I will not be the first or the last to say, the State of the dis-Union was on full display last night. Republicans raucously devouring every force-fed line, joke and lie from the President, and the Democrats grimly swallowed the bitter pill of an unscrupulous Donald Trump. President Trump, if you have not guessed, is incapable of a sustained show of gratitude or conciliation. Even his mention of the standard rapture and flag draping around the Party was cloaked in a backhanded slap at black NFL players. He made sure to mention that patriotism is the sum total of placing your hand over your heart and standing [ not kneeling] at the playing of the anthem. So, am I to assume if you exercise your rights but are not the right skin color, it is obvious you are “Sons of Bitches?” NFL player Julius Thomas took up the Colin Kaepernick initiated kneeling protest after the President’s insult, back in December. As a young black man, I took up that protest years ago. Growing up in the sixties there were many, many times that my country, my flag, and my anthem did not ring out with the truth of its belief, that all men are created equal.
If you deny that, you are as bad as Mr. Trump…
I marched, I held my balled fist high and my friends and I applauded when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised a gloved black fist at the 1968 Olympics. Publicly my great-uncle and great-grandmother, who raised me, were appalled because they had been taught to be complacent to public protest. My great-grandmother was raised in Southern Maryland, and as a child of the south, at the turn of the century, public approval of civil rights could get you lynched. Those are lessons that stay with you for life. So, when I heard the man, who in recent weeks, call the continent of my ancestors a “shithole” or “house,” if that makes a difference to you, address the nation last night I recoiled. Yes, I sneer openly when I see his face or hear his voice because he sneers openly at the faces and voices of people of color. If you are still making the excuse of boys will be boys or locker room talk and issuing mulligans then I have a white hood for you.
This is not a new phenomenon in American politics, Woodrow Wilson screened in the White House D.W. Griffith’s racist film Birth of a Nation, and as a result, the Klan marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. Lyndon Johnson made the N-word a regular epithet in the splendor of the Oval Office. Now we have a suspected, enemy collaborating, draft dodging, woman abusing, racist and proven liar addressing the nation two weeks after Martin Luther King Jr.’s eighty-ninth birthday.
If you detect some anger in my syntax, GOOD…
I have news America, Wally Cleaver is not around to ask Mary Ellen Rogers out to the sock hop, nor is “Kookie” going to lend you his comb with a little dab of Brylcreem any longer. My people and people like me are not asking for a place in this world, we have earned it. So, the next time one of your conservative friends tells you about economic anxiety or frustration with people who do not speak the language; tell them my ancestors spoke a different language cramped in the bottom of slave ships and they were the victims of real ‘chain’ migration.
Vote in 18’ for Change
