Frederick Douglass once said, “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” His words remain painfully relevant nearly two centuries later.
As I stepped outside today (July 2nd, not yet the Fourth) I watched a group of young Black children playing with sparklers, guided by an older white woman who was helping them prepare for the coming celebration. I couldn’t help but feel the weight of irony pressing down on the moment. These children, full of joy and innocence, have no idea of the historical betrayal woven into the holiday they’re about to celebrate. And that white woman? She represents the very demographic whose ancestors penned a Declaration of Independence that never truly included us.
This disconnect... between celebration and suffering, between fireworks and the fire of injustice... is why Black America continues to struggle. We are a people disconnected from our power, numbed by religious delusion, and economically drained by a spiritual system that yields zero return. Every month, between seven and eight billion dollars are funneled from the Black community into religious institutions. What do we get in return? Empty promises of a better afterlife while our communities starve, suffer, and stagnate.
Some defend their churches, saying, "My pastor gives back" or “My church does community work." But the truth is, most of that money goes to overhead: mortgages on lavish homes, salaries, and expenses. And don’t fool yourself... major religious institutions, including the Catholic Church, profit from Black tithes.
Religion - especially Christianity - has become the greatest long con ever played on the Black mind, and we’ve become its most loyal victims.
We will never overcome if we continue to financially and spiritually invest in illusions. We would not need reparations from the U.S. government if we simply redirect the $8 billion a month we give away.
With that capital, we could build schools, own banks, fund businesses, create healthcare systems, and reclaim our neighborhoods.
But that would require us to face a difficult truth: the Jesus most of us worship never existed... not as the blonde-haired, blue-eyed savior sculpted by Western culture. There may have been a spiritual teacher, perhaps a man like Gandhi or Buddha, but his name was not Jesus Christ. That name, and the mythology around it, was crafted and weaponized to colonize our minds, control our actions, and keep us obedient... afraid of death and hell, and too docile to rebel.
It’s time to stop giving money to institutions that do nothing but perpetuate dependency. Spirituality should not come with a collection plate. If heaven is real, it does not operate on dollars. And if God is just, that divinity would never require payment. The truth is, many of us believe we’re going to sit next to God in heaven because we tithed 10% of our income. But ask yourself: if God is infinite, why would He need your money?
We all come from the same source and return to it... call it God, the Creator, the Universe, or Source Energy. Carlton Pearson, a once-revered pastor, was ostracized for saying as much. He realized that hell is not a real place. It’s a concept invented to scare you into submission. We are energy (carbon, nitrogen, water) and those elements have been cycling through Earth for millions of years. When we die, we do not burn; we return. Reincarnation is more logical than eternal torment. We come to Earth to grow, to evolve, to learn. Some of us fail miserably, others progress... but all of us return to Source, again and again.
Black people, we have to wake up. That means doing the unthinkable: denouncing the religious systems that enslave our minds. Denounce Christianity. Denounce Jesus Christ... not the spirit of love and justice that many associate with him, but the myth created by the West to keep us passive and poor. The Bible did not fall from the sky. It was compiled by human beings at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., who decided which texts would serve their political agenda. The truth has been filtered, edited, and weaponized against us for centuries.
True divinity is within. The church is within. The God-force (whatever you want to call it) lives in you, not in a building. You don’t need a preacher to mediate your relationship with the Creator, especially not one who’s collecting your paycheck and coveting your wife.
Imagine what would happen if we stopped giving that $8 billion to institutions that give us nothing in return. Imagine investing it in ourselves, our children, our future. We wouldn’t need to beg for reparations. We wouldn’t need to ask permission to live with dignity. We would build our own reality, where our cities couldn’t be bombed like Tulsa, our lives wouldn’t depend on government crumbs, and our self-worth wouldn’t be measured by proximity to whiteness.
But we won’t get there until we shake off this 500-year-old spell. The spell that started when our ancestors, stolen from the motherland, were forced to bow to a foreign god. It’s time to stand tall. To remember who we are. To stop celebrating a holiday that was never meant for us... and instead create our own day of liberation.
Frederick Douglass saw through the hypocrisy of America’s Independence Day. The question is: do we?
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