The Fourth of July

Independence Day, our country's struggle to reconcile the sins of the past, and Affirmative Action's relationship to the Achievement Gap.

The Fourth of July

I will be honest, the Fourth of July never really was my holiday. I mean, I have held my sparkler or two, and I know it is a celebration of the USA’s independence, but emotionally it never held a lot of meaning for me.

Over the years though, I have come to understand more of why that is, and more recently I have grown to dislike the holiday. For my more patriotic readers that might sound like sacrilege. I still love this country, despite its many, many flaws. However, I can’t seem to love the Fourth of July. 

The Fourth to me props up the big lie about who we are as a country. It conjures up this mythological story of fighting for freedom and justice against the oppressive British Empire, where we--the US-- finally shed the shackles of tyranny and struck out as our own sovereign nation.  

As a child, the rather shy-on-details and one-dimensional way I learned about the founding of our country in US History classes coupled with the heavy aggrandizing of the founding fathers prompted a cartoon-like story of the US origin in my mind - a one-day event that somehow happened on July 4, 1776.

I never understood how the US origin story translated into hot dogs and fireworks, and like most of us, I had to be reminded what the Fourth of July was about when I was younger. All the US flags helped. So did the constant reminders in school, from the pledge of allegiance to the many trips to Fort Ticonderoga to the tall-tales of our Presidents.

The Fourth never felt like my holiday. I didn’t see myself in the heroes or villains in those stories. There aren’t any people of color in those stories. I know now that they were there, as they had to be. However, the US History textbook, the pictures of Presidents we colored in the early grades, and everything we were taught didn’t make a lot of effort to include them. People like me were largely irrelevant.

The Fourth feels like a veneer over uncomfortable truths we refuse to acknowledge as a society. We are so committed to being the good guy in the world, that we erase, silence, or attack any narrative that shines a light on the sins of our past. What we can’t avoid though is how that past shapes the continuing sins of today.

We have come a long way since slavery, but it is hard on the Fourth of July not to feel like Frederick Douglass’s words from his pre-13^th Amendment speech  What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July still resonate:

“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 [the slave], mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” 

Depending on who you are…Yikes. Boom! Preach. Facts. 

Supreme Reminders from the Supreme Court

This week’s Supreme Court decisions were a brutal reminder of the mythology we tell ourselves about liberty and justice for all. I would claim it is ironic that the decision on Affirmative Action, LGBTQ rights, and student loan forgiveness all came down the week leading up to our celebration of US liberation, but it feels more serendipitous than ironic.

It was like a nice slap in the face to say, “Hey, did you forget who we are as a country?” followed by a pat on the butt telling us to go celebrate our country’s righteousness with our friends over some barbecued ribs. 

I won’t delve too deeply into the legal reasoning of these cases. I am not a lawyer and I do not practice legalese on the regular. Like most of us, I am not intimate with the specific nuances of each case. And I get frustrated by technical arguments that don’t take a step back and observe basic human rights. I am going to just stick to what I deem common sense human-centered thinking. 

Let’s not forget that legal reasoning can also be a powerful oppressor. Dr. King made this point in his repudiation of those who urged him to abide by the rule of law in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. In my opinion, our laws and highest court are meant to serve and protect all of us, but especially our most vulnerable. However, we have a legacy of laws that have only benefited White people, power, and wealth.

We can try to implement “fair and equal” laws today, but if we don’t account for the imbalance of past laws and the advantages that carry forth from those discriminatory policies into the present, we are simply furthering the discrepancies that were legally built in. All within the “rule of law.”

I am reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee right now. Oh my goodness it is an emotionally difficult read. It is a masterclass in how legal documents carefully crafted around power and Whiteness have been used to rob, oppress, and murder in this country. This has been especially true for people of color in the US.

Just think for a minute about housing covenants, Jim Crow Laws, Federally-sanctioned segregation laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Indian Removal Act as a few examples. Central to all these laws was, yup, race. 

If you have been reading my other posts about the Achievement Gap, you know I’ve been unpacking race as a concept, a tool of oppression, and in the end, the root cause of our discrepancies in everything we measure in the US – including education outcomes. Measures of life expectancy, graduation rates, home ownership, and air quality - all of it stratifies exactly the same way, with White at the top and Black at the bottom. 

My writing is anchored in my own journey to understand these discrepancies we wake up to every day. My writing has been my own soul searching about who I am as a multiracial man, who identifies first as Black because of the context I grew up in but is no less everything else that I am.

I write to understand where I fit in in a country defined by race in all things but partitioned in very bold lines that don’t allow me to be everything I am at once. I write to figure out why our country is so deliberate about hiding from these facts. Like when our Supreme Court claims that we should ignore or look past race.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the heart of who we aspire to be as a country. But structural racism is also etched into our country’s soul. So the notion that we can somehow ignore race today when we built everything around us based on race – literally on stolen land – is ludicrous. 

