Richard Pryor did a great Uncle Tom voice. He was never a master of voices, didn’t have the versatility of someone like Robin Williams, a rapid-fire cartoon jukebox, but his voices could conjure an archetype: streetwise black hustler, dusty white hillbilly, nagging wife, fearsome Italian mafioso, nebbish middle-class WASP, mischievous child. He imbued each one of them with fresh, unexpected character in his comedic one-man stage plays, and any disciple of Pryor’s can call one up to showcase how well versed they are in the GOAT’s catalogue.
But Pryor’s Uncle Tom voice—not to be confused with a white voice, or a black-person-trying-to-sound-white voice, or a black-person-who-sounds-white-through-no-fault-of-their-own voice—has gone underappreciated. We don’t hear much about it, maybe because referring to someone as an Uncle Tom has fallen out of favor, maybe because, as I’ve been told aggressively since the Obama years, there’s no wrong way to be black, so we must dispense with terms like Uncle Tom lest we hurt someone’s feelings by casting doubts on their blackness, even if their practice of blackness does active, unrepentant harm to other black people.
What made his Uncle Tom voice so great is that he understood the crucial thing was not mimicking whiteness, but performing blackness in a way that suggests being easily and overly impressed with white people. There is no better example of this than on “Bicentennial Nigger,” the last track on his 1976 album of the same name—his second album with nigger in the title, after 1974’s That Nigger’s Crazy, which is wild to think about as someone raised in the era of “the n-word.” Provocation aside, “Bicentennial Nigger” begins with Pryor as an observer of American culture: “They having a bicentennial,” he says. “They,” some entity outside of Pryor, are celebrating the two hundred years that have passed since the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of this nation. “They gonna have a bicentennial nigger,” he goes on. “They will. They’ll have some nigger, two hundred years old, in blackface. Stars and stripes on his forehead. Little eyes. Lips just shining. And he’ll have that lovely white folks expression on his face. But he’s happy.”
Then Pryor slips into his Uncle Tom voice, the voice of the bicentennial nigger: “I’m just so thrilled to be here over here in America. I’m so glad y’all took me out of Dahomey. I used to could live to be a hundred and fifty. Now I die of high blood pressure by the time I’m 52.” As the bicentennial nigger heaps his praise upon the country that saw fit to steal him away from his home, he punctuates each sentence with an exaggerated “yuk-yuk,” full of patriotic subservience, as the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” swells in the background.
“That thrills me to death. I’m just so pleased America is gon’ last.”
Pryor didn’t think much of Bicentennial Nigger—the rest of the album was hastily conceived and recorded in just two weeks in July, in order to fulfill his contractual obligation to Warner Bros.—though it ended up winning Pryor a third Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album. It’s not full of strong material; it clocks in at just over forty minutes, and five of those are spent naming black celebrities in the audience. Much of the rest touches on some of his favorite topics (fucking, mostly) in less interesting ways than his other albums and concert films. But this year I have found myself coming back to Bicentennial Nigger, pulling up YouTube uploads since the album isn’t available on most streaming services. It’s my way of considering, or maybe marking, the half-assed anniversary we are confronting now.
The album cover is ingenious: a cadre of animated and differently guised Richard Pryors—police officer, Civil War soldier, boxer, pimp, naked slave, businessman—all chained together at the ankles by another Pryor, this one dressed as Uncle Sam. Perhaps he is the same bicentennial nigger we hear yuk-yuking it up on the album. He has gleefully imprisoned the others, reminding them that no matter where they fall on the spectrum of respectability, they are still nigger subjects of the American project, and that is all they ever can be . . . but at least they are chained together, their fates interlinked, suggesting some possibility of solidarity. Most crucially, they, unlike Uncle Tom, still have their souls intact.
