Happy July 4th?

"Hang on to the world as it spins around
Just don't let the spin get you down
Things are moving so fast
Hold on tight and you will last
Never mind your fears
Brighter days will soon be here
Take it from me some day we'll all be free

Keep on working tall hold your head up high
Lay your dreams right out to the sky
Take it from me
Someday we'll all be free
Yeah
Just wait and see
Someday we'll all be free"
~ Donny Hathaway, "Someday We'll All Be Free"


Every year on July 4th I make it my business to pay homage to my ancestors who were not free on our nation's independence day. I love celebrating the independence days of some of my black friends from other countries who have their own day to celebrate, but I feel guilty for joining in on any July 4th shindig. On July 4th, 1776, America won its revolutionary war which allowed it to break from the economic and patriotic pull of the British empire. At that time, the slave trade was still in existence pulling thousands of Africans from familiar shores to horrific ones. Yet, black people are the main ones having picnics, when even that word has suspicious usage in our culture-- lynchings occurred picnic-style, with us as the main course. I never felt comfortable celebrating the independence of a country that has worked to keep my people in chains whether they be iron or virtual. So to pay homage to my ancestors, who did not even have the liberty to strike up a grill and eat, every year I read Frederick Douglass' speech he delivered to a group of abolitionists who wanted him to celebrate July 4, 1852 with them. Even though Douglas was a free black at the time, he could not celebrate with his brother and sisters still in bondage. Now, 155 years later, I stand with Douglass in his sentiment. Although I am an ocean away from the festivities, I still cannot celebrate. I cannot celebrate when our people receive poorer healthcare, our students in black school districts are in the 9th grade and cannot read, our children have black fathers locked in jail who were guilty of nothing but being a black man, and our sistas are working too many jobs to support children alone. So please take time to read Douglas' words, because they are as alive as they were one-hundred and fiffty-five years ago.

Maybe someday we all will be free, but I am tired of waiting. Let's do something to be free.

What to the Slave is the 4th of July?
By Frederick Douglass

Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that the dumb might eloquently speak and the lame man leap as an hart.

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn that it is dangerous to copy the example of nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people.

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth."

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, "may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth"! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery.

I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July! 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"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just ... For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not as astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, and secretaries, having among us lawyers doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; and that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshiping the Christian's God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!...

What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply....

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth 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 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.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms – of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Furaha.

Younger, Gifted & Black

"To be young, gifted and black,
Oh what a lovely precious dream
To be young, gifted and black,
Open your heart to what I mean"
~ Nina Simone, "Young, Gifted, & Black"

This weekend I celebrated my mother's 50th birthday, what a blessing. The funny part is my family wanted me to deliver a speech I wrote at seventeen about black women to salute her. So I thought since my past met me on Saturday, I would let you see how I became this way.

A memory that stays with me about this speech is that I delivered it my high school for an assembly and a young sista working there for the American Corps told me that I should be careful who I pay homage to in black women's history in a pretentious attitude. At the time I did not understand her and I still believe she could have demonstrated her point a bit more eloquently--I was seventeen! Now, I see where the sister was coming from. Some of the women I highlight in my speech, Madame C. J. Walker and Oprah, specifically, do not sit right with me because of their role in our history. Ironically, they both represent economic growth black women, but their means of that growth trouble me today. Walker made her millions by training black women to look white. Oprah made her billions by appealing to white America's culture and shedding her own, virtually becoming the Mammie character I describe in the speech. However, I feel we should pay homage to these women if not for anything, their entrepreneurship.

We are all black women and excluding any given part of ourselves is false and counteracts sisterhood. I'm all about sisterhood, not about just criticism, though my blog may seem so. I want black women to love ourselves collectively and as Oprah once refrained, "remember our spirit[s]."


The Black Woman: Resisting and Rising from Slavery

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lies
You may trod in the very dirt, but still like dust I’ll rise

These words of Maya Angelou explicitly describe the plight of the black woman. You see, the story starts almost four hundred years ago when the first slaves were brought to America. Africans were pulled from their native soil to a new land of desolation, tribulation, and isolation. Families were separated. Foreign languages were imposed. The dead were mourned. So in the midst of all this misery, pain, and strife, it was the black woman who had to build a family among strangers. These hard and humble beginnings of the black woman did not succeed in oppressing her, no, she rose and is still rising today. So listen to her royalty, her resistance, and her rise. Frederick Douglass in his Narrative of Slave revealed how a slave was made a man. I shall reveal how a slave was made a woman.


The motherland, filled with vast mountains, deserts, hills, and valleys is where the black woman found her roots. Heiress of powerful kingdoms and descendant of queens like Sheba and Nefertitti, she found that inner strength to survive slavery’s toil. The power to resist enabled her to endure the grueling, horrific conditions of the Middle Passage. And that same power would be essential for the survival in a new land.

Black women boarded ships as Nubian queens and disembarked, slaves. Once on this foreign soil, stereotypes, prejudices, and assumptions developed. Knowing where she came from allowed the black woman to realize that her iron chains were just a temporary substitute for the gold that had once adorned her body. Whites looked upon her as too sensual and promiscuous. Women slaves who picked rice in wet, swampy fields had to lift their skirts high above their knees to keep their clothes dry. Thus, exposing their legs and creating an image of vulgarity and indecency. The black woman was then classified as either Mammy or Jezebel, perpetuating another stereotype. Mammy, introduced to our society through a pancake box possessed a role of leadership and was well venerated and revered because she did it all. Jezebel, on the other hand, was head of the bedroom; this was her only means of survival. Usually, she would act as the master’s concubine and produce fair mulatto children to work in the big house. Like, Sally Hemmings, the quadroon concubine of President Jefferson. You see, these women had no choice of the role given to them; they were simply chosen for the job. In spite of this, the black woman’s resistance enabled her to rise.

A change in tide was first evident in 1851, when Sojourner Truth spoke the words, “Ain’t I a woman?” She would soon prove to be a superwoman since she worked the field just as hard as any man, denied her own children breast milk, and experienced the heartache of viewing her children sold away from her. Those famous words of hers told America that black women were on the rise. Women like Madame C. J. Walker became millionaires by selling hair products to the black community. Then, there’s Mary McLeod Bethune who opened a university of higher learning. Barbara Jordan had a seat for both the House and the Senate for Texas in the twentieth century. All of these women were rooted in resistance. Our royalty and our resistance have set us up to rise.

Black women have risen from the false ideals of American society to become leaders in this country. We’ve had to overcome the promiscuity that once labeled us, and resist that black face on the pancake box that’s supposed to represent us. We’ve gone from three-fifths of a person, to five-fifths. We’ve gone from leaders of the Big house, to leaders of Congress. We’ve gone from sharecroppers to millionaires. There is something special about our legacy as black women. We have risen from the deep pits of oppression and gloom to be equal if not above our white counterparts. Remember, for every Rosie, there’s an Oprah. For every Hillary, there’s a Maxine. For every Bette, there’s a Pattie. For every Britney, there’s a Beyonce. For every Judge Judy, there’s a Judge Mablean. For every Teacher of the Year, there’s a Marlene. And for every nanny, there’s a Mammy who has used her royal past as a stepping-stone to triumph. Only by remembering our royalty and resisting our oppression can we rise to victory. So my sister and my dear mother, keep on rising because Sister Maya said,

We bring the gifts that our ancestors gave,
We are the dream and the hope of the slave

Let’s rise
Let’s rise
Let’s rise

Furaha.