By Julianne Malveaux (NNPA Newswire Columnist)
Our American exceptionalism allows us to shimmer, too fully in our greatness. We are the biggest and the baddest. We are the best armed and the most influential. We win the most Olympic medals, and we have the most nuclear weapons. We are so great that we wave our flags and shout out, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” In some ways, it is an imperialist chant, a chant of dominance, a chant that ignores the fact that we chant because we have the luxury, as a nation, of an uneven playing field, especially in terms of resources. I’m not jumping up and down and flag waving.
It took the Simones (Biles and Manuel) to win gold medals for me to celebrate the Olympics. It took just a flip of the switch, a flick of the kaleidoscope, for me to see it differently. While there is a great difference between the athlete who comes from a highly-subsidized Russian or Chinese environment and one who comes from an urban area combining grit and corporate sponsorship, as in the United States, or those who either make it on their own or cobble together possibilities, all of these athletes are chasing greatness and perfection. Indeed, their obstacles may be a metaphor for the challenges that we all face in life. Some will be subsidized, some will scrap, and sometimes the cream rises to the top, regardless of barriers.
Even as Olympians strutted their excellence, enforcing the notion that America is “great,” at least in our medal dominance, Republican candidate Donald Trump’s campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again.” The use of the word “again” suggests that we were great, once upon a time, and that we have to regain something that we lost. When were we “great?” What have we lost? What does it take to make us great again?
Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump said he views the 1980s as the time when things were good for the nation, though he also hearkened back to the late 1700s and early 1800s. “The industrial revolution was certainly ― in terms of economically ― that was when we started to grow,” Trump said. “I liked the Ronald Reagan years. I thought the country had a wonderful, strong image.”
The basis of the Industrial Revolution was a credit system that relied on using enslaved people as collateral to lend and spend for economic expansion. The North and South were always connected, even in war, with economics often trumping ideology. The Cornell University historian Edward Baptiste, in his book, “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of U.S. Capitalism,” connects the dots between southern oppression and northern complicity. The era that Mr. Trump touts includes legislation to penalize those who dare educate enslaved people in the early nineteenth century, and the oppression of Black Codes in the post-Reconstruction era. Mr. Trump wants to make America great again? For whom?
Whenever anyone does that throwback stuff, “we used to be great,” I have to wonder what he or she are nostalgic for. Do they wish they were in the land of cotton? Are they hankering for segregationist signs? Or are they simply pining for the days when, though it was unstated, White was right and everybody else had to step. This manifested by the assumption of deference, the assumption that African Americans would step aside and allow a White person behind them in line to step ahead or shrugging off microagressions because they “aren’t that deep.”
Many have touted our “Greatest Generation,” the World War II contributors, as people who made America great. Yeah? These folks had to elbow their way into our nation’s service, fighting for the right to fight, struggling for the right to contribute. Is this what you call greatness, Donald Trump? Are we all supposed to put blinders on to the cracks in our collective national armor?
Thus, it is exciting that President Obama signed an executive order to stop the rampant use of a distorted statement called the “Pledge of Allegiance.” He wrote that federal office and contractors should not force employees to swear to “One Nation under God,” and that’s a good thing. One nation? With a Back unemployment rate twice that of the White unemployment rate? How do I pledge allegiance to a flag “and to the Republic for which it stands.”
President Obama tickled me, for the first time during his presidency, by reminding us of the flaws in the Pledge of Allegiance. How do we transcend the flaws when Trump’s “great again” message suggests “slave again” to me?
Julianne Malveaux is an author and economist. Her latest book “Are We Better Off? Race, Obama and Public Policy.” Is available via amazon.com for whole and booking inquires visit julianemalveaux.com
The writer chooses to focus narrowly on negative aspects of the past.
Every nation has its shortcomings and sins.
From the 1940s to the late 1960s, America prevented the enslavement of a large part of mankind to Naziism and then Communism. But some people just don’t get it.
It is too sad (bad) that the NDG decided that the only view they chose to highlight was that of an “African-American” who has had, probably, little first-hand experience with the “terribleness” of this nation. Yes, we have all the blessings she suggested we have, but we have also shared them with the world. We are the only nation that has aired our “dirty laundry” before the world as we have dealt with them. It is tragic that we are led by people with the perspective she seems to have (including the current occupant of the White House) feel the need to heap guilt for all those blessings. And such people have felt the need to go to nations who still commit much more grievous atrocities than we ever did, with no remorse I might add, and apologize to them! It is nice, I suppose to live in such a terrible nation and make a better living than most in the nation trashing it.
So true…and yet last spring, when a 22 year old young black Woman in New York (K. Lake) wrote on her cap (in response to her Trump supporting co-workers) “America Never Was Great” – she got death threats.
So much for free speech and associated greatness in the United States…but I tend to find myself agreeing with Ms. Lake. And I cannot help but wonder at Trumps meaning. I remember the furor that erupted when minister Farakan said Hitler was (wickedly) great. And in that context, I can agree with Trump. By the standard of wickedness, the U.S. was great. (And straying from the point, why do we keep accepting the substitution of the word America for the United States?) Returning to the point; I don’t think a return to that old U.S. type of greatness would be an improvement. As a matter of fact, the “greatness” that Trump talks about would make the U.S. eligible for the type of damnation that Reverend Jeremiah Wright mentioned when he was soundly criticized for saying God damn America.
We can agree that America is a great country and has done wonderful things. WE WANT TO CELEBRATE the contributions of EVERYONE. But that does not mean we must forget and gloss over the fact we have made mistakes which we need to learn from.
We built fences in the 1940s too — they were for Japanese American internment camps. Ask the average 25-year-old and they will swear you are lying.
There is so much shared here that we can only agree to disagree. But let’s agree that is an American privilege and jointly celebrate that fact.