Semiquincentennial Blues
Bearing Witness to Truth on a Fascist Anniversary
I’ve been vexed by the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America and the way our country is celebrating. Over ten years ago, a bipartisan congressional committee was established to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, called America 250, but that was not enough for Donald Trump, who fought to create its own initiative, Freedom250. America 250 was already going to be a whitewashed celebration, an erasure of the past, and a masterclass in denial with no mention of American imperialism, settler-colonialism, slavery, lynching, segregation, or mass incarceration.
However, Freedom 250 took things to a whole new level of buffoonery, an ultra-right wing fascist propaganda festival celebrating the faith of the founding fathers, a UFC Fight on the White House lawn, a Great American State Fair on the National Mall featuring a 110-foot Ferris wheel, an armada of tall ships and military vessels traversing along the Atlantic coast, and a variety of other spectacles that have yet to be named. More disturbingly, the marquee statement on the Freedom250 website is a quote from President Donald Trump, which says, “The story of American history makes everyone free.” This is not only a bald-faced lie, but it is fascist propaganda.
So, I’ve been searching for the right words to describe how I feel about the semiquincentennial when I ran across a poem the great jazz artist Gil Scott Heron wrote for the 200th anniversary of America called the “Bicentennial Blues.”
The blues has always been American
The question is why?
Why should the blues be so at home here?
Well, America provided the atmosphere
America provided the atmosphere for the blues and the blues was born
The blues was born on the American wilderness
The blues was born on the beaches where the slave ships docked
Born on the slave man’s auction block
The blues was born and carried on the howling wind
The blues grew up a slave
The blues grew up as property
The blues grew up in Nat Turner visions
The blues grew up in Harriet Tubman courage
The blues grew up in small town deprivation
The blues grew up in big city isolation
The blues grew up in the nightmares of the white man
The blues grew up in the blues, singing of Bessie and Billie and Ma
The blues grew up in Satchmo’s horn,
on Duke’s piano and Langston’s poetry, on Robeson’s baritone
The point is that the blues has grown
The blues is grown, but not the home
The blues is grown, but the country has not
The blues remembers everything the country forgot
It’s a bicentennial year, and the blues is celebrating a birthday
And it’s a Bicentennial Blues
A year of historical importance
A year of hysterical importance
The year the symbol transformed into the B-U-Y centennial
Buy a car
Buy a flag
Buy a map
Until the public has been bludgeoned into bicentennial submission
Or bicentennial suspicion
I fall into the latter category
It’s a, a blues year
And America has got the blues
It’s got the blues because of partial deification
Of partial accomplishments
Over partial periods of time
Halfway justice
Halfway liberty
Halfway equality
It’s a half-ass year[i]
I guess it’s another half-ass year. Gil Scott Heron had the “bicentennial blues,” and I’ve got the “semiquincentennial blues,”[ii] but I’m grateful for the language to understand the intense emotions I’ve been feeling. It’s not just that remembering 250 years of American history gives me the blues. It is also the feeling that I’m singing the blues while the rest of America is celebrating the rhythm and disregarding the blues. You know what I’m saying?
The blues is more than a musical genre; it is the story of the collective suffering and perseverance of the African American community, reflecting the resilience of those who lived and died, struggled and survived. It is the unvarnished truth of life and history. As James Baldwin wrote, “Blues is the tale of how we suffered. [And] while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell; it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”[iii] The blues remembers everything the country forgot, and I long for an America that can embrace its history and sing the blues. Yet our nation has repeatedly received the rhythm and rejected the blues.
It’s a predominantly white problem, a problem of European who remain trapped in their own history like a butterfly trapped on a pin.[iv] And as Gil Scott Heron reminds us, this is why our country has never grown up and remains an infantile adolescent. We are the Peter Pan of nations. Our refusal to be self-reflective and self-critical has severely stunted our growth. We are emotionally underdeveloped children who are experts in the pathology of denial. We have become an immature people who cannot take accountability or responsibility for our own story, unable to integrate our past with our present. Some call this “American Amnesia,” but it is more accurately selective memory, willful ignorance. We’ve chosen to forget our own story.
We are not the first generation or empire to be plagued by a perpetual adolescence. The Bible is full of the folly of forgetfulness. The people of Israel are constantly forgetting God’s laws, forgetting God’s commandments, forgetting God’s actions, forgetting that they are God’s people, and simply forgetting about God entirely. The Prophets consistently warn the people that their willful amnesia and stubborn forgetfulness are the root of ingratitude and will inevitably lead to human pride, idolatry, social injustice, moral decay, and national ruin.
If I were an anthropologist, I might argue that religion itself is a system of sacred rituals and practices designed to keep us from forgetting. “Remember that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” After breaking the bread, Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me.” The Christian year, from Advent to Easter, is a cycle of remembering the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We are constantly being instructed to remember, because memory is the heart of spirituality.
People of faith are those who practice “dangerous memory”[v] of God’s liberation in the midst of empires that are designed to make us forget. In the words of Imani Perry, we are called to “See through time in order to see today…[we must] haunt the past to change the present and claim the future.” We must haunt the past to change the present and claim the future.
