This may not our nation's issue but the things he raises inside are quite universal.Take a look and see what I mean.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The True Fourth of July 2004
By Muhammad Nasser Bey
[email protected]Forty years ago this week President Johnson, a southern signed into law
the Civil
rights Bill of 1964 despite the filibustering of white, southern racists.
Within four years the most celebrated civil rights leaders and social
reformers of the
20th century, Martin Luther King, Malcom X and Robert Kennedy would be
assassinated. Men who had not fire a shot in anger.
On this 4th of July night the nation is engaged in a frenzy of merry making ,
celebrations, parties and thanksgiving over that most blessed gift, Human
freedom
and dignity. But this evening as the fireworks fill the skies over our
cities and
citizens nation wide eat their barbecue not all Americans are celebrating.
I am an African-American, I live in a major city in the east of the
nation, I have
never waved a flag or sung the pledge of allegiance willingly even as a
child and yet
I am native born to this land, as American as any American!
I am not celebrating anything. While most Americans are swept away on a carpet
of red, white and blues, dazzled by fire work and TV shows, speeches and public
pronouncements proclaiming our freedom, My eyes have yet to see the glory that
they now rejoice over.
On Television there are programs showing immigrants talking about how happy
they are to be Americans, that¹s fine, but in America tonight there are
those like my
self who burn not fire crackers but a light in our windows in the hope
that justice will
find us.
In the nation tonight a million are in American jails, many of them the African
Americans who could never look up at the statue of liberty like some
grateful roman
freedman and say thank you for your gift to me, we acknowledge that things have
improved but they have not improved enough and in some ways the situation is
worse, made worse by the current presidency of George bush and his crime
family.
Slaves for 200 years in America, disenfranchised for a further 100 from
the end of
the civil war to 1964 and made to fight the civil rights movement over and over
again with each new generation of conservative, southern racist in
Washington and
local politics we the despised of this guilty nation can not look on any
period of
American history and say ³those where the good old days".
NO it is not the forth of July for all of us, no matter how much you
would ignore
my words or drown me out with Suez¹s band music, the burning truth is that
America has not lived up to it's creed for all citizens and does not plan to.
Last Year in Philadelphia the city fathers have opened to the public a new
Constitution
center. Lost in this dedication is the sad fact that this new showcase of the
constitution was built on top of a grave yard of African slaves!
The irony of this is lost on no one who knows about!
Even now the insult is added to by still another injury to the collective
dignity of my
people and fewer than 1 person in 10,000 in America is even aware of it.
It's not the sort of thing you talk about while engaging in a festival of self-
congratulations.
The True Forth of July will not dawn for my people nor for America as a
whole until
the sins of racism and bigotry is washed away, apology and compensation made to
the descendants of American slave holding and Jim crow and until the
nation as a
whole, not just her government stays their hand from domestic and global
racism.
Until then there is nothing to celebrate as a nation but the swelling
vanity of a short
sighted and small minded people.
America can kill Malcolm X, assassinate Martin Luther King, send cops to murder
Fred Hampton in his bed, or shoot Robert F. Kennedy in a hallway , but you can
not kill their message, nor make us forget their example. These men
never fired
a shot in anger but were silenced because they dared to try to make
America a place
of equality. Instead America continues to be ruled not by a true rule of
law but by a wealthy elite who support George Bush and his cronies in
Texas and Saudi Arabia.
America is becoming a place were moral bankruptcy was a kind of religion, were
corruption at the highest levels IS the order of the day and the ignorant
mob is kept is a perpetual state of alarm over r the threat of mostly
non-existent terrorist threats.
In George Orwells book 1984, the writer speaks of a process where the wars
a nation fight are not meant to cease but to go on year in, year out,
decade in , decade out for the sole purpose of maintaining the status quo.
George Bush call him self a war president, the real term is ³war-time
president, meaning a president during a time of war. No president is in
office to wage war but to wage civilization. The point is that while war
is furthered poverty grows, while our court system become macabre finance
companies for the states, squeezing the poor and indigent of Moines in the
form of parole fees and court fee, justice go wanting. True Justice is
NOT justice at someone else¹s expense.