On an earlier track of the album, “Bicentennial Prayer,” Pryor deploys his Southern black preacher voice: “We aaaare . . . ga-therd here tuh-dayyyy . . . tuh celebrate dis year of bi-centenniality . . . in hope of freedom and digni-tay. We’re celebratin’ two HUN-dred years of . . . white folks kickin’ ass.” The preacher, unlike Pryor, appears to feel some sense of belonging in the bicentennial. He is in danger of becoming another soulless Uncle Tom. Until the next line:
“And the prayer is . . . how long will this bullshit go on?”
That the marquee event of the semiquincentennial celebration of America’s founding has been an Ultimate Fighting Championship bout, dubbed UFC Freedom 250—literal ass kickin’ on the White House lawn—is perfect for an era in which subtlety is read as weakness. Sweaty, ‘roided out, proteinmaxxed, mostly white, mostly American, all living embodiments of an ethos that has supposedly been stamped out by feminists and beta men and trans people—these patriots pummel each other in the name of entertainment. The neosegregationist white folks currently in charge love nothing more than reminding everyone of just how much ass they can kick, even if they themselves aren’t physically capable of doing the kicking. And there are now, to answer Pryor-as-preacher’s question, fifty additional years of American ass kickin’ for them to celebrate. Breathe in the freedom.
“I have seen some surreal things in my life—this is the most surreal. It doesn’t seem real. None of it seems real. It’s so crazy,” podcaster, UFC color commentator, and avatar of the times Joe Rogan said during the event’s broadcast, which took place on June 14, Trump’s 80th birthday, in front of an audience of military members who met strict fitness and wait-to-height ratio requirements. Far be it from me to diminish Rogan’s genuine awe, the total surprise with which he is regarding a masturbatory fantasy he himself helped bring to life, but nothing about such a spectacle feels surreal. Nothing about the second Trump regime feels surreal. We have passed the point at which the absurdity appears as aberration.
The Monster Energy and Crypto.com sponsorships for the evening: very real. The female quotient including no women fighters, only the “Octagon girls” in sequined hotpants and velvet bodices: also real. The United States Marine Band playing a rendition of “The Boys Are Back in Town”: too real. A fighter operating under the moniker Black Beast: painfully real. The Black Beast losing to someone who took his victory speech as an occasion to announce, “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?”: still real.
If the second Trump regime hadn’t made it clear before, in rhetoric and action, who they believe America belongs to, this event left little doubt: America is for Manly White Americans Who Love Kickin’ Ass and the Cheerleader Types Who Love Them. Not that I was under any other impression, but I had become accustomed to people in power pretending otherwise—pretending that there were no Uncle Toms, because we all belonged, one America united by the fact of our differences.
The semiquincentennial has not been like the bicentennial, and not just because it doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily. “Whether you lived in Washington, DC, or Los Angeles, or in my small town on the coast of Mississippi,” Eddie Glaude, Jr. writes in his new history and analysis of America’s anniversaries, America, U.S.A., “the bicentennial celebration found its way to your living room.” The American Revolution Bicentennial Administration named twelve thousand “bicentennial communities” around the country, which would coordinate local events. As Glaude writes, “Activities ranged from Operation Sail 1976, which brought sixteen tall sailing ships from around the world into New York Harbor, to the Bicentennial Wagon Train Pilgrimage to Pennsylvania, to the Smithsonian’s Festival of American Folklife, which included exhibits of folks songs and dances from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.” It didn’t stop there. The NBA, MLB, and NHL hosted all-star games in Philadelphia and the NCAA also held the Final Four there, to honor the city where the Continental Congress signed the Declaration. The NFL neglected to host the Pro Bowl in Philly, but it did its own celebration at that year’s Super Bowl with a halftime performance dubbed “200 Years and Just a Baby: A Tribute to America’s Bicentennial.” Ed McMahon, Paul Anka, Walter Cronkite, and Bob Hope all hosted television specials. Schoolhouse Rock! produced the now iconic “America Rock” segments, which featured the enduring and endearing “I’m Just a Bill.”
