Last Saturday on July 4, 2026, the U.S. celebrated 250 years of independence from the British Empire. When we say 250 years of the United States of America, what we mean is that it marks 250 years from the Declaration of Independence (1776). It is a document that declared the United Colonies free and independent from the British Empire.
The first sentence reads,
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
The document refers to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” is what/who entitled the people to “the separate and equal station.” Notably, it does not name Jesus Christ nor the Triune God. While all of the 56 signers of the document were Christians, this is significant. The signers were predominantly Protestant with a Catholic minority of 1 signer, Charles Carroll of Carrollton who represented Maryland. Therefore, I would argue this label of God is unusual because, as Christians, we rejoice to call out to our God by his name when we pray, when we seek and worship God.
Another significance we must remember about the Declaration of Independence is that it declared,
“… the United Colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown… all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
What beautiful and inspiring ideals are they, stated here!
The document declared triumphantly as if “all men” had “certain unalienable Rights” to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The author of Slavery and the Founders, Paul Finkelman, a U.S. law historian, noted that slavery was legal in all newly independent states in the late 18th century (Finkelman 2014, pp. 163-164). When looking back at the realities of the U.S. in 1776 and beyond, we must re-examine this history and ask, “Were all men truly equal then?”
Who did the Declaration of Independence mean by “all men” who are created equal? If it did not include Black Americans, did the signers believe Black Americans were not fully men?
In Nobody Knows My Name (1961/2022), James Baldwin writes,
“Any real change implies the break-up of the world as one has always known it…”
He emphasizes how this world of slavery that one has known whether black or white had continued for more than two hundred years and that the abolition by the Northerners brought the Black Americans in the North quasi-freedom. In other words, the Declaration of Independence nor abolition of slavery could bring the realization of the words asserted. Rather, they made visible the discrepancy between lived experiences and legal statutes regarding Black lives and created an illusion of liberty.
The North abolished slavery long before the 13th Amendment (1865) held all 36 states (today’s 50 states) accountable for abolition. One who is not black would expect that the Northerners had a much better life after the abolition than the Southerner, but the picture Baldwin illustrates of their experiences is far from better. In his own words, they were “two sides of the same coin,” where the former was ignored and the latter was under surveillance.
Embarrassingly, reading about this came to me as a surprise. How little did I know? I remember there was a time many years ago when I used to say there was no more racism in the U.S… Such belief demonstrated how sheltered (?) or caged (?) I was with my privileges. I was colorblind, even as someone with Asian appearance. I was naively sold on the liberalist ideas as if they were true and realized. I claimed I was innocent and certainly not a racist, not deliberately partaking in the racial injustice. F. G. Bailey, a British social anthropologist, called this the hegemonic lie (Bailey 1991, p. 20), which forms when we collide in a basic lie because it demands a destabilizing change of our reality. Political scientists explain this structural blindness as a biological tendency to default to highly routinized and schematic cognitive and behavioral patterns that preserve safety, rather than engaging in the complex, adaptive approaches that disrupt underlying biases (Hibbing, Smith and Alford 2014).
On these liberal ideas we were brought up with, Jason Stanley highlights in the preface of his recent book, Erasing History (2025), that making them come true needs our defending by taking responsibility,
“A liberal democracy is a system that centers the values of freedom and equality, in which all citizens have equal political value—and are thus entitled to equal respect and dignity. With that freedom comes responsibility, including the responsibility to safeguard and improve the institution of democracy.”
My first recognition of how I was entangled with racism in this liberalist world came about a decade ago during my trip to Southeast Asia where the majority of the locals’ only option to provide for themselves or their family was to work for the tourists. I flew there expecting to enjoy a tropical paradise. But unexpectedly, I saw in their eyes the lingering question about why this young girl who looks like a local could have a vacation at this hotel while they would never be able to afford to be a guest there. The reflection of me I saw through their lens was an image of myself that I had never known.
Baldwin famously reflected on this relational mirror (Baldwin 1961/2022, p. 59),
“It’s a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself.”
What I experienced was somewhat the inversion of this mirror where the locals had diminished their own humanity believing that is the way of this world. By encountering my life seemingly untouched by the demanding inequality that left them there, they finally saw the injustice put on their lives.
The existence of my privilege made them feel small, although white privilege did not shake their world. It fit the world they had known, which told them to feel proud to serve the white guests. I was rather puzzled to learn their logics, especially the likening of me as one of the locals because they were Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists when I was a Christian. I looked East Asian, not Southeast Asian, and the locals practiced cultures completely foreign to me. It turns out the Chinese had migrated to Southeast Asia centuries ago and had lived there for generations that the locals considered someone with East Asian appearance, me, a local. It meant that for them, that I should be bound to the same fate as theirs.
Meanwhile, my personal experiences of Southeast Asians prior to this were only on the West Coast of the U.S. In my world, those who looked Southeast Asian were not bound to poverty or lack of opportunities! So, when I looked upon the locals, I did not assume a life dictated by racialized poverty.
Equality, then, was not to see them as equal (or identical) to me but to bear witness to the inequality they had suffered.
This global encounter was just the tip of the iceberg. Understanding racism against Black Americans was a vague idea to me until I watched the murder of George Floyd pan out in 2020. Thanks to smartphones… Driven by a shifting conscience, I began asking Black friends about their families’ experiences over generations. I asked dumb questions like, “Is it true you tell Black boys they must behave extremely cautiously around police officers?” because I believed the police were there to always protect us, not to intimidate us. Little did I know… The hidden cost of my complacency in the structural inequality was their unseen trauma.
Not to mention that women in the U.S. only gained the right to vote in 1920 upon the 19th Amendment. Even then, residual white supremacy immediately established legal obstacles to block non-white women from ever reaching the ballot box. Many states maintained laws withholding true citizenship, preventing voting rights for Asian American women until 1952, Native American women until 1962, and for Black women it was systematically stripped away from them by literacy tests and poll taxes that were impossible to fulfill for the descendants of those who endured four centuries of slavery without a penny of compensation. On top of that, bureaucratic discrimination they endured until the Voting Rights Act finally passed in 1965 is well documented (Collins 1990/2026). Yet today, we are still asking whether U.S. women—regardless of Black, White, Asian, Native American—are truly equal to men (UN Women n.d.).
All men are created equal. All are entitled to freedom. These are not necessarily biblical ideas—since the Bible does not say either of those things, nor does it declare them as the end goal for humanity—but they indeed are nice things to hear and say out loud. They are great ideals to avow! Now, to truly live it out, to have integrity, it calls for our action and commitment. Without us all taking up on our part, the human costs will remain unequal.
To a Christian like myself, this might just be why Christ took up the cross he did not earn to carry. He wanted to show us how it is done to make the unseen suffering and the love that can heal it visible to us and make each of us a witness.
Bailey, F.G., 1991. The Prevalence of Deceit. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Baldwin, J., 2022. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. Dublin: Penguin Classics (Original work published 1961).
Collins, P.H., 2026. Black Feminist Thought. Routledge Classics ed. London: Routledge. (Original work published 1990).
Finkelman, P., 2014. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson. 3rd ed. Abingdon: Routledge.
Hibbing, J. R., Smith, K. B. and Alford, J. R., 2014. Differences in Negativity Bias Underlie Variations in Political Ideology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37(3), pp. 297–307.
Stanley, J., 2025. Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. New York: One Signal Publishers.
U.S., 1776. The Declaration of Independence. Philadelphia: Continental Congress.
UN Women (n.d.) Country Fact Sheet: United States of America. Available at: https://data.unwomen.org/country/united-states-of-america (Accessed: July 7, 2026).
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