Make America America Again Guy Vs Indian

Permit America exist America once more.
Let information technology be the dream it used to be.
Let it exist the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it exist that great stiff land of honey
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That whatever man exist crushed past one to a higher place.

(It never was America to me.)

 - Langston Hughes, "Let America Be America Again," 1936

American poet and writer Langston Hughes on the steps in front of his firm in Harlem, New York.

In moments of uncertainty, we often return to familiar touchstones. For me, 1 such ballast of comfort and clarity is the poetry of Langston Hughes, icon of the Harlem Renaissance.

During recent weeks, I've institute myself ruminating on Hughes's "Let America Be America Again," especially its amazing opening stanzas. In these 10 lines, Hughes evokes the power of the American promise, coupled with the hurting of indignity and inequality. He speaks to the complex mix of rage and hope, of anxiety and optimism, that characterizes the black experience in America—and that I would debate has characterized the experience of many Americans at some point, white, brown, black, ethnic, and immigrant.

Over the past year, information technology has become clear that the noxious swill of rage and anxiety remains as potent every bit ever. Regardless of which side of the US election each of us was on, we all detect ourselves living with a public discourse that has become increasingly callous, cynical, and polarizing.

So, as we launch ourselves into a new year, I find myself reflecting on where nosotros go from here—how nosotros counterbalance anger and hopelessness with radical promise and optimism, and how nosotros create, in Hughes's perfectly chosen words, "that great strong country of love" and dignity for all.

Two reactions to our current moment

Hughes's poem captures a tension I've noticed in many of my daily interactions over the past several weeks, in all kinds of settings and among all kinds of people, including myself: a tension between a sense that our times are dangerously unprecedented and a sense that while dangerous, they are all likewise familiar.

On the one paw, many of us experience that the globe has been turned upside down. To read the headlines is to see an unfamiliar landscape in which several unsettling trends have converged. The proliferation of fake news and the prevalence of brazen falsehoods on air and online are undermining religion in basic facts. The burgeoning democratic institutions that captured the imagination of Alexis de Tocqueville nearly 200 years ago—our civil order, our free printing, our universities—are increasingly beleaguered and besieged. Ascension hate speech and violence across the country has rightfully frightened many people. All this constitutes an attack on what nosotros thought were well-established societal norms.

On the other hand, some of us expect to history and recognize that our current moment is not without precedent. To me, one articulate parallel is America's post-Reconstruction era in the South, when some Americans worked to scroll dorsum and repeal the hard-won voting rights and educational and economic opportunities that brought liberty and dignity to the lives of so many of their fellow citizens.

Indeed, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and all kinds of othering are non new. Identity politics has always been a role of American life. Our founding fathers codified identity politics into our earliest documents, valuing the voices and contributions of white men above all others: Women were denied the right to vote; enslaved African Americans counted as three-fifths of a person; ethnic peoples were exploited and marginalized. And throughout our history, waves of immigrants from Europe and elsewhere were initially met with suspicion and often discrimination. It'southward important to call back that over the course of our long, messy march toward justice, women and men—not but our predecessors, but nosotros, the people, of every generation—accept endured prejudice and persecution. We have seen it with our own eyes, and lived it in our own lives.

I'll never forget coming of age equally a gay man in the 1980s—watching AIDS ravage our community as politicians stayed silent. I'll never forget the brutality of apartheid, and how our own American government condemned Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and the other freedom fighters seeking to end that unconscionable regime. I'll never forget watching as the marches and protests unfolded in Ferguson in August 2014, or continuing with John Lewis on the Edmund Pettus Span a few months later, awestruck equally he recounted the bloody Sunday in Selma 50 years earlier.

America'south rich and inspiring history has taught us that progress is not linear. As the dazzling Zadie Smith recently wrote, "Progress is never permanent, will always exist threatened, must be redoubled, restated, and reimagined if it is to survive." So while these twin reactions—the sense that our moment is either unprecedented or has clear precedent—may seem at odds, they actually reaffirm a deeper understanding of the persistence of injustice in our world. They as well remind united states of america of the strength we must continue to find within ourselves to persevere and fight for our democratic institutions and ideals.

Against divisions, affirming dignity

Over the past 3 years, I've written about the ways inequality creates and exacerbates divisions. These include divisions of course, race, gender, identity, and ability, as well as differences in how we make sense of injustice in our lives.

There is no better illustration of this last category than the political binary of an election twelvemonth, when our two-party system induces united states to spend months defining our collective future in terms of us versus them, this stark choice versus that i. This rhetoric reinforces the notion of zip-sum outcomes, and encourages united states of america to believe that the gains of one happen at the expense of another.

We must resist this impulse. Information technology is like shooting fish in a barrel to lose sight of what nosotros have in common, just the fact is that all of usa share a cardinal man aspiration: to alive in dignity. This is true no matter what we look similar, where we live, how we worship, who we love, or what our abilities are. Whether by holding a decent-paying chore, having agency in the decisions that bear on united states of america, or freely expressing our thoughts and inventiveness, we spend our lives in pursuit of nobility for ourselves and our families. Recognizing this universal quest for dignity is a prerequisite for whatsoever meaningful work toward social justice.

I am not suggesting that dignity is guaranteed. In that location are people and systems that seek to rob people of their innate dignity. They advance narratives that pit communities against one some other—that let some to falsely merits that the simply way to ensure dignity for yourself is to strip it from others.

Of course, the dignity of i person does non preclude that of another. We can lift a poor Latina out of poverty and save a rural white man's mill job. We tin can fight to protect black lives and the lives of the law enforcement officers who protect us. Nosotros can concord up a buoy of low-cal for the "tempest-tost" refugees who seek safety and opportunity on our shores, and feel safety and secure in our neighborhoods and gathering places.

I'm not simply saying that we can do all these things; I'chiliad saying we must.

Our current context demands that we question our assumptions and expand our understanding of who is vulnerable and excluded. If inequality fuels the fault lines of division, then our shared pursuit of nobility must assistance bridge the gaps. To borrow a phrase from the vivid artist Lilla Watson, our liberation is bound upwardly together.

The path forwards:"America volition be!"

It might be tempting to ignore or abandon the common obligation that ties us together, to embrace a kind of nihilism of indifference or, worse, to retreat into anxiety or rage. But we tin can choose a better path forwards. With history every bit our guide, nosotros tin follow a path of promise—radical hope.

For Langston Hughes, born in 1902, the gap between America's promise and its practices was wide. The keen-grandchild of slaves on one side and slaveholders on the other—the child of educators and organizers—Hughes lived a life that demonstrated that the overwhelming fact of injustice does not obviate or relieve in whatever manner our responsibility to act confronting it. He showed that a person tin simultaneously feel righteous acrimony about the world and radical optimism for it. We must affirm the creed to which he gave voice, that the piece of work of creating the America nosotros envision requires optimism and resolve.

"America never was America to me," Hughes wrote in the penultimate stanza of his masterpiece. "And however I swear this oath—America volition exist!"

For as much progress as we have made, America has however to fully live up to its promise and founding aspiration to be a nation of liberty, dignity, and justice for all. Yet this noble vision remains equally profound as always.

At the Ford Foundation, our commitment to achieving this vision will not change. We resolve to continue fostering a fairer, more but America and world. We remain steadfast and unyielding in our support of the institutions and leaders fighting injustice and addressing inequality of every kind and category. And nosotros are grateful for your leadership—and partnership—during the critical months and years ahead.

With appreciation and unbridled hope,

Darren

rylandenalland1953.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/stories/posts/let-america-be-america-again-a-new-year-s-reflection/

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