The American President, a mid-1990s movie, had a short scene in which a politico from a university with a top-notch football team asked the President to do something about how Title IX was being implemented. When reminded that the law was an effort to eliminate discrimination in women’s sports, he complained that while he knew about the law, he was upset because the government was trying to enforce it.
Around July 4th each year is a time for scholars, news reporters, and pundits to tell us what they think Independence Day is all about. This year some told us that a once historical unifying institution now seems like empty rhetoric to too many, people of different races, different cultures, and surprisingly, wait for it, different political parties.
The land on which the US sits has been here for over four
billion years, but the nation we call the US, is relatively new. The first
established town was St. Augustine, in 1585, Jamestown began in 1607 and
Plymouth in 1620. It took another 150 years for the colonies to declare their
independence from Britain, and they did it with fervor. “We hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments
are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed,” We are, after 245
years, still a work in progress.
Another eleven years passed before
“We the People …” formed an effective government. History always has two versions, one written by the winners, and the other by
the vanquished. Depending on where you lived,
you may have studied the history of the Civil War or the history of Northern Aggression.
White people, consciously or unconsciously, wrote Elementary and high school
history texts, for white people
and they were used as a tool for indoctrinating
patriotism. Civic classes taught
about the great ideas in the Declaration
and the Constitution without paying too much attention to how many of them owned slaves, how they counted Blacks
in the census, or who could vote.
Those history
books may not have mentioned the
Japanese internment camps, or highlight the anti-American hatred of the Klan
toward Blacks, Catholics, and Jews. They did not tell us about the Tulsa
massacre, the lynching of Blacks in the modern South, and other shameful
events. Even today, in state after state, white-dominated
legislatures are making it illegal to teach these things
The internet allows people to
learn more than what is contained in constrained textbooks. Information is
instantly available about both our greatness as a nation and our warts. Increasingly
the well-educated populous peals a clarion
call for history to be, “Accurately – and fully – taught.[i]
That means that a lot of what we learned
twenty, thirty, or even sixty years ago, and what we didn’t learn, requires reexamination, a different slant,
and more truth. That will not be easy for many, especially for the person in
The Villages in Florida a few
months ago who raised his fist while driving his golf cart, shouting the need for
“White Power.” It
will not be easy for those who are doing everything possible to keep people
from voting in the next election.
The Declaration says all
people are created equal; some, like the Alabama sports fan, are upset that so
many want the “law” enforced. It says that people have a right to life; they
want the “law” enforced. The “law” says people should be able to pursue
happiness; they want the “law” enforced.
Sometimes we overlook this
section of the Declaration: “That to secure these rights, Governments are
instituted among men … “People want that “law” enforced as well. The purpose of
our government is to ensure that we all enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness. In addition, people want the “WE” to include everyone.
So, what does July 4th
mean to us? Rather, what should it mean to all of us? It should be an
opportunity to celebrate our achievements in our progress toward the guiding
principles of our founding documents. We have always said we are not a perfect
union, but most take pride in making the effort. For too many, however, the
guiding principles are simply words on paper, not their reality. We can change
that if we want to.
If any of our actions, the
actions of a group, or the government does anything to make one person less
valuable than another person, it goes against the American spirit. We know
those who flaunt un-Americanism in the name of patriotism: the Klan, private
militias that invade state capitols, insurrectionists who invaded the US Capitol
on January 6th. We know about the banks that redline real estate loans,
lending institutions that charge interest based on race, the school boards that
create or tolerate racial or gender disparity of resources, and others that
discriminate based on race, gender, religion, orientation, nationality, or other
reasons. We can change the direction of the country if we want to.
All we have to do is agree
that all people are equal and start treating them as equals. That is how we
enforce the “law” written by the founding fathers.
[i] Kathleen Parker – How long will people talk about critical race theory? -Washington Post – July 4, 2021
