o My Colleagues and Comrades in the Social Responsibilities Round Table
On this Independence Day, I find it necessary-not to mark a celebration, but to offer a reckoning. As librarians committed to social responsibility, we are trained to attend to the record, to the archive, to the structure beneath the story. And the story of July 4th is one that demands disassembly.
The United States did not declare freedom in 1776. It declared the autonomy of a settler elite, a landowning class eager to consolidate its rule, break from imperial taxation, and expand westward without British constraint. The "freedom" it proclaimed was never meant for the enslaved, the Indigenous, the landless poor, or the women and children consigned to invisibility under patriarchal rule. The contradiction is not a bug in the system; it is the system.
We must be clear: the founding of this republic was not a rupture from colonialism, but a rearticulation of it. And the revolutionary promise invoked by many was, in practice, a mechanism to preserve class power and racial domination in new form. The Declaration of Independence enshrined bourgeois freedom-a freedom inseparable from private property, from slavery, from genocide.
Why should this matter to us, in the library field, in 2025?
Because our institutions remain entangled in these foundations. Because every shelf, every metadata schema, every neutrality clause or "balance" policy is inscribed with the long afterlife of empire. Because our work is not simply to preserve knowledge, but to interrogate its production-who gets to narrate history, whose voices are cataloged as legitimate, whose suffering is rendered archival, and whose is erased.
The pageantry of July 4th can obscure the continuity of domination. Beneath, behind, beyond the fireworks we see the prison walls, hear the drone warfare, witness the climate devastation, suffer the anti-trans laws, fear the police militarization, and watch the machinery of imperial violence-of which libraries, like all institutions, are not outside.
But we are not powerless. If we are to take "social responsibility" seriously, we must understand it as a commitment not to civility or liberal pluralism, but to solidarity with the oppressed, to resistance against the hegemonic lie, and to transformation of the structures that make knowledge complicit in injustice.
This is not a call for performative guilt. It is a reminder that our labor has potential-to radicalize space, to decolonize language, to refuse institutional silences, and to be comrades in struggle. Not merely information workers, but political actors, cultural workers, and insurgent stewards of memory.
Today, while the nation celebrates a myth, I call on us to recommit-not to a flag, but to a horizon: the abolition of racial capitalism, the end of settler colonialism, and the collective liberation of all peoples. That is the only independence worth declaring.
In solidarity and struggle,
Mark Charles Rosenzweig
International Responsibilities Task Force, SRRT
co-coordinator
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Mark Rosenzweig
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