In what is sure to rankle the feathers of many conservatives, MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry took to her show Sunday to ponder the meaning of Independence Day, highlighting mostly the stains on American history. “It’s ours, all of it,” she said. “The imperialism, the genocide, the slavery, also the liberation and the hope and the deeply American belief that our best days still lie ahead of us.”
“Independence Day is more aspirational than actual,” she began her monologue. “We have longed defined the American Dream with commodities, a home of ones own, better education for the kids, family vacation and a car to the vacation in. And if we measure the dream by acquisitions, we’re in trouble. National unemployment remains above 8 percent. Wages have dropped, and the median net worth of American families plummeted by almost 40 percent.”
Harris-Perry noted that “financial security is important, but it’s only an outward manifestation of the American Dream. Freedom itself is both more elusive and more complicated.” She explained that America’s founding wasn’t about profits and loss but that “our founding is an unlikely narrative of young men, so inspired by an age of ideas that they threw off the yoke of colonialism and founded a free nation — men who were embarrassingly imperfect.”
The imperfections she listed: “The land on which they formed this Union was stolen; the hands with which they built this nation were enslaved; the women who birthed the citizens of the nation are second class.”
“But all of this is our story,” she continued. “Each of us benefits from the residuals of oppression and each of us is harmed by the realities of inequality. This is the imperfect fabric of our nation, at times we’ve torn and stained it, and at other moments, we mend and repair it. But it’s ours, all of it: The imperialism, the genocide, the slavery, also the liberation and the hope and the deeply American belief that our best days still lie ahead of us.”
She continued on to explain that her favorite story for this Fourth of July is one of people who are “not technically free.” She described a group of 27 inmates who recently completed their GEDs at the jail on Rikers Island. “Despite being incarcerated, they hold fast to the optimistic belief that education, hard work and second chances are still the stuff of America. And that they have a right to take part in the dream.”
“So on the Fourth of July,” Harris-Perry concluded, “I’m going to think of the Rikers Island graduates, and I’m going to wave a flag without hesitation — not because I’ve forgotten my nation’s many wrongs, but because I remember them. And I am nonetheless proud of my country, not for its perfection, because the alternative is too grim, the alternative is to give up on the dream of the nation founded in the belief, if not yet the practice that all are created, all deserve freedom, and all have the right to pursue happiness. Now, that is a dream worth celebrating — with fireworks.”
Source: Mediaite
360,000 Union soldiers and an American President died fighting against slavery, and the problem has been fixed in America. Although a boil on our history, no one now living experienced it first-hand. Independence Day is a day to be rejoiced. Knowing MSNBC, I have to assume the reason this woman stood out at hiring time, was for her hatred of America. Where did this Rikers Island thing come from, anyway. Is she a bleeding heart for criminals?
Are we still falling for the the falsehood that the Civil War was about abolishing slavery?
Those 360,000 Union soldiers thought it was, and they died to correct it. Do you have some sort of inside information about it that is reliable?
Jeff, there was ofcourse a host of reasons but slavery took center stage. The Southern Plantation owners weren't about to give up their cheap (in most cases free) labor to bring their cotton & tobacco crops to the markets. Most Plantations offered a roof and food for the workers and nothing else. They had guarenteed markets in the north and exported to Europe as well. To cut those profits by abolishing slavery was unthinkable and considered it an intrusion on states rights!
There are always those who amoung a cheering crowd will cast dispersions on our celebrations to honor those who protected freedom and the rights of the individuals. It strikes me that these people will never be pleased and never understand the sacrifice of those who it was that gave her the very right and priveledge to speak and demonstrate her ignorance.
Can you tell me how Rikers Island criminals came into her picture?
Carol, she makes the reference that these criminals hold sacred the opportunity that the American dream lives on given the opportunity to get education as a road to a better life. Ofcourse we all know that they would have done this GED process on their own instead of committing the crimes that put them there in the first place. What a load!