Making America Great Again

Making America Great Again

Why Race Still Matters in America

Making America requires us to expose the sickness in America that doesn’t allow us to be civil or united in order to have liberty and justice for all. The notion of making American great again calls us back to periods in our history that our nasty, ugly, hateful and not great for many citizens of this country. 

Before and after the Presidency of Barack Obama highlights why race still matters in America. An awakening of racial and cultural hatred displayed against not just Blacks but Brown and mixed raced citizens in this country grew. Police brutality and racial profiling has always been a problem in America. It did not just start under President Obama, it was escalated with the advance technology of social media. 

Just in recent news, the white woman who accused Emmitt Till of whistling and making sexual advances at her admitted that she lied. A jury let off the officers who confessed and told exactly how they killed this young, Black boy in cold blood. It’s like hitting the reset button on all of the racial and cultural mishaps that have caused racial tensions to worsen in America with recent cases. Justifying the injustice of Police Officers who are to serve and protect yet killing unarmed Black and Brown citizens with Black on Black or Brown on Brown crime is ludicrous. For many Black and Brown citizens, it’s like watching the not guilty verdicts of Police Officers who have shot down unarmed, Black and Brown citizens in America over the years become the new era of Jim Crow and segregation. 

When we take a closer look at homelessness, poverty that is generational, lack of economic and community development, educational inequality, the school to prison pipeline and health disparity in this country, a large number of Black, Brown and to go further, racial disparity within other minority groups including LGBT, Muslim, Islanders, etc., citizens of darker complexions are still disproportionate.

After we witnessed the murders of Medger Evers, Malcolm X, Dr. King and so many of this age, Trayvon Martin, Eric Gardner, Oscar Grant, Tamar Rice… the narrative of making America Great Again hasn’t changed. We’ll work to make America great again after tragedies that have torn us apart, only to keep us separate and unequal. Here’s a wake-up call America. We can keep telling the same story, but we’ll keep working to change how the story ends. 

As Nina Simone said in an interview, ask us a year from now how we feel about Civil Rights and if we'll still be fighting for them.