Fourth of July Reading List

On this 4th of July, we offer a reading list that explores three main topics: Settler Colonialism, Colonialism, and U.S. Imperialism.

It’s been 168 years since abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave one of his most famous speeches, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” before the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, N.Y., and many of his most urgent questions remain unresolved. This Fourth of July we, like many of you, are thinking about what it means to be a part of this country at this time in history; a time we hope will prove to be a great unmasking and turning point, where the lies the United States has told about itself can no longer be told so easily by so many for so long. At this moment, when COVID-19 and the uprisings for racial justice and against police and state violence are simultaneously laying so many of the faulty structures of American life bare for even the most unwilling to believe, we hope that readers and activists will choose to learn the history and the stories that so many of us were not formally taught, but have been forced to carry in our bones, our cells, our hearts, our DNA, like a secret that people in power threaten us against telling.

If there is ever to be a reckoning of the harms the U.S. has committed on this land and throughout the world, it should be now. In fact, reckoning with those harms is the only way to make all of us free. We cannot seek to dismantle white supremacy domestically without understanding the true histories of how this land was stolen and also seek to know the stories of people outside of the United States whose histories and destinies continue to be shaped by U.S. colonial and imperial policies and projects. The U.S. was founded by a practice of what is now known as "Settler Colonialism." White people came to this land and killed or removed the Native people from their home lands and sought to completely eradicate their surviving culture. White people enslaved people from the continent of Africa and used their bodies and their unpaid labor to build a nation while also seeking to eradicate their surviving culture. Throughout the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries the U.S. has waged official and covert wars of colonization and territory expansion as well as economic imperialism throughout the globe--from Mexico to Puerto Rico to the Philippines to Hawaii to Alaska, American Samoa, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, The Dominican Republic, The Virgin Islands, Guam, The Northern Mariana Islands, South Korea, Cuba, Grenada, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Congo, Palestine, Somalia,Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, and likely more that we are forgetting or which are not yet known to our history books. Some of these wars have been fought more transparently in the name of U.S. expansion and prosperity, many more have been cloaked in the false flag of humanitarianism, the fight against Communism, the fight against terrorism. Our policies continue to force human migration throughout the world and separate family members from one another and from their homelands. When people migrate to the U.S. hoping for safety we regularly commit additional physical and emotional harms against them and seek to separate them from "true Americans."

Most of us know some or all of these truths and yet many of us, especially those of us who are white, act as though we don't. Because to act as though we understand our history and our nation's global and domestic policies would necessitate a deep thoughtfulness about what, exactly, it is we are celebrating on Independence Day. As Frederick Douglass wrote to his white audience in 1852, "This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony." We believe that this Fourth of July represents an opportunity for pause and reflection that we have perhaps not ever had collectively. With no fireworks displays or BBQs to attend, with COVID keeping us home and relatively quiet, perhaps we can access the still, silent voice of truth so many of us repress day in and day out when it comes to truth and justice--the Fourth of July should be a day of mourning, not of celebration.

Georges Erasmus, an Aboriginal Tlicho leader from Canada, said, “Where common memory is lacking, where people do not share in the same past, there can be no real community. Where community is to be formed, common memory must be created.” Books are one way to create a common memory; by listening to and learning from the human stories that make up our collective history, we can practice rejecting the lie of American exceptionalism and superiority and acting in ways that align with our desire to dismantle white supremacy wherever it manifests. We offer this list in the spirit of building a common memory so that we might yet build a truly common future.