Make America Great Again…Coded Language for the Racist…
…but the real cry of the Middle-Class or How Trump’s Message is spot-on Republican
By now, everyone’s heard of the death-threatening actions of Krystal Lake, the college student working her way through school at Home Depot who dared to wear an “America Was Never Great Hat.” Never citing racism, Lake said that her wearing the hat was in response to co-workers in support of Trump and that she was beleaguered with Trump’s campaign of exclusion.
On various social media sites Black folks are rising to her defense and raising the question, “exactly when was America great?” While I understand everyone’s sentiment, I have to take the rode less traveled and disagree. In all of it’s sickness, racism, and double standards, America once was “great” for most people willing to work hard, earn a decent living, save money, and so on and so forth…the so-called American Dream (minus the getting hung, burned, beat, having your home firebombed stuff).
I say that in lieu of the world in which we now live where our sister, Ms. Lake, upon graduation (unless she had scholarships or parents paid for school) will have mountains of debt, based on her field of Communications, will enter a world of freelance and contract work, and will be unable to afford to live in the same neighborhood she grew up in. That’s because America is definitely reeling and we all had a warning of it during the glory days of former President, Bill Clinton.
William Jefferson Clinton, Governor of Arkansas, was elected the 42nd President of the United States of America on 20 January, 1993. Black Americans were excited and eager having accepted the new President as their own. He had that Southern twang and played saxophone and was a breath of fresh air after Big George Bush.
It was during that first year that a small book was put out by a little known publishing company, FCN Publishing Company. The title of the book was “A Torchlight for America” and it was authored by Minister Louis Farrakhan. There was no New York Times Book Review nor any media coverage concerning the release of this book. A quick look at its content, some 23 years later, and the chapter titles read like a mirror image for problems that are ailing our country today: America is on Her Deathbed, Hiding the Light, Greed & Leadership’s State of Mind, Fixing the Public School System, Rebuilding the Economy, Developing America’s Moral Backbone, & Ending the Health Care Crisis.
This is how the book opens:
America is clearly suffering, and from my vantage point, America lies on her deathbed in dire need of guidance and a new direction. If you examine her vital signs, you will have to agree that they show America is steadily on the decline.. …Without truth the American people are left paralyzed, unable to constructively address their problems. Min. Farrakhan
“A Torchlight for America” is full of insight. Yet, the talk throughout the book is of decline. If something is to decline, it must first have some place to decline from and this is where our story begins.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, if you have yet to read “The Warmth of Other Suns” please stop reading this now and proceed to that book. Isabel Wilkerson, via interviews and research paints a poignant picture of some of the six (6) million people who migrated from the South to the North and out West between 1910 and 1970.
Black people wanted to escape the overt and constant racism that Jim Crow assaulted them with daily as well as get out of the fields that their forefathers toiled in for free. There was factory work, the word spread silently through the Black community, and many of us had to “steal away” in the night — even after slavery (surprise) we were viewed as property — to take that trip out of the south.
The Detroit Black Middle-Class was born out of Ford factory employees, with Ford’s penchant for hiring Black employees a thing of legend. Blacks in Seattle had to wage war with Boeing while the US waged war with the Axis Powers, but they eventually overcame that obstacle and many upwardly mobile Blacks in Seattle found their origins there. The same is true of factories all over America.
In the “Autobiography of Malcom X” Malcolm described the “uppity, society” type in this fashion:
What I thought I was seeing there in Roxbury were high-class, educated, important Negroes, living well, working in big jobs and positions. Their quiet homes sat back in their mowed yards. These Negroes walked along the sidewalks looking haughty and dignified, on their way to work, to shop, to visit, to church. Malcolm X
And, although Malcolm X said these Black people were actually working menial jobs like porters, postal work, etc. it just shows that even having that form of employment, one could improve their life from a life of field work and sharecropping. One could buy property, send their children to college, even do as much travel as one possibly could in those deep days of segregation.
Fast-forward forty-plus years and it’s an entirely different picture.