Indeed, the celebration began long before the bicentennial even arrived. On April 1, 1975, the American Freedom Train began its journey in Wilmington, Delaware, setting out for the rest of the country. It carried hundreds of artifacts spanning two hundred years of nationhood, including, according to a 2019 Washington Post story, “George Washington’s personal copy of the Constitution, NBA star Bob Lanier’s size-20 sneakers, the Louisiana Purchase agreement, Thomas Edison’s first working lightbulb, a lunar rover, John F. Kennedy’s rocking chair, Hank Aaron’s baseball bat, a dress worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, and the Stanley Cup.” It also had MLK’s pulpit and a copy of the Liberty Bell twice the size of the original, courtesy of a $100,000 donation from the American Legion. After traveling 138 cities across the lower 48, it ended its trip in Miami on December 31, 1976.
The bicentennial Freedom Train was modeled on the original 1947–49 Freedom Train proposed by William Coblenz, a veteran of both World Wars who, in 1946, was serving as the Justice Department’s assistant director of public information. As the scholar Stuart J. Little tells it in a journal article for American Studies, Coblenz “wandered across Ninth Street on his lunch hour and saw an exhibit of Nazi war documents at the National Archives. The exhibit gave him the idea of combining American historical documents and contrasting Nazi documents in an exhibit that would combat what he recalled as ‘the whole problem of subversion.’” The end of World War II had brought both relief and paranoia to American shores: Its former ally, the Soviet Union, was now as much of a specter as Nazism, and the country’s political leadership believed that combatting Soviet influence and control should be the central geopolitical and domestic project of postwar America. In order to galvanize support, they needed a beleaguered American public to identify with its mission, and the Freedom Train became one strategy for fostering a unified identity.
Coblenz’s original vision didn’t come together. But in the fall of 1947, Little writes, the “‘Spirit of 1776’ locomotive pulled seven white cars with red, white, and blue stripes running the length, and a golden eagle with wings spread or three-foot high gold letters spelling FREEDOM TRAIN appeared on alternating cars.” The locomotive chugged along sans Nazi documents, but had 133 pieces of all-American memorabilia, including the Mayflower Compact, the Bill of Rights, Washington’s copy of the Constitution (again), Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the United Nations Charter and the Iwo Jima flag. Some 50 million Americans, or one third of the nation’s population at the time, are estimated to have seen the train over the course of its travels, and to have had the opportunity to sign a “Freedom Pledge” (“I am an American. A free American. / Free to speak —without fear / Free to worship God in my own way. / Free to stand for what I think is right / Free to oppose what I believe wrong / Free to choose those who govern my country / This heritage of Freedom I pledge to uphold / For myself and all mankind”), or buy souvenirs, such as a handkerchief with the Bill of Rights printed on it. As Thomas D’Arcy Brophy, president of the advertising agency Kenyon and Eckhardt, and president of the exhibition, put it, the idea was to “sell America to Americans.”
This had been, until Trump, the basic operating principle of those who held the reins of American power. The goal was to convince people of the ideological coherence and moral goodness of their country. But Trump has never sold anything except himself. So, today, there’s the ballroom, the arch, his face on our passports, and the two hundred fifty–dollar bill. Trump has no interest in enjoining us to feel a part of something greater than ourselves, in part because Trump doesn’t believe there is anything greater than himself. The semiquincentennial’s theme of a “Great American State Fair” may sound like something out of the past, an event that gathered Americans together in the earnest pursuit of fried Oreos and obscene fireworks displays, until you realize that Trump has planned his semiquincentennial program with Freedom 250, a public-private initiative run through the White House, not America 250, the official organization authorized through Congress. America 250 had already planned similar events for this year, dubbed “America’s Block Party,” enlisting artists such as Mary J. Blige, Chris Stapleton, Smashing Pumpkins, Anthony Ramos, and Chaka Khan. Trump and Freedom 250 went forward with their own competing version, and the “Great American State Fair,” molded in the administration’s agenda, has been sparsely attended. They booked acts like Young MC and Bret Michaels, but both eventually pulled out, and left only one man standing: Vanilla Ice.
