Salon argues that white supremacy renders Independence Day holiday a 'false start'

Brett T. | 7:01 PM on July 04, 2015

Woke up eagerly anticipating the inevitable @Salon article slamming the Fourth of July. I'm guessing "Why the 4th Is Racist Against Gays."

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) July 4, 2015

So close.

Happy Independence Day, everyone! There’s a good chance you were at a parade this morning celebrating the holiday, so you might have missed some hot takes on why you shouldn’t have been at a parade this morning celebrating the holiday.

As Twitchy reported this morning, ThinkProgress weighed in with “21 great Americans we could celebrate instead of those old white Founding Fathers,” such as Rep. Nancy “We Have to Pass the Bill so You Can Find out What Is in It” Pelosi and Planned Parenthood founder and eugenicist Margaret Sanger.

One tweeter proclaimed it “the dumbest thing you’ll see on the internet this year,” and she’s probably right, but don’t count out Salon, which is celebrating the Fourth with a piece called “America’s real founding moment: Why we get Independence Day all wrong.”

Staff writer Elias Isquith’s piece argues that while we might celebrate “America Day” today, July 4th certainly isn’t a day to celebrate independence.

… It’s true that something calling itself the United States of America asserted its independence during the summer of 1776; but the country I’ve lived in for my whole life is not it. In some sense, my country — a multiethnic, pluralist, secular and democratic republic — only came into being during the civil rights struggle of the mid-20th century. Yet even if we aren’t so exacting in our standards, today’s America came into being during the Civil War, not the War of Independence.

In fact, the only way we can see Independence Day as anything more than a false start is if our understanding of liberty and equality is subject to the overriding prerogatives of white supremacy.