However, there are times in scripture where the law and the prophets cannot pierce through the bleak imperial cloud of forgetfulness and bring people to remember. And whenever that happens, God resorts to other means. God calls upon Creation to bear witness to the past and to convey the truth that humanity is unable to tell itself. The earth bears. After Cain murders Abel, God told Cain that his brother’s blood was “crying out to me from the ground.” In Exodus, God sent plagues of blood, frogs, gnats, flies, pestilence, and boils to bear witness against the slavery and oppression of Egypt. In our text from Deuteronomy, Moses called on the heavens and the earth to bear witness that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.”
In Job, God speaks from a whirlwind, listing the marvels of the cosmos, bearing witness against humanity’s inability to control the oceans, manage wild animals and celestial bodies command the morning, or understand the depths of creation.” In Micah 6, just before the famous “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly” God calls upon the hills and the mountains to hear his testimony against the people’s superficial worship and social injustice.
In the Psalms, it says that even if the mouths of every human being were shut up, the animals will roar, the birds will sing, the oceans will crash, the wind will blow, the earth will quake, and Creation itself will give praise to God! In the gospels, John the Baptist told the Pharisees that God could make Children of Abraham from the stones, and Jesus told the chief priests that if they silenced the crowds singing “Hosanna,” the rocks themselves would cry out! Whenever the people forget the past, God marshals her Creation to pierce through the bleak imperial cloud of amnesia and bear witness to the truth.
On vacation I swam in the Atlantic Ocean every day. I got salt water in my eyes, my ears, my nose, my mouth, and I remembered that I was drinking the blood, sweat, and tears of the ancestors who died in the Middle Passage. The ocean bears witness to the holocaust of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Our rivers bear the names of the indigenous people who lived here before us: the Catawba, the Cherokee, the Pee Dee, the Lumbee. Every inch of land on this continent bears witness to the stories of indigenous nations. Southern trees bear strange fruit. All the suffering and trauma oppressed people have experienced in this nation’s history is in the soil that we plant and till to grow our food. Which means, we literally eat what our ancestors have gone through before us. That is how close we are to the past. It is living and breathing inside us.
This is why there will always be a witness to the past, to the truth, to God. Even if all of humanity was gone, there would be a witness. Even if all humanity forgets, there would be a witness. Even if all humanity becomes evil and capitulates to the will of the empire, there would be a witness. Because the earth bears witness, the soil bears witness, the wind bears witness, the water bears witness, the trees bear witness, the mountains bear witness. This is what Gil Scott Heron meant when he said, “The blues was born on the American wilderness.” The earth sings the blues to us. The earth bears witness to us. It remembers everything that our country forgot, everything the church forgot, everything the world forgot. It remembers, it sings, it tells the story, it bears witness like the blues, and we can find healing in that testimony if we are willing to listen.
Why is it so important to have a witness? Because there can be no healing without a witness. Trauma cannot be healed without a witness. This is what therapy is. This is what friendship is. That is what community is—what the church is supposed to be. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe tries to outrun and bury the central tragedy of her life that was caused by slavery. But her spiritual, emotional, psychological healing only begins when the community of her fellow survivors stops avoiding her past and actively “bear witness” to the horrors she endured. Morrison teaches us a powerful ancestral truth—echoed by experts on trauma across the world. Our nervous system will hold on to trauma until we are in an environment where we can safely share our pain and process our trauma with trusted witnesses.[vi] Every trauma requires a witness!
I chose the passage from Luke today because it was the text of one of the most important sermons in history. Over 500 years ago, on the fourth Sunday of Advent in 1511, a Dominican priest named Antonio de Montesinos preached a sermon in the Spanish colony of Hispaniola with Christopher Columbus’ son, Governor Diego Colón, and the great champion of indigenous rights, Bartolome de las Casas in the audience. You’ve probably never heard of Montesinos sermon, which was titled “I am the voice crying in the wilderness,” but it was the first sermon in history to explicitly condemn the practice of Spanish colonialism and slavery.
Las Casas, a slaveholder at the time, was convicted by the sermon to free his slaves, and would later write that “Montesinos spoke in such pungent and terrible terms that it made the congregant’s flesh shudder.” Only excerpts of Montesinos’ sermon remain, but we know he said, “I am the voice of Christ in the wilderness of this island. Open your hearts and your senses all of you, for this voice will speak new things harshly, and will be frightening…This voice says that you are living in deadly sin for the atrocities that you tyrannically impose on these innocent people. Tell me, what right have you to enslave them? What authority did you use to make war against them who lived at peace in their own lands, killing them cruelly with methods never before heard of? How can you oppress them and not care to feed or cure them, and work them to death to satisfy your greed?... Aren’t they human? Have they no rational soul? Aren’t you obliged to love them as you love yourselves? How can you live in such a lethargic dream?”[vii]
After the sermon, the Spanish colonizers and settlers were furious. They marched to Governor Diego Colón’s estate and demanded that he force Montesinos to retract his sermon. The crowd would only disperse once they thought they’d secured a promise that Montesinos would apologize for his words, but they misunderstood the power of the divine voice. The following Sunday Montesinos walked to the pulpit, his head held high, and began his remarks with a quotation from Job, “I will start from the beginning and prove my sermon is correct.”