And so there will be no Freedom Train this year. The American Freedom Train Foundation 250 attempted to bring it back, but couldn’t secure any corporate sponsors. There’s a Freedom Plane, a technologically advanced version, but far narrower in ambition; only eight cities with ten documents, and people can’t board the plane itself. There have been Freedom Trucks, supposedly, but I haven’t seen or heard tell of one rolling into town. The American people’s best bet to feel the noble expanse of freedom and to semiquincentennially celebrate their interconnectedness is through US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy’s reality show, The Great American Road Trip, in which he takes his large family across the country’s highways and byways to various historic landmarks. Though even that, slated to premiere in June, has yet to drop any episodes.
I thought there would be . . . more. More flags, more parades, more fireworks, more minuteman cosplay, more Washington and Jefferson and Adams, more hootin’ and hollerin’. More bullshit. I was ready for the bullshit; I’ve been primed for the bullshit my whole life. Perhaps the view is just obscured from where I live, inside the socialist republic of Mamdanistan, awash in the orange and blue of our NBA champions, but I thought there would be bigger and brighter reminders of the 250th than the window display of the Chase Bank on Flatbush Avenue.
That doesn’t mean it’s not out there. Twice, my Instagram stories have alerted me to merchandise being sold at Walmart. Perhaps in a backyard, next to the open flame of a grill, one can enjoy an all-American beer-and-hot-dog combination alongside Walmart-brand red, white, and blue paper cups and plates. Except the plates read like an accidental obituary, declaring “America 1776–2026.” This could’ve been avoided with a bit of oversight, but I’m inclined to believe it’s the truest reflection of the national mood—that everyone involved in the plate’s production knew it, that the people buying them know the same, and every “celebration” across the country will carry the feeling of a wake.
In the ten years between Lyndon Johnson authorizing the creation of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (“to recall to the nation and to the world the ‘majestic significance of the Revolution’”) and the bicentennial, MLK and RFK were assassinated, the National Guard killed four students at Kent State, and Nixon brought us Watergate (which you could relive in the spring of ‘76 via the cinematic release of All the President’s Men). The streets had been transformed into battlegrounds by Black Panthers, feminists, hippies, and LGBT activists, not to mention racists and cops. It was the year of “The Soiling of Old Glory”—the Stanley Forman photo of Joseph Rakes assaulting Ted Landsmark with the American flag at a protest over busing in Boston. The Freedom Train was in Lowell, Massachusetts, on April 30, 1975, when Saigon fell and America lost the Vietnam War. It kept chugging along.
The bicentennial celebrations attempted to put the pieces together again, to speak in a unified voice that Pryor knew could no longer exist, if it ever did. He yuks it up for a few minutes on “Bicentennial Nigger,” until he’s finally had enough of playing the Tom. He gets tired toward the end, the voice losing steam because, as good as he is at deploying it, his soul can’t bear what his critique is asking of him. “I don’t know where my own mama is now. She up yonder in that big white folks in the sky. Y’all probably done forgot about her . . .”
Then he drops the Uncle Tom voice. He’s Richard Pryor in 1976 again, where “they” are having a bicentennial, and reality swallows the room.
“But I ain’t gonna never forget it.”
Remembering hurts.
Gil Scott-Heron didn’t do voices, save for the occasional moments he slipped into the Caribbean accent of his father, a Jamaican soccer player. But he had a voice—an Otis Redding kind of voice, husky, worn, already grandfatherly even in his twenties. “Gil clearing his throat coughed up more gravitas than many gruff MCs’ tuffest sixteen bars,” Greg Tate wrote on the occasion of Scott-Heron’s passing in 2011, “Being a bona fide griot and Orisha ascendant will do that. Being a truth teller, soothsayer, word magician, and acerbic musical op-ed columnist will do that. . . . Shouldering the task of carrying Langston Hughes, Billie Holiday, Paul Robeson, and the Black Arts Movement’s legacies into the world of 1970s African American popular song will do that too.” In the bicentennial year, Scott-Heron found himself tasked with remembering, just as those before him had done. In response to the original Freedom Train, Langston Hughes had penned a poem, also called “Freedom Train,” which appeared in the 1947 issue of the New Republic, and which Paul Robeson would record a reading of:
I’m gonna check up on this Freedom Train.
