Here’s today’s Boondocks re-run. It may be of interest if you’ve been following recent exchanges in the comments section.

Jazmine: Why aren’t you coming to our cookout on the Fourth?

Huey: I don’t know if your parents told you this, Jazmine, but we weren’t freed on Independence Day.

Huey: Apparently one of the rights America won from the British was the right to hold slaves and oppress others. I see little reason to celebrate.

[Pause.]

Jazmine: Oh, you can find the downside to anything.

Huey: Like chattel slavery? Yeah, I guess I’m just funny that way.

On a related note:

But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? … At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

— Frederick Douglass (1852): What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?