Is this really Independence Day?

My uncle, eight-generations removed, physically wrote out the Declaration of Independence 235 years ago. Timothy Matlack was more than a scribe. He reported directly to Washington during the Revolutionary War, abandoning the pacifism of his Quaker heritage. As a politician, he was known for his fist fighting, literally. His favorite hobbies were bear baiting and cock fighting.

The document that my colorful ancestor wrote out arguably changed the course of human history by declaring that all men are indeed created equal with the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. State religion, class system, and monarchy were struck down with Timothy’s pen.

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Many of the original colonists had come to the new world to escape religious persecution and endured great hardship in the name of freedom. Timothy’s grandfather , William Matlack, from whom I am directly descended 10 generations back, was a Quaker who arrived as an indentured servant. He wanted nothing more than what the Declaration set out.

Over the last two centuries, the idea of men’s equality has been used by Lincoln to free the slaves, by women who sought the right to vote, and by countless other disenfranchised groups. That first Independence Day has become the mirror into which we gaze to judge our progress as a country. And today of all days we should take a long, hard look.

In terms of wealth, race, and gender we have strayed profoundly away from what Timothy set down in ink.

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Our founding fathers fled monarchy to create a melting pot of equals. Over time the middle class came to stand for the American ideal of opportunity. In Europe, your place in society was determined by your birth, but here in America your role was determined solely by your contribution.

The last 20 years have seen the most rapid wealth transfer in our history. The middle class has withered away. The richest of the rich have grown enormously wealthier, while the other Americans have not. Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. The paper, which covers data through 2007, points to an unprecedented disparity in American incomes. At a time of record unemployment, The New York Times reported yesterday that CEO compensation increased 23 percent last year.

One contributing factor has been a separate-but-unequal education system, where the rich send their children to the world’s finest institutions of learning, from kindergarten through college, while the average student in our country can’t read to grade level. Of students below the poverty level, 3.7 percent went to private schools while the rest went to public schools struggling to provide adequate instruction. One of the most remarkable aspects of the recent studies showing the U.S. falling behind many other countries is the extent to which outcome is now determined by class in the United States. A poor child in China has a much better chance of upward mobility than a poor child in America. Among children born into low-income households, more than two-thirds grow up to earn a below-average income, and only six percent make it all the way up the ladder into the affluent top one-fifth of income earners, according to a study by economists at Washington’s Brookings Institution.

Another factor has been the staggering wealth creation in the financial services industries that now dominates our economy, produces no tangible product, and has systematically defrauded the middle class. The FBI’s Operation Stolen Dreams arrested 500 kingpins in the mortgage fraud in the last month.

A final factor is race. Despite the promise of emancipation, civil rights, and even an African-American president, our country’s black people continue to suffer a cycle of poverty and inequality that leaves a gaping hole in the Declaration’s concept of freedom. In our inner cities, most African-American boys grow up without a father. Educational parity is often only achieved through immersion programs like the Epiphany School here in Boston. The unemployment rate among men of color is more than double the rest of the population. And most troubling is that the U.S. census reported that 67 percent of the the 2.3 million men incarcerated in this country aren’t white. Earlier this year state law-makers in Ohio attempted to overturn that state’s death penalty purely based on the fact that Ohio’s black population is about 12.5 percent, 55 percent of those on death row are black.

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A gender war has also begun to rear its ugly head as men attempt to take on a wider role as husband and fathers, while women continue to assert themselves in the workplace. There are now more women with jobs and in college than men, leading noted female writers to call this the era of the “End of Men.” Where African Americans are still down in structural ways, it seems that the women’s movement has kicked into overdrive in attempt to reach well beyond equality and to state, categorically, that not only all of the good men have disappeared, as the WSJ recently reported in one headline, but men, as a gender, have degenerated into just one more Charlie Sheen YouTube video gone terribly wrong.

Of course the Declaration was sexist to begin with by speaking of only “men.” But the ideal of freedom speaks every bit as much to gender as race or sexual preference or any other distinction that threatens to divide us rather than uniting us. Bigotry is the enemy of equality whether based on race, creed, or gender.

So on this day of independence, as the blood relative of one who was there at the table with pen in hand, I’d ask that we as a nation recommit to the idea that we are all created equal with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We still have an awful long way to go.

—Photos via ThyBlackMan.com and bildungblog.blogspot.com