Our nation locks up and locks down millions but the broader justice
remains elusive, a justice where those responsible for creating or
perpetuating condition in which crime a corruption flourish remain
unpunished. An awareness of the Larger Injustices of our nation is what is
needed now.
Still, there will be those who say America, love or leave it or go even
further as many have and say "go back to Africa" or where ever, but those
are the cries of small, frightened men clinging to their fears, Afraid
that THEY may have to change in order for America to become America.
It is a necessary thing to criticize America for her short comings without
loosing faith in her essential potential to go beyond being a nation of
hucksters,
hustlers ,snake oil sales men, casual or institutional racists or crime
families
committed to making their lives better at someone else¹s expense.
This thread of "take what you can-when you can-from whom you can" runs
through our entire history as Americans and explains much of our conduct
as a nation
, from the wanton holding of slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries, to the
support of
dictators for oil and strategic metals today.
2000 years ago there was an idea that was Rome, a place where men and
women fought and died for the idea that people could live together in
peace and equality.
Rome's true self was lost to greed and corruption often masked by displays of
ceremony and grandeur to keep the population miss directed. It is still
the same
today in Washington were men speak words they have not written to
selected crowds in staged media events, they talk a kind of word speak
where they use hot button terms to get people fired up to do their bidding
on issues which are used merely to disguise their intents to covet what
the world has in the name of democracy. Don¹t think for a moment that the
elite care about you because your white or a veteran, they need you and
you are expendable.
We in America claim to be the inheritors of that once great republican
idea that undergurded the foundations of Rome, the question now is, is
that idea worth working toward. I say that it is .
But the quest for the True forth of July in the True America must begin
with mutual
respect for one another, for the truth and for our collective right to
live a better, more
meaningful life, not just a life with more or bigger possessions .
My original concerns still stand, what I believe is that America is
intolerant of the
demand for full participation by minority groups in general and by African
Americans in particular. The deliberate removal from the voting roles and
subsequent labeling of persons in Florida as felons during the 2000
election, many
of them African Americans is a prime example of my argument.
That there be a frank discussion of issues of fundamental, entrenched
bigotry¹s so
pervasive as to be invisible, so invisible as to be pervasive, be put on
the table and
discussed not with rancor and fist shaking but with an epic calm.
Because we are a nation of schemers, go-getters, rugged individualists and
hustlers
we are often unable to work together as a nation until there is a crisis
and than we
usually work against our own interests, we point fingers at one another ,
blame
someone else, blame the poor, the Italians, the Germans or the Japanese as
we did in
the second world war. In the south the white man blamed the black man for his
troubles after the civil war, resulting in 100 years of disenfranchisement, the
economic and cultural equivalent of placing a 100 pound mill stone around
a mans
neck and then expecting him to run a foot race uphill. The happy
inheritors of this
legacy can be found today in the mean spirited, money motivated politics
of the ultra-right wing of the republican party. Their hoods replaced with
dark , blue suites.
As for reparations the discussions of reparations cannot begin with
questions of
money, the issue is not about money and it is an insult to suggest that it
is. The
question of reparations is a multi-dimensional pursuit to become who we
can become as a nation. Within those dimensions is the question of
admitting of the facts, that these things did happen and their result is
still with us today.
Only then can the nation purge itself of guilt for its crimes, disgorge
itself of racism and begin the true healing process, a process which will
take many years if not decades to complete. The true forth of July is
then something which we living now should not hope to celebrate but hope
that our children shall, for when the day spoke of in this text does dawn
it will be the forth of July not just for America but for the world, no
matter what date it falls on......
One Year ago, on the Fourth of July 2003 I published this article on the
internet
resulting in some debate on my comments about our values as a people, on the
meaning of the fourth of July in the United States and it¹s deeper
meaning. Every
year for the rest of my life this article shall be published anew with
additional
commentary about the state of race relations and justice in the United
States. Until
the United States scrubs it self clean of the stench of Racism,
Oppression and
injustice in all of its contrived forms, this discourse shall go on and
on ...and on.
MUHAMMAD NASSER BEY