This may not our nation's issue but the things he raises inside
are quite universal.Take a look and see what I mean. 
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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