The Civil Rights movement was the only miracle I have ever witnessed. There is little evidence prior to that of citizens being able to bend capitalism, and demand this country live up to its well-stated and off repeated ideals. Historically, the words have different meanings if you’re Black, and not just the paragraphs of purple prose eloquently invoking liberty, freedom and equality. These resonate with White Americans as defining ideals. Black Americans, however, can see with their own eyes that these do not apply to them. What the gentile southerners called family plantations were in reality forced labor camps, nothing more or less.
The great migration northward gave fleeing Blacks access not to American dreams but to to America’s nightmares in the form of dilapidated, dangerous, rat-infested housing. Just a few individuals were permitted to dream of upward mobility while most were consigned to poverty. White politicians with the power and the money thought they were clever when they built highways designed to serve as barriers, making sure Blacks stayed put in deplorable conditions. These were virulently racist boundaries, rendered in concrete and steel.
And that’s just the backstory to today’s cruelty. Now we have vicious attacks of people who honor diversity, embrace inclusion and end inequity. They are mocked, ridiculed and even attacked.
What we now see is a violent, grotesque backlash, a shameful attempt to squelch efforts to pay back a little bit we owe for those of 400 years of oppression.
Trump and his cronies would will politics to revert to the racial dynamics of the 1950s. This backward looking is futile and pointless and self-defeating for the Whites themselves. There are many ways to improve the lives of Whites without blaming Blacks.
Imagine instead Black Americans as our bridge to Africa, the least developed continent where they facilitate the construction of companies and trade relationships, and this becomes one of America’s competitive advantages.
The same might also be said of Hispanic Americans. The true solution to cross border flows of desperate people is investment in the industries that employ Hispanics and the education to get higher level jobs. Instead, the land of the free and the home of the brave allies itself with rightwing authoritarian regimes that murder their own citizens and capitulate to criminal enterprises. Our country stands behind the assassins and give them our assistance. Which is the bigger crime, kidnapping (and raping, torturing and murdering) Africans or enabling the oppression of hungry but hard working Latinos gathered in an America south of here? The Hispanic community in the US (66M) should be our bridge to the people of South America (437M) for trade and commercial development.
A century ago this idea was called Pan Americanism and the idea was that America’s cultural diversity was a tremendous but underutilized economic asset.
Recreating a world in which the U.S. was the overwhelmingly dominant economy is not possible even if it were desirable. And rolling back the gains achieved by the feminist revolution, the civil rights movement, the defense of LGBTQ rights and our other successes cannot happen. In the great thesaurus in the Cloud MAGA is an equivlant term to “Make Minorities Docile and Compliant Again,” as if that made America great.
In Trump’s alternative history America is not an immigrant nation, transformed by glorious diversity, the world’s first multicultural nation. It is the right’s sincere and profound belief — as always, without evidence — that returning to an America run by wealth White men would be superior. Can they possibly be more wrong? Deport them to Finland or some other one color country without jazz, barbeque ribs or basketball (or grits, rock and roll or professional football, for that matter….)
