The United States of America had just celebrated the 75th anniversary of its independence when Frederick Douglass went before the Rochester, N.Y. Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and delivered a searing speech detailing the chasm between America’s vaunted ideals and its vile embrace of slavery and racism.
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Douglass asked. “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 denunciations 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.”
What is sobering about this speech is how relevant it remains.
It is true that less than 11 years after Douglass gave this speech, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending slavery as a legal institution. It has now been 163 years since that document was signed. And yet, each time America approaches that place where the gap between what it says it believes about itself and how it treats the people of color in its midst is narrow enough that the nation can make the leap from hypocrisy to wholeness, it balks, then retreats.
That happened in the years immediately following the Civil War, when the Reconstruction era ushered in a rapid rise in Black political power in the South, which was quickly followed by a backlash from White America that erased those gains and solidified a century of Jim Crow segregation throughout the country.
The civil rights revolution of the 1960s brought a legal end to segregation and racial discrimination, but a majority of White Americans responded with the elections of Richard Nixon in 1972 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 to put the brakes on the effort to repair the damage done by the combined legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 was taken as proof that those brakes constrained but did not stop the movement toward true racial equity. But the America that proved that it could elect a Black president in 2008 proved that it could turn around eight years later and elect as its president a floundering businessman-turned-showman whose racism was as naked for the world to see as was his vulgar senility—not once, but twice. Recall that during a 2024 debate between Donald Trump and then-Vice President Kamala Harris—a Black woman with an enviable track record of accomplishment—the White majority chose the man ranting about Haitian immigrants “eating the dogs [and] eating the cats” over the opponent presenting a serious platform for moving the nation forward.
Emboldened by this majority and enabled by an acquiescent Supreme Court and syncophantic Congressional Republicans, Trump has ushered in with full force a new Reconstruction backlash.
We know the elements, including the assault on diversity, equity and inclusion programs; the redirection of federal civil rights programs to focus on alleged White victims of racial discrimination; the dilution or outright erasure of Black historical accomplishments from public facilities; and mass layoffs of federal employees that disproportionately affect Black federal workers, including high-ranking Black officials in positions usually outside the change in presidential administrations who were fired for no apparent reason.
The capstone of this assault on Black America is the Supreme Court’s systematic evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, which reached its climax in April with the crippling of the law’s Section 2. That’s the section of the law that Black communities, until now, used to protect their ability to elect representatives of their choice against efforts by White legislators to dilute their power through gerrymandering. The impact of that ruling, coming after rulings that essentially rendered toothless the three other components of the law, will be swift and devastating. Already, Louisiana has postponed its May 16 congressional primaries so that it could redraw its district lines to eliminate the seats of its two Democratic representatives, both of whom are Black Republican leaders in Tennessee, Alabama and South Carolina are considering similar moves that would likewise target southern Black Democrats.
The cumulative effect could mean that the Congress that is seated as early as 2027 would have the largest percentage reduction in the number of Black representatives since 1877. That was the year of the Southern Compromise that saw the withdrawal of Federal troops from the South and a 57% drop in Black representation in Congress, from seven members to three. There wouldn’t be more than three Black members of the House of Representatives again until 1957.
Our backtracking on racial equity is beginning to show up in the economic data. For decades since at least the late 1960s, the Black unemployment rate was at least twice that of Whites. But that disparity had begun to narrow somewhat in the early 2000s. In March 2024, the Black unemployment rate was 6.4 percent while the White unemployment rate was 3.4 percent. In March 2026, the Black unemployment rate had risen to 7.1 percent, almost double the slightly higher White unemployment rate of 3.6 percent. Black households were earning less than 61 cents for every dollar earned by White households as of 2024, according to the latest available federal data, and that percentage had been trending downward.
We could also look at racial gaps in other measures of wealth accumulation, as well as education opportunity, health care access, housing, business ownership, and corporate management. An honest look in each of these areas would debunk the myth that racial discrimination is a historical artifact, a cancer that has been cured. Instead, we are the cancer patient who took too low a dose of treatment and stopped the treatment too early. We declared that we felt better and didn’t want to go through the discomfort of the medicine. And we dismissed the tests which showed that in our very tissues and blood the cancer of racism and the damage it has done to our collective body is far from cured.
It is not that a majority of White America full-throatedly embraces Trump’s “Make America Great Again” reassertion of White supremacy. Based on available polling data, for example, no more than half of White Americans agree with Trump’s outlawing of DEI, and fewer agree with specific implications of outlawing DEI, such as banning books on elements of Black history or ending cultural sensitivity training for public employees. The crucial question is how many White Americans will stay silent and thus complicit. I am reminded of the frustration Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. laid out in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” when he wrote that “the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White citizens’ ‘Councilor’ or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; … who paternistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”
So how can a Black person celebrate the 250th anniversary of a country that continually backs away from living out the true meaning of its creed that all people are created equal, and are equally endowed by their creator with unalienable rights? How do we celebrate a country that entertains itself with the exploits of a subset of Black millionaires but recoils at the work of shared prosperity and shared power for the Black masses? We are supposed to celebrate that we are not slaves—in fact, some say we should celebrate that we were once slaves and then graciously freed to live under the limits of what White people were willing to allow. When some Black historians remind White America that freed slaves were promised “40 acres and a mule” as tangible compensation for the labor stolen from them, and that compensation has yet to be delivered more than a century after White slaveowners were compensated by the government for the loss of slave labor, we’re told to “get over it.”
We will not “get over it” until the nation commits itself fully to the work of healing our collective wounds and reconciliation. The first step, in fact, is the recognition that the wounds of some affect the health of all. The ethos of Trumpism is individualism, that each person rises or falls on their own and no one owes anyone else anything. Your successes are yours alone, and so are your problems and failures. But the same Bible hoisted by Christian nationalists tells a different story. The apostle Paul said that we are all part of one body, and each part depends on the health and well-being of every other part. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’” Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians. King made the same point when he said, “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
We are learning the truth of this as we see how attacks on Obamacare, colored by the myth of undeserved largesse to lazy urban Black folks, have led to the destabilization of health care systems in rural White communities. Or how cuts in government-funded food subsidies have translated into less income for farmers. Or how the relentless efforts to expel immigrants from our communities have weakened rather than strengthened those communities.
A true multiracial democracy is not blind to how the inequities of the past ripple through to the present but is committed to acknowledging and erasing them. Part of what it takes to build such a democracy involves, as Frederick Douglass did, imagining a God looking down on us and, using the words of the prophet Isaiah, declaring our self-celebrations “an abomination” and calling us instead to “cease to do evil, learn to do well; seek justice; relieve the oppressed; judge for the fatherless; plead for the widow.”
Our hope can come from the same place that Douglass found hope—in “the great principles” of the Declaration of Independence, “the genius of American institutions,” and an increasingly interdependent world in which “long-established customs of hurtful character” could no longer “fence themselves in and do their evil work.” These are some of the elements that can support a moral revolution, not unlike the revolutions that ended slavery and ushered in the civil rights era. We may not have a reason to celebrate, but we have a light that shows the way forward, and a history that shows the change that can happen if enough of us choose to walk that path.
Poole writes with clarity and the facts are on his side. As a country we have not accepted the harm we have done to our African American citizens nor have we owned up to what we need to do make things right. I am grateful we have written documents that state the great principles to which we are called to live. The words continue to challenge us toward a more perfect union.