Welcome to Hear Me Out. I'm your host, Celeste Headley.

Independence Day is a massive cause for celebration in this country, and we celebrate

revolutions in hindsight. But in practice, when you're living through a revolution, I think,

never having lived through one, I imagine that revolution is a lot messier than it appears

during our picnics and barbecues and fireworks. Revolutions are very often deadly. They're

violent, and the upheaval is often unpopular, both among those in power and those who benefit

from the status quo. In past years, we've seen so-called insurrectionists invoke 1776,

and leftists declare urban neighborhoods autonomous zones. And across those political lines,

those acts have been quashed, often aggressively. So how should we think about uprisers and

revolutionaries? We all know that insurrections can be good. We all know that insurrections

have historically gone deeper, reflecting the most oppressed and the most excluded.

Writer and organizer Geomar joins us on Hear Me Out in just a moment. Stay with us.

Welcome back to Hear Me Out. I'm Celeste Headley. We have a complicated relationship with

revolution in this country. We are, of course, celebrating the 4th of July this week. And

the American Revolution was, of course, a bloody one. And much of the country celebrates it anyway,

with red, white, and blue abandon. But this country has also instigated revolutions in other parts

of the world and attempted to stop ones that did not align with our goals. And let's not forget

the speech that Frederick Douglass delivered in the mid-19th century when he said, what to the

American slave is your 4th of July? I answer a day that reveals to him more than all other days

in the year. The gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. When revolutions

and uprising ferment on our own soil, the status quo is fiercely protected. We've seen that time

and time again, instigated by struggles for everything from civil rights to the environment. And the

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