In 1526 Montesinos traveled with Lucas Vázquez de Ayllon to participate in the founding of the first colony in North America. There he would witness the first slave revolt and the birth of the first maroon community among the Guale people. He would be one of the few Spanish who escaped, and he would go on to become a protector and advocate for the indigenous people of Venezuela. Montesinos would eventually be murdered there by the Welser Banking company of Germany for speaking out against their abuses of indigenous people. Quite a resume as a witness.
There has always been and will always be a witness. There will always be someone singing the blues, even if that someone is the trees, or the mountains, the birds, or the ocean waves. We are invited to join along with the chorus of Creation. We are invited to join our voices with the song of the wretched of the earth and the crucified of history. We are invited to be voices in the wilderness who reject the lies of empire and refuse to be silent. We are invited to be voices who witness to the past, who testify to the truth, who sing the rhythm AND the blues, who cast a vision of what life should have been, what life is, and what life could be.
Like Isaiah and John the Baptist, we are called to “Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths in the wilderness; a highway for our God. Help every valley be filled in and every mountain made low. Bring the crooked roads into alignment and make the rough ways smooth.” We too are called be the voices in the wilderness who bear witness to the truth of what oppressed people are experiencing, the reality that the kingdom of God is coming, the good news that beloved community is unfolding, the announcement that collective liberation is on the horizon, and the fact that everyone deserves to be free and none of us are free if even one of us is in chains.
As the old gospel song says, “My Soul is A Witness for My Lord.” Our souls are witnesses against the forgetfulness of fascism, the iniquity of imperialism, the cruelty of colonialism, the grisliness of genocide, the sin of slavery, the wickedness of white supremacy, the poison of patriarchy, the hatred of homophobia, the nefariousness of nationalism, and the evil of environmental degradation. Our souls are witnesses for life, for love, and for liberation for every person in this world and every nation.
So, in the tenth year of the reign of Donald Trump—when JD Vance was Vice President, Mike Johnson was Speaker of the House, Marco Rubio was Secretary of State, Pete Hegseth was Secretary of War, during the high-priesthood of Paula White, on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the word of God came to us in the wilderness of the American empire, just as it came to John all those years ago. We are the voice. God is calling us to take our semiquincentennial blues and use our voice to bear witness to the past, to the truth, to justice, to healing, and peace.
As witnesses we know the hard reality—you can’t have grace without truth, you can’t have faith without works, you can’t have religion without sacrifice, you can’t have worship without justice, you can’t have power without responsibility, you can’t have change without struggle, you can’t have politics without people, you can’t have salvation without liberation, you can’t have the kingdom without the cost, and you can’t have the resurrection without the cross!
So, when the empire tries to make us forget, to keep us quiet, to shut us down, to beat us up, to put us in prison, or to take our life, we will not be surprised, we will not be silent, we will not be shaken, we will not be stopped!!! We will keep on bearing witness to God, we will keep on remembering the past, we will keep on telling the truth, we will keep on singing the blues, and we will keep on fighting for justice until all the world sees freedom and liberation! We know that “The story of American history” is not what makes everyone free,” because Jesus said, “You shall know the truth and the truth (and only the truth) shall make you free.”
Can I get a witness for truth? Can I get a witness for justice? Can I get a witness for faith? Can I get a witness for healing? Can I get a witness for peace? Can I get a witness for joy? Can I get a witness for hope? Can I get a witness for life? Can I get a witness for love? Can I get a witness for liberation? Can I get a witness for salvation? Can I get a witness for freedom? Can I get a witness for the blues? Can I get a witness for the good news? Can I get a witness for the cross? Can I get a witness for the blood? Can I get a witness for the empty tomb? Can I get a witness for what God has done for us in our lives and in this church?
Heaven and earth bear witness that God has set before us life and death; we must raise our voices with Creation and the oppressed people of the world and choose life, so that we, and our children, may live!
[i] Gil Scott Heron & Brian Jackson, It’s Your World, Arista Records, 1976.
[ii] Eddie Glaude, America U.S.A.: How Race Shadows The Nation’s Anniversaries, New York: Crown, 2026.
[iii] James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” The Jazz Fiction Anthology, ed. Sascha Feinstein and David Rife, Indiana University Press: 2009. See also Leroi Jones’s Blues People, James H. Cone’s The Spirituals and the Blues, Kelly Brown Douglas’s Black Bodies and the Black Church: A Blues Slant, and B. Brian Foster’s I Don’t Like the Blues.
[iv] See James Baldwin, “The White Man’s Guilt,” Baldwin Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison, New York: The Library of America, 1998.
[v] Johhan Baptist Metz,
[vi] Bessel A. Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
[vii] Greg Grandin, America, América: A New History of the New World, New York: Penguin Books, 2026.