

Since 1492, and since Mayflower, and since the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution, it has been one chaos after another for non-whites.  As we get more into the Jim Crow era in Jill Lepore's narration of the history of the United States, we will remind ourselves about what she is exploring in this book:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

And so far the evidence is ... awful!  The original inhabitants nearly wiped out. People from Africa imported, traded, and held as property.  An empire-building America provoked a war with Mexico and gobbled up the upper-third of its territory.  A horrible Civil War was fought in order to abolish slavery. Women were told that they shall not have rights to participate in politics.

Political equality? Natural rights? Sovereignty of people?

It was time to go after yet another group: Chinese immigrants.

Following the gold rush, "Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in large numbers during the 1850s."

Given the track record of white supremacy from 1492, it is easy to predict that the Chinese would have been attacked, killed, imprisoned, and their citizenship questioned, right?

It is incredible how when I was in the 8th or 9th grade, when Mr. Venkatesan taught (he was a horrible teacher anyway!) history, we were somehow led to understand that it was a glorious American political experiment, in which the only blemish was slavery, which too was corrected by Lincoln after the Civil War. And it was happily ever after!

So, people immigrated from China.

Chinese workers began settling in Boise in 1865 and only five years later constituted a third of Idaho's settlers and nearly 60 percent of its miners. In 1870, Chinese immigrants and their children made up nearly 9 percent of the population of California, and one-quarter of the state's wage earners.

Imagine white settlers looking across and seeing hardworking Chinese.   Oregon and California tightly restricted the rights of Chinese. 

Frederick Douglass was consistent in his view of human rights:

Again, this is the Douglass about whom the current president knew nothing!

As I noted in this post back in September, the United States passed a law to exclude the Chinese. To strip them of their citizenship. And the US Supreme Court even upheld this law in 1889! 

Let's ask ourselves, again:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

Build that wall

The Europeans kept coming in by the shiploads.  And the original inhabitants of the land were systematically ousted from their homes and lands.

Jill Lepore writes:

Many parts of the country, including Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, recruited immigrants by advertising in European newspapers.  Immigrants encouraged more immigrants, in the letters they wrote home to family and friends.  "This is a free country," a Swedish immigrant wrote home from Illinois in 1850. ... A Norwegian wrote from Minnesota, "The principle of equality has been universally accepted and adopted."

Maybe the Swede and the Norwegian did not know about the conditions of blacks and the original inhabitants.  Or, maybe they didn't care, and what mattered to them was how the whites were "free" and could enjoy the "principle of equality."

How huge was this white immigration?

European immigrants grew from 1.6 percent [of the U.S. population] in the 1820s to 11.2 percent in 1860. ... By 1860, more than one in eight Americans were born in Europe, including 1.6 million Irish and 1.2 million Germans, the majority of whom were Catholic.

The Catholicism of the new white folk bothered the older white folk who were Protestants.  "By 1850, one in every four people in Boston was Irish.  Signs at shops began to read, "No Irish Need Apply."

To think that America needs to keep immigrants out is a remarkable denial of the country's history.  The current President, who was elected by 63 million racists, openly declares that he would welcome immigrants from Norway but not from "shitholes."

We are yet to reach the critical time of the Civil War.   But, even at this stage of Jill Lepore's history of the US, think again about Frederick Douglass' speech from 1852, in which he thunders:

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 sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts 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.

When we sing about "the land of the free and the home of the brave," I am not sure who we refer to. 

We shall overcome ... some day

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity, which is outraged, in the name of liberty, which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery -- the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate - I will not excuse."

That was Frederick Douglass on the "hypocrisy of American slavery."  Yes, the same Douglass whose "by the rivers of Babylon" prompted me to blog a post a few months ago, and has been the featured post for a while now.

As I re-read that, the following line rattles me even more now in the context of trump's explicit racism and his support even among elected Republicans, leave alone his base!

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. 

If I were an African-American who traces his roots to slaves, it would have been a challenge for me not to have been violent when I was young.  The injustice is simply beyond my comprehension. Beyond my understanding.  And then to read that the president refers to the continent, from where the slaves were brought, as "shithole"?

With his latest display, Mr. Trump has pulled deeply from the white-racist imagination. “Shithole” refers either to a toilet or the anus. Then again, in Mr. Trump’s mouth, it could mean both. So, let’s get this right. Places like Haiti, El Salvador and African countries are indicative of places where feces are deposited or places from which feces are expelled. Either way, Haitians, Salvadorans and Africans function, in Mr. Trump’s white racist imaginary, as “dirt,” “crap,” that which “stinks,” is “foul” and “nasty,” that which causes us typically to recoil.

That paragraph is not any unhinged rant.  It is from a compelling commentary in the NY Times by George Yancy, who is a professor of philosophy, and who has been a frequent contributor to the philosophy forum at the paper.

How did we get to this moment in 2018?

There were enough Americans who were willing to accept Trump’s racism to elect him. There are enough people in Washington willing to accept Trump’s racism to defend him. Not only is Trump racist, the entire architecture of his support is suffused with that racism. Racism is a fundamental component of the Trump presidency.

63 million Americans, many of whom are Jesus-loving Christians, supported the racist. Including two white (past) commenters here!

How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

Back in high school, my friend and classmate, Chandru, had a record player, in which he played for a couple of us who had gone over to his home an LP of a music group called ABBA.  And soon after that, I came to know the music of another group, Boney M.

Those were the days when nobody was ashamed of disco music and were actually joyously singing along.  Among the many Boney M songs was one that began with "By the rivers of Babylon ..."



What I did not know until yesterday--yes, literally yesterday--was that this Boney M song, the opening lines that I was so familiar with, is from "a biblical Psalm – Psalm 137."

It is amazing how ignorant and ill-informed I am.  Every single day, this blog serves me well as a confession booth!

That tidbit is merely the starting point for my ignorance.  The essay begins thus:

On the anniversary of America’s independence, the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass made a biblical Psalm – Psalm 137 – best known for its opening line, “By the Rivers of Babylon,” a centerpiece of his most famous speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”.
Douglass told the audience at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, that for a free black like himself, being expected to celebrate American independence was akin to the Judean captives being mockingly coerced to perform songs in praise of Jerusalem.
Not only did it inspire the famous abolitionist; this 2,500-year-old Hebrew psalm has long served as an uplifting historical analogy for a variety of oppressed and subjugated groups, including African Americans.

Wait, what?

After that essay, I read the New Yorker and David Remnick also refers to Frederick Douglass, this Psalm, and Douglass' speech.  Seriously, am I the only one who is always stumped by own ignorance?

I decided to read Douglass' speech. Or, at least most of it.

It is powerful. It is moving. It is a must-read.  I imagine that if a James Earl Jones delivered this text, tears will flow down our cheeks listening to the words.

It will be a gross injustice to excerpt even a single sentence from that speech.  With all the apologies, and my ignorance as an excuse, I will wrap up this post with the following lines from Frederick Douglass:

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 sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts 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.