May the Fourth be with us all

Sorry if this post offends some of my more ardently “patriotic” friends, but freedom wasn’t freedom until at least two centuries later than 1776.
Pick your own date on that one. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation? Or the Supreme Court’s Brown Vs. The Board Of Education in the 1950s? Or the “ground-breaking” 1964 Civil Rights legislation?
The truth is, whatever freedom that was to be found came as a precious whisper at a time as it slowly dawned in the American mind.
The “founding fathers” clearly wrote and signed off on all that elevated language in the Declaration, but at the time and for centuries after it they were far from ready to live it.
Indeed, America was led by a long succession of men who did everything possible, high and low, enacted every sort of law, played every sort of demented game, to prevent Black people from acquiring any sort of power, be it education or a living wage or the slightest drop of prestige.
The sickness was beyond deep. The first European laws on this continent regarding very human Black people defined them as “chattel,” or farm animals.
I discovered that sad fact while writing part of a series about Blacks and the legal system for the Roanoke Times in the early 1980s.
Those laws served to unleash mass criminality. If you define people as sub-human then you are free to do sub-human things to them. Mass murder and rape and theft on an unimaginable scale, the sort of criminality that forms the absolute bedrock of the country today.
It is our legacy. Our truth.
It is why Black freedom, the freedom of all put-upon minorities, is the central story of American freedom itself.
Without those stories? We are merely a bunch of empty words.
I admit that as I became a man and gained a better understanding of our world that I began to feel a little different about the Fourth of July. It helped to explain all the strangeness I first became aware of as a child growing up in a small southern town.
Among my earliest recollections was that race came to weigh as a great mystery in my life. I was a small boy walking on Main Street with my father when he stopped to speak with a Black man named Mitch.
I am told that as a young child I had an imaginary native American friend called Kookiwah. It was apparently so intense that my mom had to set a place at the table each night for Kookiwah. Lol.
What was that all about?
Much later, as I went to school with and soon came to work with quite an array of amazing people, the mystery of race deepened.
I admit it would later become an obsession in my writing life and my research. Why was it like this?
Why was this country so desperate to cover up its true history? It was living history. We were living our racial history every single day and in absolute denial about it.
I have long considered that denial the number one issue of our culture, that it allowed us to be divided and then used to usurp our freedom.
Recent events show us that it is about to destroy us, if it hasn’t already.
There were many clues to these mysteries, but only in the five years of research for my latest book, a biography of Magic Johnson, did I find greater clarity on this issue.
A white writer from North Carolina in the 1880s, who had spent decades observing the behavior in the culture around him, wrote a story for the Atlantic describing the great scope of white fear driving the entire matter.
Sadly, it was the ability of certain politicians to exploit and manipulate white fear that allowed them to gain power and lead America down its needlessly ugly, murderous, rapacious path, through the entirety of slavery and the horrific decades that followed it.
As a young man, as I began to gain a better understanding of the world, that ugliness seemed to dissipate a little more each year over the decades.
I recall that it was in 1971 that I began as a relatively clueless young person to get the sense that things might be changing, whatever that meant.
I began to get the sense that for the first time in forever, Black people were finding the freedom to define freedom itself, that in fact the very idea of freedom itself was a sham if it did not address and embrace their long, painful, horrendous walk to free lives.
To live and be seen as equals. Or even better, to be recognized for the vast array of examples of their exceptionalism and superiority, that those qualities were far from exclusive to any race.
I based all of my feelings about race on personal experience.
Over the decades, at each step of the way, I found my life to be changed quite dramatically by any number of Black friends and mentors, people I have come to love dearly.
But I also soon enough became aware that no matter how successful or how brilliant or how deeply human they were, they always were possessed of a silent dread, that they had to be looking over their shoulder.
That white fear always lurked.
Now, over the past decade, for the first time in years, I feel that sense of foreboding is growing again.
I don’t know president Obama personally, but I even sense that about him these days. The ease and grace and skill with which he led this country have disappeared.
He’s had to begin looking over his shoulder. Seriously.
His ascension to the presidency did something to white people that I hadn’t seen or felt in a long, long time.
It brought out that somewhat dormant white fear.
Many people I know quickly came to despise him simply because he dared to lead the country with every ounce of talent, wisdom and ability he possessed. And he possesses immense amounts of those qualities.
So now, after years of having a sense that America was changing for the better, we find that our very definition of freedom has gotten really really crazy again.
We have a group of people, from the president to the supreme court, who simply don’t share many values with tens of millions of Americans.
The values of a majority of the Supreme Court are tied to the power of Donald Trump, a man obsessed with his own personal power, which is grounded in his ability to debase and weaken and destroy American democracy itself with its checks and balances.
What is his secret? He plays white fear like a master, with amazingly effective notes of resentment and grievance.
Now, we’re seeing racism become wildly systemic again, which has sickened me beyond belief to see white people I thought I knew rush to embrace it, to revel in it like they’ve been transformed from the decent folks I once knew into some sort of alien beings.
To me, the Fourth is not about all the gentlemen with the statues.
To me, there’s always been a lot of treachery perpetrated in the name of freedom. Right now that treachery is coming at us as a hurricane.
The Fourth has become a very serious day. It probably always was. I just didn’t recognize it.
To me, now it’s a day to reach into your heart and ask yourself, am I just celebrating my own freedom? Do I secretly enjoy the fact that millions of people more than ever have to look over the shoulder and wonder where their world is headed.
That ain’t freedom.
And if you think it is, you can go hell. Because if you persist, that’s where we’re headed.
Now more than ever I personally consider all of our Black cousins along with millions of other immigrant minorities and their powerful personal narratives as the true definers of American freedom.
If they ain’t free and protected by the Constitution, by those high-minded words…
Ain’t none of us free.