Fordham Law Professor Tanya Katerí Hernández shares with Beacon Broadside, a project of Beacon Press, what the Fourth of July holiday means to her.
As an AfroLatina person of color born a US citizen, I have always had a complicated relationship with each July Fourth Independence Day celebration. The complication arises from wanting to celebrate the promise of our Declaration of Independence, assurance that “all [men] are created equal,” while living in a nation riddled with inequality. I am surely not alone in feeling this ambivalence, for as early as 1852, Frederick Douglass expressed the same dualism.
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. . . . Allow me to say, in conclusion . . . I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation, which must inevitably, work the downfall of slavery. (Source: Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, by Frederick Douglass, July 5th, 1852 (Rochester: Lee, Mann & Co., 1852)).
Douglass’s hope for the abolition of slavery did come true. And so as I watch the work of the many committed so social justice, I too continue to hope in the potential for our pursuit of equality imbued in the Declaration’s conclusion.
“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
—Tanya Katerí Hernández, Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality
Read “The Meaning of the Fourth of July in Our #NoKings Era” on Beacon Broadside.