On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, our nation inaugurated a man who is the antithesis of every ideal King stood for. Still, in President Donald Trump’s inaugural address, he invoked Dr. King’s spirit, promising to “strive together to make his dream a reality.” What’s so abhorrent about this invocation is not the president’s despicably racist history — it’s the fact that he does not know where his words originated, nor does he seem to care.
This is yet another example of Trumpism fostering societal regression for people of color, debasing the principles upon which my predecessors acted.
King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which Trump called on, was directly influenced by the language of Langston Hughes’s poem “I Dream a World.” Hughes writes, “I dream a world where man / No other man will scorn” and where “Black or white, / Whatever race you be, / Will share the bounties of the earth / And every man is free.”
Additionally, on April 4, 1967, King gave a national speech, recorded live in New York City’s Riverside Church, in which he condemned the war in Vietnam and brought in lines from Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again” — “Oh yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, and yet I swear this oath America will be!”
According to Jason Miller, distinguished professor and public scholar in NC State’s English department, King started including Hughes’s language in his work because it made him less of an academic and more accessible to the average Black American.
Hughes was the poet of the people, and King knew this.
Miller began his research on Hughes by focusing on his poetry about American lynchings, hoping to see what additional areas of American culture Hughes’s legacy could be felt. That legacy is clearer than ever today, but the bastardization of Hughes’s poem and ideals began in 1980.
“Now, what becomes absolutely startling is that ‘Make America Great’ then crops up in the 1980 Ronald Reagan campaign,” Miller said. “Buttons were printed out that said ‘Let’s Make America Great Again.’ It continues to have a life of its own when President Clinton in the 1990s actually starts his campaign.”
When Rick Santorum ran for president in 2012, his campaign team put together another riff on Hughes’s poem, claiming his platform would fight to ‘make America America again.’
“The very next day, [Santorum] turned up at a press conference, and he was interrogated,” Miller explained. “People said, ‘Why would you take the words of a communist, anti-American subversive poet and use it as your conservative, right-wing slogan?’”
This is exactly what is happening with Trumpism. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan is a degrading representation of the intentions that Hughes and King had when dispersing this language to the American public.
Miller states that “origins are always inextricably tied to purposes, and so when we understand how things started, we can also understand how it’s being used.”
“What is startling to so many intelligent thinkers [about] the way that [Hughes’s work] it’s invoked in the context of white supremacy, and Donald Trump’s campaigns of cruelty is that we’re back to where we started with this voice calling for an America that never was,” Miller said.
Hughes’s and King’s dream was not to make America great again because it never was great for my people.
Hughes writes, “Let America be America again / Let it be the dream it used to be / Let it be the pioneer on the plain / Seeking a home where he himself is free.” Then, Hughes inserts parenthetical commentary, saying “America never was America to me.” and “There’s never been equality for me / Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’”
“People like Hughes [are] talking about underrepresented people who’ve never had that America, who have always been shackled, who have always been under the subject of lynching and other cruelties, sometimes not so overtly named,” Miller said.
Hughes is still a poet of the people for Black America, and Trump not actively acknowledging where his own slogan comes from demonstrates yet another instance of appropriated Black language to advance white supremacy and systemic oppression.
The transformation of “Let America Be America Again” to “Make America Great Again” is dangerous because Hughes’s poem is a dialogue between two ideas, an attempt to reconcile the ideals of America with its reality for Black people; but Trump’s slogan makes the idea of an idealized America monologic, only giving white Americans a place in the conversation.
“Anytime you get a monologic statement, one person declaring things without dialogue — that’s when you lose all the ambiguity, the depth, the cultural history and, most frighteningly, the ability to listen to other people that have different perspectives than you on what America has been and can be,” Miller said.
Too often, white America silences people of color and refuses to acknowledge the reality of their experiences with racial injustice.
It’s why we are seeing attacks by the Trump administration against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. It’s why Trump and his MAGA cult believe white people are discriminated against.
Trump and white supremacy are actively silencing the experiences of people of color, and we will not stand for it. We will not listen to a fascist manipulate, however unknowingly, the words of Civil Rights figures to advance a narrative that protects white America once again.
I implore any individual reading this, especially white Americans, to embrace the origins of our current political language. To fight alongside people of color for what “Make America Great Again” should really mean: uncovering the true ideals of America and making it great for once, for everyone.
