Founding Families
In a country as diverse as ours, Independence Day should be about inclusivity. We’ve all seen the iconic images of the day and know how powerfully they resonate with how this American holiday is celebrated. I’m talking about those spectacular illustrations of the bewigged Fathers hovering with great intellectual rigor and excitement over a long table composing the cherished document that delivered the United States of America from Great Britain. These images are nice, of course, but they’re also mythical. And a bit redundant at this point, personally.
To me, there is more authentic American heritage that has more depth and breadth than those repetitive renderings. The authentic America is also broader than what was ideologically created, and bigger than who was in that room -- although significantly influenced by who wasn’t.
You might say that the Declaration of Independence and its creators inadvertently designed a template, or a springboard, for a way of life and a country that the world had never seen before. Less than a decade after the Declaration of Independence, these same Fathers wrote the United States Constitution. The Constitution is a living document, as it is called -- but its writers weren’t prepared for who would be living in it. Today, that living document represents a place where everyone from all over the world lives unprecedentedly under one union. That wasn’t part of the plan, of course.
In this space today, we celebrate our country’s diversity and the special contributions communities of color have made to the fabric of our nation as we know it. We celebrate the descendants of African slaves, whose epic journey from bondage to relative freedom to global cultural influence is almost Biblical in its scope. We celebrate the enduring legacy of the Indigenous Peoples, the natives who supported the new English and Dutch settlers before they were forced on what we call the Trail of Tears, a dehumanizing journey from the bountiful east coast to the desert plains we think of as reservations today. Yet, their spiritual, earthy cultural sensibility remains one of the great mysteries of humankind. We celebrate the Chinese and Japanese infrastructure engineers on the western coast who made it possible for white Americans to “pioneer” California and prosper during the Gold Rush, pre-dating by centuries the technological contributions of these communities that would propel this country’s economic and innovative dominance for decades. We celebrate the Hawaiian Americans whose land was also poached from them before they were forced into indentured servitude for generations, but whose culture of hospitality remains free of vengeance or spite about the past.
And we celebrate, specifically, the women in these communities. How, in the midst of these challenges, some women of color stewarded the families of their masters and oppressors while anchoring their own families is anyone’s guess! Strength is the adjective applied to many women of color so often in America today. It’s become a trope. Perhaps after generations of nourishing both your oppressor and your offspring a little superwoman power might have become genetically encoded. For centuries, black and brown women nurtured the human spectrum of this country with rich and creative meals, child-rearing, and domestic maintenance, all the while supporting their own brood and their beleaguered spouses, men whose forced subordination to the settlers and the cowboys and the patriarchy sometimes diminished their own glorious, ostensible, often unrivaled masculinity.
For some Americans, fighting for independence is a battle that never stops. We pause and huddle together intermittently amidst the ambushes, the booby traps, the blockades, and the usual anticipated offensives; the fires, big and small. And we celebrate the journey.
Happy Birthday, America.
— Christina Lucas