The reality of modern America is that most people will never live to be Middle Class. When Professor Amy Glasmeier of MIT developed her Living Wage Calculator what she learned was that the Middle Class shrank considerably between 2001 and 2011.
When I look at the minimum wage compared to the living wage, in many places in the United States, it would take working two-and-a-half to three minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. So from the standpoint of how families are doing, we can say clearly that minimum wage as a baseline is making it very difficult for families. That’s the first thing that jumps out to me. Professor Amy Glasmeier.
Listed above is the top ten states as far as income required to be Middle Class Lower and Upper Bound. Some people look at those numbers and balk thinking that they can easily reach the Lower Bound Middle Class numbers…until they do the calculations.
If we were to look at the last state on the list, Mississippi, and what it takes to be lower Middle Class there — $25,309 — that number seems so low it’s almost laughable. But what does that equal to as far as hourly wage? According to convertunits.com:
As a simple baseline calculation, let’s say you take 2 weeks off each year as unpaid vacation time. Then you would be working 50 weeks of the year, and if you work a typical 40 hours a week, you have a total of 2,000 hours of work each year. In this case, you can quickly compute the annual salary by multiplying the hourly wage by 2000. Your hourly pay of $12.65 is then equivalent to an average annual income of $25,300 per year.
I can almost say with 100% surety that most jobs are not only hiring for less than $12.65 an hour but that the chances of an employee even getting 40 hours a week in the current economy is almost impossible.
And this is why Donald Trump’s message is almost a double entendre — the true Republican message indeed.
By definition, any Religious person that maintains their Religion’s values and has a desire for an upright society would be classified as a Conservative. Furthermore, as a person rises up the tax bracket, they also desire less government interference and are looking for tax breaks. Supposedly, this is what the Republican Party stands for.
But what we all can agree on is when Donald Trump says “Make America Great Again,” the above image (of Black folk hung) is what comes to Black people’s minds…and based on the death threats hurled at our sister, Ms. Lake, and the campaign trail of Mr. Trump where Mob mentality and racism prevailed, it is exactly the same thing that most Trump supporters see too.
America has potential. The principles laid out by the Founding Fathers of the country and the apparent hypocrisy of their words laid the foundation for this countries culture. America speaks of freedom while working to curtail the freedom of it’s lowest citizens. America preaches about being a country of immigrants yet vehemently rejects all-non white immigrants. And this has always been the case.
The thing is, now, America is becoming a place that practically no one can afford to live in — white or Black and all people are being led like sheep — whether it’s by the slick Clinton machine that imprisoned more Black folk than any other Presidency or the Trump campaign that screams all of this “America Great” rhetoric, yet the one doing the screaming has always been in the 1% and has no plan or intention to help those who are his supporters.
Our sister Krystal Lake expects to be laid off from Home Depot and is currently looking for a job in her field. At 22, she’s growing up in a different world than the world Minister Farrakhan grew up in.
When Minister Farrakhan was 22, America was entering some of it’s greatest years of prosperity (and hanging Black folk wholesale). Black people knew that they had to work harder, focus on education, etc. These are the morals that were taught in that generation on down to mine. Racism was in your face.
The world that Ms. Lake is growing up in — the so-called “post-racial” world is a world of lies and fallacies. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “the Great Recession and its aftermath is the longest, most severe period of economic weakness in more than seven decades,” and as a result unemployment among college graduates is high. That, coupled with the fact that the factories or other service jobs that the non-college grad would work are dried up, leads to an exorbitant amount of unemployment.
This affects people of all races…and like Minister Farrakhan mentioned above, “Without truth the American people are left paralyzed, unable to constructively address their problems.”
I close with more words from “A Torchlight For America:”
Even though America says she wants change and renewal, she must deal with the basis of this country’s woes. Either she must evolve from the limited vision of the founding fathers and repudiate that vision, or, America must say that she believes in the true vision of the founding fathers and that darker people will never be respected as equals inside of this nation. Min. Farrakhan.