Let’s Talk About Affirmative Action 

I often imagine my audience being composed of what I’ll call fence-sitters. I am writing to all of the skeptics who see race as this black-and-white object, see racism as singular incidents of abuse, and racists as “those bad people over there.” But I am also writing to anyone who doesn’t believe they play a role in perpetuating racism. Because the facts are, we all play a role, regardless of what color we come in. 

How do I know that? 

First, as I’ve noted often—and will continue to note in my posts -- the data show racialized outcomes in everything we know how to measure. 

Second, science proves that this is impossible, given humans are 99.9% the same, and melanin, which determines skin color, has no bearing on intelligence, tenacity, determination, morality, etc.

And third, authentic US history holds a staggering amount of evidence of racial mistreatment and oppression that one would have to be delusional to think is not still impacting our society today.  By the way, this is the same authentic history that many are trying to keep out of textbooks and schools.

You know who teaches their full history? Germany. Yes, the country that was once ruled by the Nazi Party and orchestrated the systematic murder of 6 million Jewish people and 5 million other people who did not meet their racist standards.

Unlike the US though, Germany has committed to “never forgetting,” these horrors of their past. They own what their ancestors were responsible for with courage, learn from it daily, and as a result, have become a humanitarian centerpiece in Europe more than 70 years later. For example, children in Germany, starting in elementary school, learn the visceral truths of the holocaust, and later in upper grades continue that learning through visits to former concentration camps like Auschwitz and Dachau. There are memorials of the victims of the Nazis throughout Germany, and very intentionally, there are no statues of Nazi generals.

Germany’s transformation is not an accident. It was driven by dedicated acknowledgment of the past and commitment to reconciliation. In later posts, I will get into what we can learn from Germany and apply in places like Chicago.

The critical point here is that the outcomes we measure like the so-called Achievement Gap, life expectancy, home ownership, tree-canopy cover, quality of asphalt, distance to fresh groceries, lead paint percentages, and hundreds of others can’t possibly be driven by individuals.

That leaves us with one explanation for what the data show us: structural racism.

And if it is structural, then sadly, that means racism is not confined to individual racists and racist acts, but rather it is “in the air we breathe.” That makes it all of ours. That said, those who have more power and wealth, and who have benefitted the most from the history that brought us to this point, have the greatest responsibility in striving to undo it.

Affirmative Action was a policy granting special consideration to historically excluded groups, specifically men and women from underrepresented racial groups and White women. In the college admissions space, it meant a student of color with lower standardized test scores than a White student could get additional consideration and might be admitted ahead of that White student.

On the surface, that might feel unfair. I know, even as a Black man, that it did to me at one point. I was a beneficiary of affirmative action and would not be where I am today had I not had the opportunity to attend the college I chose. My test scores were well below the average for my college. I wrestled with this fact while I was there and long after, always wondering if I had been given an unjust opportunity. Was I just a charity case as I heard occasionally from some of my White peers who were as ignorant as I was about our history and reasons for something like Affirmative Action?

It has taken a lifetime of internal work to realize that even with the opportunity affirmative action gave me, my battle has always been uphill, largely due to race. It was my analysis of racialized data, in particular the Achievement Gap, and learning the science that helped me recognize this. 

My quiet self-loathing as an Affirmative-Action-beneficiary I imagine is the same thing Justice Clarence Thomas wrestles with. Our US collective identity is soldered to an ideology of individual hustle and determination. The best of us “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” and “make something of ourselves.” That “something” typically refers to accumulating wealth and power.

For White people who have accumulated wealth and power and feel like they have worked hard for those things, which many of them have, it is difficult to hear they were given an unjust advantage. For the much smaller percentage of People of Color who accumulate similar wealth and power, suggesting it wasn’t earned is also a difficult pill to swallow.

Our collective belief in the exceptional individual makes us want to believe that the meritocracy works for everyone the same way. And for those of us who had to come even further, how dare one suggest they got there with an advantage or a moment or two of luck? That bruises the ego of our collective identity.

It is statistically impossible for outcomes to be driven by individual effort as I illuminate in this earlier post 2: Two Out of Three. In future posts I will be analyzing data about housing, employment, criminal justice, and health, to bring this point home.

According to a 2020 report by the Brookings Institute, less than 1% of the top 1% of wealthy US families identify as Black¹. Forbes reported 571 White US billionaires in 2020 and only 5 were Black ones. Brookings points out that a proportionate representation of Black billionaires to the overall population would be a count of 80, yet there are only 1/16th of that number.

If science says we are the same, how can we assume that is somehow natural? And if your triggered response is: “It must be culture,” then please read this post on why culture arguments are bogus and often racist in origin.

So if we can come to terms with structural racism being real. If we can accept that student outcomes from K12 are not measuring “achievement” but rather that they are measuring discrimination, then we have to take a different view of Affirmative Action than the one the current Supreme Court took.

