What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelly 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. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
Frederick Douglass “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (via ladyatheist)
Nearly the exact same sentiment could be said of the LGBTQ community; where is their freedom to marry, to visit their dying partner in the hospital and make important decisions on their behalf, to have a job where they can be themselves without fear of being fired or falsely accused of sexual harassment, to go through high school without being bullied to the point of thinking about or attempting suicide? This country does give us a place where well-to-do white males can do just about anything they want. But if you are queer or transgender, don’t subscribe to the supposed “religion this nation was founded on (not true but used anyway,” or if you simply refuse to accept oppression by a government unwilling to help our own countrymen as much as those in Africa, Asia, South America, the Middle East, and more, then you don’t quite live as freely as others…
(Source: brashblacknonbeliever, via lickypickystickyme)
