89

There were 89 brutal years that passed between the time that the United States gained her emancipation and the Black enslaved people were freed from her hypocritical chains. Approximately three more generations that languished under the whip; three more generations that built wealth off the backs of the kidnapped, the raped, the old and the young, even the backs of their own children.

What are you celebrating today? Freedom?

I ask you this: can you celebrate with eyes wide open? Will you remember that the same groups of people who fled abuse, persecution, and murder came to this land and immediately visited worse atrocities upon the indigenous people? That instead of metabolizing and confronting the trauma they experienced, the founders of this country became the abusers they vilified and fled?

Will you reflect on the fact that while all men (all humanity) were created equal, that the country you celebrate ensures that all are never treated equally? That the rights of citizenry are denied to Black people to this day (watch what happens when we bear arms, when we assemble; watch our cruel and unusual punishment, our search and seizure—observe how many of our rights are routinely violated)?

This July 4th, I pray that the pandemic puts this country in just the sober mind needed to reflect quietly on the costs so many bodies bear in order to uphold patriotic lies; that the population becomes wise to the propaganda that shields them from hypocrisy and violence, both past and present.

I hope the people of this country take time to mourn the parts of them that died to make them “white” and robbed them of an ethnic heritage and culture that would add to the American fabric. I hope they mourn the burglary that whiteness has visited upon them; for while my people were forcibly ripped from country, language, and culture and forced to create a new and vibrant culture from memory, from trauma, and from resilience, white culture is a mantle voluntarily taken up for economic gain and societal superiority; a culture from negation (“I am not Black,” “I am not foreign,” “I do not live in those neighborhoods,” “I do not cook those foods,” “I do not listen to that music”), formed by violence and segregation. When who you are is defined by what you are not, you cannot exist without an “other.” So many of you have been robbed.*

I especially hope that people who claim to follow Jesus would reflect upon this day and examine yourselves: Are you Moses or are you pharaoh’s sorcerers? Are you leading on the Lord’s side towards reparation and emancipation, or are you an apologist of slave-holding Egypt? Do you claim selective amnesia when it comes to slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, police brutality, voting inequities, carceral inequities, but find your voice to condemn those who shout and rally for equality? Are you lighting up sparklers today and waving flags to remember something that happened in 1776 while silencing people for killings that happened last week, last year, last decade, and over the last 3 centuries? Woe to you!

Do you separate church from state, because state corrupts the holiness to which you are called, or do you crave to be counted among the state-sanctioned prophets of Baal? Are you more willing to wave banners of the state and of traitors and preserve monuments than you are the human bodies suffering under the yoke of oppression? Will you defy the witness of Moses? Of Elijah? Of John the Baptist? Of Jesus, the savior whom you claim to serve? Choose this day between the God of the oppressed and the god of comfort. Only hypocrites stand in the way of shalom for the poor, the enslaved, the imprisoned. 

I pray that on this July 4th, the Spirit of God would trouble the souls of those content with unequivocally commemorating a day that came 89 years too late for so many of America’s sons and daughters, and promised nothing but land robbery, tearful trails, genocide, and broken treaties for this land’s original inhabitants.

The dry bones of this whitewashed country can yet live, but not without reflection, confession, and reparation. Let us begin, today.

*Want to do more listening? Hear the witness of James Baldwin, recorded in 1986 (thanks, Tiffany).