Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. celebrated his very last birthday, so it seems fitting that this year his holiday falls on his actual birthday. That being said, I’m sure Dr. King is rolling over in his grave at where this country has gone since his fateful assassination. The man who occupies the presidency is diametrically opposed to what Dr. King advocated for, and on the eve of Dr. King’s holiday weekend, Mr. Trump made explicit one of the implicit and insidious reasons why the immigration debate has always been so fraught.
When the man who occupies the presidency labels the very first Black republic in the world and the second-largest continent on the planet known for its majority-Black populations shitholes compared to a wealthy and prosperous majority-white country, one can no longer deny how he feels about people of a certain hue. When the man who occupies the presidency is so unmoored from history, and how that history has led to a contemporary where citizens of these countries feel they must leave their own nations to find opportunity in one that claims to accept “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses“—but with an asterisk and the tiniest of fine print that reads “Whites Only (even if this also had some rules and regulations based on ethnicity)—we must realize we are facing a crisis of conscience, and this conscience is entirely out of whack from the man we honor today.
“Merit-based” doesn’t mean what most Americans think it means, at least not in Mr. Trump’s mind, and it certainly doesn’t mean what Dr. King had meant that inspiring day in August almost fifty-five years ago. Of course, those of us—whether immigrant or native-born—who are of a certain race/ethnicity/hue have already known this. Mr. Trump has dog-whistled and plainly spoken it for years—decades, even—which is why when the news broke Thursday afternoon about his deplorable rhetoric, those who have been paying attention to the vitriol this man utters weren’t surprised. In fact, not even the White House could walk back those words, even though it tried to spin them. Trump’s comments underscore just who he thinks could ever be American—and make no mistake, this includes those of us who’ve been here for centuries through no will of our own, those of us who built this country with our blood, sweat, tears, and whose futures were perpetually owned by an elite class until a war had to be fought to end that peculiar institution.
A historical fact that is still, inexplicably, being litigated today.
According to Trump (and his Party, and his base), people from majority-Black countries could never merit long-term entrance and citizenship into the country their cousins helped create and build. Thinking that Haitians, a direct descendant of the revolutionary spirit that created the United States of America in the first place, aren’t fit to enter the country; or that Africans, whose intellect, skills, abilities, and resilience are so coveted they’ve been stolen and appropriated for centuries upon centuries would sully American shores now, is the height of hubris and wrongness. And as a Black woman who graduated from one of the top universities in the world, the Black population at this school was predominantly not from the United States. The Black tax is real, no matter from where one comes in the African Diaspora, but particularly those who are not born in the States. It is a tax levied completely because the color of our skin belies the nations from which we hail, nations that for too long have been overexploited for their materials and undervalued for their humanity.
It is this last point that makes it possible for “Black Lives Matter” to be a controversial position and statement; for it to require the forfeit of nine black lives in a church before lawmakers finally remove a traitorous symbol from their State House grounds; for an entire city to have unclean water for years; for wildly disparate responses to natural disasters at home and abroad based on the demographics of those affected. For Black bodies to be valued only by the profit they can generate, to the point entire economies and industries are created upon their backs.
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The narrative surrounding Martin Luther King Jr., in many ways, has been neutralized and usurped by people who refuse to see just how radical he was, to the point of believing he would be on their side if he were alive today. This conveniently forgets how few people thought of Dr. King as a hero while he lived and breathed, primarily because he galvanized communities to demand the justice they were due when, for so long, they had suffered under state-sanctioned terror. The most frustrating part about Dr. King’s success for his opponents was he used rhetoric based on American ideals to do it. What Dr. King did with great effect, to the dismay of the status quo, was remind the country African Americans were citizens, too, and were due the rights and freedoms their white counterparts enjoyed. Fifty years later, we’re still fighting this fight; but unlike when Dr. King was alive, the man who occupies the presidency is more interested in upholding a Constitution with no amendments, let alone the ones from Thirteen on.
We are our grandmothers’ prayers / we are our grandfathers’ dreamings
I am a generation removed from the remarkable moment in our history. I didn’t personally experience segregated lunch counters or separate entrances or required seating by law, but my parents and grandparents and older cousins did. All I have are stories told to me, history made tangible by where I work, and my own attempts to pay homage to the period through my writing. Because of the generations before me, I could attend well-resourced school districts and enter into public establishments with the full expectation of being served. I can even say I voted for the first United States president of African descent twice. Yet, unfortunately, we are sliding back to a dark time when access to the American Dream was barred because of color—regardless if one was born in this country or not (or in many cases, for example, Charleston County, South Carolina, never really left).
To make matters worse, the man who occupies the presidency has been the loudest proponent of this regression. His entire mantra of “Make America Great Again” is to return to a time when America was most certainly not great. It was at its peak hypocrisy, of legislating who could receive the full rights and privileges of American citizenship, all based on the color of one’s skin. Now, thanks to the gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and gerrymandering running amok, the ground Dr. King and others fought so hard to gain are crumbling beneath our feet.
We continue to march, despite laws trying to make it a crime. We continue to vote, despite laws trying to disenfranchise. We continue to protect a country that, at many times, has gone out of its way not to protect us in return. The State doesn’t wait for us to pull out passports to make sure we’re homegrown Black Americans or born elsewhere. Even birth certificates of former presidents aren’t enough. Nevertheless, it doesn’t change the fact the last president’s father was from a continent the current titleholder so clearly disdains. It also doesn’t change the fact that it is the last president, and not the current one, who represents a dream realized instead of a dream constantly and continually deferred.
None of us expect our presidents to be perfect. They are humans just like we are, but we do expect them to uphold the creeds of this country’s founding. This is why we honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the first place. He forced the country to take a good, hard look at itself and reckon with the fact it was not what it was founded to be. And as we honor the fiftieth anniversary of his last living birthday, it is our duty, obligation, and right to ensure we continue to make this dream a reality and resist the forces that would have this country descend into nightmare. For current and future citizens. For those native or naturalized.
For all.