Who’s the engineer on the Freedom Train?
Can a coal black man drive the Freedom Train?
Or am I still a porter on the Freedom Train?
Is there ballot boxes on the Freedom Train?
Do colored folks vote on the Freedom Train?
When it stops in Mississippi will it be made plain
Everybody’s got a right to board the Freedom Train?
On his 1976 album It’s Your World, Scott-Heron picks up the mantle with “Bicentennial Blues,” a spoken word piece. “America has got the blues and it’s a bicentennial edition,” he bellows, though he’s also measured and calm, a 27-year-old bluesologist delivering the news. The country by then was saturated in bicentennial spectacle and consumerism. As Scott-Heron said: “The year the symbol transformed into the B-U-Y centennial / Buy a car / Buy a flag / Buy a map / Until the public en masse has been bludgeoned into bicentennial submission.”
“The Declaration is the Polaris of our political order—the fixed star of freedom,” Gerald Ford said in his bicentennial address. “It is impervious to change because it states moral truths that are eternal.” But from where he was speechifying at the National Archives, Ford had to acknowledge that his was a hard sell. “That eternal truth is the great promise of the Declaration, but it certainly was not self-evident to most of mankind in 1776. I regret to say it is not universally accepted in 1976. Yet the American adventure not only proclaimed it; for 200 years we have consistently sought to prove it true. The Declaration is the promise of freedom.” Gil was not moved. “The blues is grown now, full grown, and you can / Trace the evolution of the blues on a parallel line with the evolution of this country / From Plymouth Rock to acid-rock / From thirteen states to Watergate / The blues is grown, but not the home / The blues is grown, but the country has not.” He saw an immature nation convincing itself of an unearned bastion of freedom and democracy, exercising its power in the same manner one would expect from inexperience and delusion.
I have It’s Your World on vinyl and have reached for it more than a few times this year, sometimes in tandem with Bicentennial Nigger listenings. For a while, I was certain that the semiquincentennial would be similar to the bicentennial Gil and Richard were responding to, and that I would want to tap into the furious clarity they offered. But there has been little worth reacting to.
It’s been just another blues year. A blues year for the Kennedy Center. A blues year for kids on SNAP. A blues year for Minneapolis. A blues year for Alex Pretti and Renee Good. A blues year at Delaney Hall. A blues year for Venezuela. A blues year for Lebanon. A blues year for Iran. A blues year for Gaza—every year is a blues year for Gaza, but it’s a blues year that the regime is proud of. They feel no embarrassment about what they have presided over; they are excited that not everyone feels invited to their party. And I feel embarrassed that the only voice I have to respond with is the one I honed over the comparatively halcyon Obama years, when recruiting Uncle Toms was easier because more people wanted and needed to believe in the farce of American progress. I am yearning to reject something that is not even being sold to me.
My voice, now, feels closer to Gil’s on the song “Tomorrow’s Trane,” which features musical accompaniment composed by Alice Coltrane, early into her Hindu mysticism era. He belts, strains, and cracks to meet the frantic momentum of the saxophone as they charge hard into locked areas of otherworldly consciousness. “Music from the spirit helps you when you hear it / The music from the spirit helps you when you hear it / The music from the spirit helps you when you hear it / We need you, need you / And the time is now / And our strength is how.” It’s almost too much—too much pain, too much soul-stirring, too much urgency. Too much remembering. If the nation does have a singular voice it can call upon, it’s here in Gil’s belting, straining, and cracking underneath the uncertainty of its survival.
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