Saturday, July 06, 2019

A Few Final Thoughts on Colin Kaepernick and Independence Day

First Nike announced that it was recalling a new line of shoes because Colin Kaepernick objected to the Betsy Ross flag on them. Then Colin himself out out a tweet on the 4th of July quoting from Frederick Douglass saying " This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn."

This is all very childish and ignorant. The American Revolution was not about slavery. Slavery existed world-wide before and after the revolution. It did not completely end in the United States until the Civil War but this was the beginning of its end. Massachusetts incorporated language from the Declaration in it's state constitution in 1780 and by 1783 this was used in court cases to outlaw slavery in that state. By 1804 every state in the north had abolished slavery. The middle states were slower to abolish it with the last two, New Jersey and New Hampshire being the last in 1865. While new southern states were allowed slavery, it was always outlawed in the Northwest Territory.

Great Britain freed it's slaves with an act in 1833 that required slaves to remain apprentices until 1840. Mexico outlawed it in 1829. France alternated abolishing slavery and allowing it again in its colonies until it was outlawed for the final time in 1848.

The point here is that slavery was not "America's original sin" and unique to the US but rather something practiced by all of the European powers. I won't get into what the Indians did to each other because it's irrelevant to people enslaved and transported from Africa. Anyway, claiming that the flag Washington fought under is tainted is quite a stretch.

As for Kaepernick's 4th of July tweet, that was excerpted from Douglass's " The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro" speech which was given in 1852, well before the Civil War, and was give by someone who was born a slave and was calling for the abolition of slavery. Was Kaepernick who is part of the 0.01% comparing himself to a slave? Seriously? Or did he just find a pithy quote without looking up the context?

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