The Achievement Gap in education has existed as far back as we can measure, stalking us like our own shadow. I talk about the Achievement Gap’s ubiquitous presence in my post here. If what the gap is actually measuring is discrimination, as I assert, then colleges have to account for that when evaluating applicants.

Especially if they are trying to create diverse experiences for all their students rather than provide a homogenous White male experience like most college admissions policies optimized for up until the 1970s (which would have been…Affirmative Action for White males?).

Obviously, colleges and universities figured this out. It is in a college’s best interest to avoid admitting students who will not be successful. 

Affirmative Action was actually a reconciliation program, one that was combatting the sins of our past. It was one of the few programs in our country working to undo the ongoing deleterious impact of the US’ racist history and structural racism of today. In order to undo the stratification generated by structural racism we have to work against that in ways that deliberately account for race and the impact of discrimination.

Now pause for a moment and compare Affirmative Action to the racially restrictive laws I mentioned earlier - housing covenants, Jim Crow laws, Federally-sanctioned segregation laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and Indian Removal Act.

If you consider who benefitted from these policies, you realize that they essentially functioned as affirmative action programs for White people. FHA loans through the New Deal were about as straightforward an Affirmative Action program for White people as one can get, and far more lucrative to the beneficiaries than extra consideration in college admissions. You can learn more about Affirmative Action programs benefitting White folks on the amazing podcast series Scene on Radio.

The Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down Affirmative Action just before the July 4th holiday offers us a poignant moment to reflect on who we are as a country versus who we tell ourselves we are.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who has acknowledged he himself benefited from Affirmative Action, stated that he: “holds out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.”

The Declaration of Independence was formally adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4th, 1776, cutting ties with an oppressive British Monarchy and setting us on a course to becoming a sovereign nation. It is why we have the Fourth of July holiday.

What many of us do not learn is that the early draft of the Declaration of Independence had an explicit condemnation of slavery that was eventually stricken from the final draft in order to appease many of the signatories - the White men we call our founding fathers.

Why? Because the majority of the founding fathers who signed the Declaration were slaveholders. 

So “all men are created equal” meant White men. It did not include women or People of Color. It certainly didn’t mean enslaved Africans or Indigenous populations native to the Americas. It was the legal foundation of structural racism in the US.

That doesn’t mean we throw it out or try to burn all the founding texts. It does mean we have to adapt as we move forward though, as we can all agree that this White-male-supremacy thinking was not optimal for a just and humane society. Certainly, not one that holds up the ideals of “justice and liberty for all.”

It saddens me that the Supreme Court cannot see this, though it does not surprise me. Most of the conservative justices would scoff at the idea of structural racism. Clarence Thomas, whose specific sentiments on racial uplift I am more familiar with, finds the notion appalling. Based on everything I have heard from him, which is quite a bit over the years, I am pretty confident that he believes his achievements come solely via his own merit, and others, especially Black people like him, should simply do the same.

His ego blinds him to the injustices (yesterday’s and yesterday’s hangover we still feel today) that prevent people like him from achieving what he has. Meaning we either accept that Thomas is extraordinarily exceptional, explaining why he is one of only four People of Color to ever sit on the Supreme Court (of the 116 Justices who have served throughout history).

Or we can look at the data, and say wait a minute, how is that possible without something else preventing People of Color from making it to positions on the highest court?

I wish the Court could put the data together with the science and practice anti-racism in more intentional ways. I wish our whole country could.

Pew Research data² show that more than 60% of the US approved of race-based affirmative action in college admissions in 2003. 20 years later in 2023, Pew data³ show that percentage fell to under a third of the US. Why? Because many powerful groups continue to push narratives anchored in the ideology of American exceptionalism, a fair meritocracy, and bootstrapping to success.

Coupled with those narratives are problematic ones that portray People of Color as a threat and erase our histories.

The impact on our collective-identity is a reversion to a nation that is more polarized and less willing to believe in rectifying the harm of our racist past. I mean, if that past never happened, why are people so upset? They should just work harder.

The only way we see outcomes improve for all people, and gaps closed for good, is by acknowledging that “colorblind” policy is not anti-racist policy. In fact, pretending race is not important when it penetrates everything is like logs on the structural racism fire. Our solution is through racial reconciliation, which is possible in places like Chicago. It’s what will allow us to stop pretending race is not a factor, when it is the factor.

In denying structural racism and the need to address it, we are closing off the path to the kind of racial reconciliation we need to finally move forward and prosper as a nation.

In future posts, I’ll talk more about what I see as the four pillars of racial reconciliation: courageous leadership, supportive non-government institutions to hold government to the course, a collective commitment of the majority of people to that effort, and a regular engagement with our full and authentic history.

Racial reconciliation is what will finally allow the Fourth of July to mean the same thing to all of us.