Fredrick Douglass and the Fourth of July

In the year 1852, Fredrick Douglass gave a famous speech in my home town of Rochester, New York. This speech, now called the Independence Day Speech, is one of my favorites. The world has changed immensely since he gave that speech, but much of what Mr. Douglass says still applies today.

He starts off with an incredible opening, challenging his audience:

Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?

Mr. Douglass was a powerful advocate for American slaves of African descent, because he himself was an escaped slave. The abolitionist movement reaped great benefits from having an eloquent writer, speaker, and debater like Douglass as a leader in their movement. Contrast that, in modern days, to people like Maher Arar - whose ability to speak about his year-long U.S. Government-sponsored torture and imprisonment in Syria is a heavy reminder of the injustices we must fight against in today's America.

Perhaps Mr. Douglass would be considered a buzz kill by today's standards:

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.

He was not congratulating his audience, his country, for all the progress they've made; rather, he was reminding them of all the suffering they still had left to stop. This is much different from the feel-good messages and quick-fix solutions that many modern advocacy groups broadcast to their members donors.

Note that Mr. Douglass used language that would make Cindy Sheehan blush:

There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.

Sadly, that statement is still true. What would Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh say to Mr. Douglass? Would he last even five minutes on Bill O'Reilly's show? Today's political discourse is in the hands of the oppressors, and the American people have bought it. A man like Fredrick Douglass would not be able to work with today's presidents to set wartime policy; today, that's the job of corporate think-tanks, not social justice types.

I recommend that you read the speech when you get a chance. And imagine what it would be like to be in the presence of the great leaders and liberators of our ancestors. To live in a time when change was easier to believe in.

Slavery in America, Today

It's commonly understood that the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution abolished slavery. But wait, it has an exception! Here it is in its entirety (emphasis mine):

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

As a major part of my incarceration at Wayne County Jail between May 16 and June 25 last year, I found myself forced to work in a kitchen almost daily, three times a day, serving meals to other inmates. I also spent a day dismantling an abandoned nursing home (and helping to improve a shooting range), and for my last day in jail, literally breaking apart gravel with a pickaxe.

Many aspects of forced labor were completely new to me; for example, the incentive to wake up on time (at 5:00 am) was to avoid getting yelled at or threatened by the corrections officers. Any resistance to an officer's orders could result in either solitary confinement or extra days spent in jail. The system is built on absolute power and fear, which is nothing new in human history, but it was new to me.

And fear is a good motivator. I found it strange to help install a sink and food prep area at a shooting range, where guards practice how to use lethal force against inmates like me. I found it strange to distribute 150 battery cage eggs a day, each egg equaling a full day a poor hen spent in deplorable conditions, when I was in jail precisely because of my resistance to battery cage egg production. And I found it strange to aid in the functions of a system that was causing pain and hurting families much more than it could ever benefit society. But I thought, correctly or not, that I had too much to lose to resist.

One could claim that the injustice of modern slavery is for punishment, or for safety, or to maintain civility. But should any society, as common practice, give any person complete power over others, as a correction officer has over an inmate? Or, to consider it from a different angle, is any western society ready to drastically reform its criminal "justice" system so it becomes a system of rehabilitation instead of oppression? Every US citizen should agree that our justice system isn't working, and perhaps it refuses to function, in large part, because of all the injustice at its foundation.