[Warnings: Police violence, explosions, and loud noises]
“What to my people is the Fourth of July?
My people who are failed every day by every country. Sleepless in the long night. Terrorized by fireworks. We who have cried salt baths for our kin. Look at all we have borne for you. Arms, armistice, the sweetest fruits. Flesh of children hidden away from the ugly summer of their own blood. We are on the front lines. Help me. Tell me. What do we tell the children of your Fourth of July?
What is death to a daughter? What is river to a sea? Where is the country where my people are safe? Ancestors set the table. Send dream mayors in high supply - too heavy, too spent, too hot to cook; no promise beyond the sparkling, simple bombs. Keep your holiday, your hunger, the blood in your teeth. Police parade down streets, proud descendants of the slave patrol - a theater of denial, a propaganda pageant, and we are on the front lines. All summer my uncle can’t sleep, and he was born free. And he ain’t never been.
We deserve a break. We deserve to laugh, talk shit, and scream. Every day I’m waiting for rain; some indication that this land I’m set to die on will grow good enough to deserve me. Where is it? This country that deserves us? What do we name it? What is it’s Fourth of July? How do I tell my children there is blue sky up there? Life threw a brick through my window of opportunity. How dare I tell my children, “there is free.” This day should be quiet; every head lowered into the pages of history. It was illegal for us to read and then we read the laws. The laws were illegal; turned horses into squad cars, hounds into warrants. What to us is your Fourth of July? Payloads and kinks of fire, a middle finger, an ugly foil, a rain, a joke where we are the punchline. A lie, until you make it otherwise.”
Written by: Safia Elhillo, Danez Smith, Lauren Whitehead, W. Kamau Bell, Angel Nafis, Idris Goodwin, Pharoahe Monch, Camonghne Felix, and Nate Marshall
Directed by: Yvan Iturriaga
DP & Sound: Aleixo Goncalves Flores
Creative Director: Adam Mansbach
Executive Produced by: Offsides Productions & Colehouse Walker Political Outcomes
Executive Produced by: Josh Healey and Yvan Iturriaga
Concept: Calvin Williams and Josh Healey
YouTube link: Daveed Diggs asks: “What to My People is the Fourth of July?” | Movement For Black Lives