As you kick back for July 4th weekend, take a second to read and reflect on the past and present state of racism in these United States.

As you settle back into your beach chair, crack a can of domestic brew and contemplate which over-the-counter ICBM to potentially start a wildfire with, you should pause, just for a moment, and remember that this nation we are all so thankful for is still in the midst of some painful adjustments.

Charleston is still reeling from a race-based massacre, there is still significant support for a flag that symbolizes bondage, hate, and death, and churches of predominantly black congregations are being "mysteriously" torched.

It's hardly a secret that race is an issue we've wrestled with since our nation's inception.

Even as they drafted the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers were aware of the role it played, and would play. According to this piece at Talking Points Memo by Fitchburg State University's Ben Railton, Thomas Jefferson, then a slave owner himself, added the following lines to a draft of the Declaration, which were a dig at the Britain's King George:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither … And he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.