The date marking the birth of any nation is a cause for celebration.July 4, 2020, marked 244 years since the United States threw off the yoke of British colonization.The victors gathered in Philadelphia not just to celebrate but to write a constitution that institutionalized the democratic process.

The constitution reflected the historical period and included sacrosanct rights such as the Bill of Rights that has withstood the test of time.That would include freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to due process, and certain stipulations that were reserved for the states in the federal system.

The original constitution defined African Americans and indigenous Americans as three-fifths of a man.Only white men with property were given the right to vote.Property-less whites were initially excluded from the political process.

Many of the founding fathers were slaveholders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.Slavery was more widespread in the South but merchants in the Northern States were engaged in the slave trade as they owned many of the ships that transported Africans in the onerous Middle Passage.

Not every African who was captured made it to the Caribbean or to the United States.W.E.B. DuBois in his research estimated that millions of Africans died during the horrendous conditions during the Middle Passage, the voyage from West Africa to the New World.

Thomas Jefferson who served as Ambassador to France and as President of the United States had a long-lasting relationship with a female slave, Sally Hemmings, who became the mother of Jeffersons offsprings.Jefferson was not just a founding father but the author of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal.

At the time of Americas independence and the writing of the constitution, not much of any discussion dealt with the contradiction of slavery and the notion of equality.

The crop that buoyed production in the West Indies was sugar and in the United States, the crop essential to early capital accumulation was cotton and less so, tobacco.

Dr. Eric Williams, the historian and former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago wrote the classic, Capitalism, and Slavery.

Williams thesis is that abolition that took effect in the Caribbean in 1833 had nothing to do with just humanistic efforts in the Mother country but was propelled that the capitalist developmental process which needed slavery in the early stages of capital accumulation, slavery was indispensable but as capitalism moved from mercantilism to industrial capitalism, free labor was necessary for further expansion.

Slavery became an impediment to the further development of capitalism in Britain and thus emancipation synchronized not with the weakened planter class but with the political hegemony of burgeoning capital industrialists.

In the case of the United States where industrial capitalism was concentrated in northern states, northern capitalists were willing to co-exist or look the other way on the question of slavery.Where the tension boiled over is on the question as to whether slavery would be allowed to expand to the western region and thus diminish the political influence of Northern states and expand the power of the slave states.

This contradiction of plantation slave labor and industrial capitalism with the need for free labor began exploding in the middle of the nineteenth century.

There is the saying that the unexamined life is not worth living.Normally this saying applies to individuals but it is also applicable to a nation-state. Often in a nation, extreme nationalism becomes the traditional line of march, and there is an absence of introspection.

Such reflex action of repeating ad nauseum about the greatness of the nation becomes more of a weakness than it is representative of strength. The boasting of American exceptionalism and that America is the greatest nation on the planet thwarts the developmental process.

What the movement Black Lives Matter is communicating not that just all lives matter but it is necessary for America to come to terms with slavery, with Jim Crow, with the Confederacy, and with systemic racism.That kind of intellectual honesty and introspection is essential to making America a coveted city on the hill.

Even after the thirteen amendments were incorporated into the Constitution, conventional historians like Ulrich Bonnell Phillips were writing works making the case that the slave system in America was comprised of the happy darkies.This falsehood was rejected by non-conventional historians like Herbert Aptheker, Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman, W.E.B. DuBois, and John Hope Franklin.

Slavery is by its very nature a vicious, exploitative, and malicious system.Despite its undemocratic nature, the sons and daughters of the confederacy were willing to wage a Civil War to preserve such an evil way of life.

Over 600,000 lives were lost in the bloody civil war yet when the remnants of the Confederacy were allowed back into the Union the Federal Government looked askance and allowed them to establish a system of racial dehumanization.

The Trump administration in celebrating Americas independence defines patriotism and the love of America in the most simplistic way possible.Even more frightening in celebration of 244 years of independence the focus was not on the humanity of the American people but on the arsenal of advanced weaponry that as a country we have assembled.

Trump engaged in typical intellectual dishonesty and defined the Black Lives Matter Movement as constituting folks who do not love America.

We have arrived at a momentous moment in American history that entails Truth and Reconciliation. There are times when a nation must fight in wars but a nation has to be mindful that it does not develop a praetorian culture that glorifies death and war and is oblivious to health care and a runaway pandemic as we are experiencing in the United States.

The country cannot deny the prevalence of systemic racism and police brutality.This entails intellectual honesty not the perpetuation of mythology.The country must learn from the Movement Black Lives Matter and put behind us the worst aspects of frontier capitalism.

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The founding fathers and the fexing question of slavery | New York Carib News - NYCaribNews