Dear Donald Trump,
I will start this letter by saying this: I do not like you.
I do not believe in what you stand for. I do not agree with your callous attitude, your rendition of races into easily digestible insults, nor your hypocrisy of being for the common man while maintaining absurd, if exaggerated, amounts of wealth.
I do not know much about business. I’m very weak when it comes to economics. You may be a good businessman, as far as your accumulation of wealth. From what I’ve read and heard, I don’t think you’re an ethical one; you mistreat employees, practiced exclusionary methods of sales, and repeatedly mishandled funds and people. Wealthy you may be, but that in no way translates to what makes you a decent or terrible person.
I’ve never felt inclined to write a letter to a public figure, although I’m sure there have been times in the past when I should have. However, I’ve decided I cannot willfully ignore what you are attempting to do as a presidential candidate.
The grievous error you make in your campaign, aside from the racism, bigotry, fear-mongering and blatant disregard to facts, is your campaign slogan itself: Make America Great Again.
The error is your belief that America is no longer great.
For minority populations whose great grandparents lived through lynching, through public police beatings, through wage protests and Jim Crow, through internment camps, through the holocaust, through the Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee, through the trials of immigration and Ellis Island, through being denied the vote and for being sent to the back of the room--for them, this country is better than it ever has been. We are living through the first century unchained from the iron hand of pure American colonialism, from nationwide bigoted law, from courts that upheld eugenics, from Sundown Towns and open segregation.
Minorities are living in a nation where we have greater access to the workplace, to education, to marriage, to roam freely, than we did one hundred years ago. Of course, things are not perfect. Police brutality is still an imposing remnant of the Old Dominion. Racism still exists in the highest levels of the American government. Politicians are exposed daily for their hateful rhetoric, their exclusionist and elitist language, their unequal application of the law and the misuse of their religious beliefs. Things are not perfect. From the inception of this country, they never have been, and I do not expect that they shall ever be.
What you propose, however, is not a "Great America", but a revival of the Old Dominion and the Old Guard. You hearken to a time when America was more "simple" under strict race based rules, through separation of the classes, through tight knit borders of a country that was blissfully unaware of the plight of immigrants, of refugees, of minorities and women and Muslims. Which, in other words, had been living in a forced Utopian vision that was dystopia for all who did not fit the bill of the ideal American.
Where you go wrong is by trying to convince your supporters that, because they aren't working their dream jobs, because they feel the economy is rough, because they are no longer able to force their ideal sexuality, their ideal religion, their ideal lifestyle, that this country is somehow less "great". You tell them you’re a businessman, that you’ve created an amazing brand, that you know how to make deals, how to make money, except there’s a problem: America is not a corporation. America is not a brand you can package, one that you can sell and negotiate. It’s a country filled with individuals, with people who have built your brand with their hands, your golf courses, your hotels, your casinos, your towers. Those people are not a brand, they are Americans, and their labor, their dedication to their work—whether or not you pay them—is not something to be “negotiated”.
You tell them that you will “Make America Great Again”, but that begs the question: When was this greatness?
Was it the days of European domination over indigenous tribes?
Was it the days when a plantation owner could easily reap his pay from the backs of African-American slaves?
Was it the days of population control that allowed for upper class cities to remain easier upper class?
Was it the days that the European race was allowed to remain pure, when inter-racial relationships were banned, when homosexuality was punishable, when difference was not tolerated?
Was it when your popular “Law and Order” was lynching for those who dared challenge the powers that be?
Was it segregated lunch counters?
Was it before women’s suffrage?
Was it “separate but equal”?
Was it the occupation of Alcatraz Island by Native American tribes to fight for land and water quality?
Was it forcing protestors from the street with firehoses, attack dogs and batons?
What you don’t seem to understand, Mr. Trump, is that America was once a land of uniform subjugation. It was once a place of Constitutionally enforced slavery, legally binding racism, unfair working wages for Hispanics, blacks, women, gays, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, and any other group outside of the Western European ideal. It was a country of public lynching, of unabashed police violence, of masters' whips, of psychological warfare against the "undesirable" population. It was a place of eternal daily struggle to reach some semblance of equality, of justice, of peace. It was a place where women were expected to be nothing but child-bearers, to stay at home, to have the meal ready, to quietly take the beatings, the catcalls, the second-place slot.
And now, for minorities of all genders, creeds, sexualities, colors—we are unwilling to simply kneel and take our beatings, to accept our second-class citizenship, to accept the slurs and insults, the beatings and the killings, the sparse paychecks, the blatant infringement upon our rights. Now, it is a place where we strive to be equals, and do all we can to prove we deserve it.
One of your campaign chairs in Ohio, Kathy Miller, said the other day that racism didn’t exist prior to Obama becoming president, that if blacks just “worked and did what they were supposed to”, that there was no racism. That blacks don’t vote because they “aren’t raised that way”. My first response was anger, hurt and retaliation. But, after giving the words some thought—words that, despite what you may say, have more importance than being “just words”—she spoke the truth. Racism didn’t really exist before Obama, or before the last few decades. It didn’t exist, because it went by—and still does go by—many other names:
Religious Liberty.
Statistics.
Freedom of Speech.
Stop and Frisk.
Separate but Equal.
Cultural Differences.
Welfare epidemics.
The "Again" that you promise your followers is not, then, for us. It is not for the woman, for the black, for the Mexican, for the Native American, for the homosexual, for the thinker and the divergent, for the Muslim, for the common American. The Again is for the way things were, when White America still remained in control, when Christianity was unchallenged, when racism was the call of the day, when unfair wages allowed for some classes to prosper over others, when the status quo was law. When a black man would never have been president. When a woman would never try to be one.
I have no doubt that, if given the chance, you will “Make America Great Again”--but only for some. Because only some think America is no longer great. Only some of us know that we are only now becoming Great, becoming more free, more equal, more diverse. Those who think the Greatness was once achieved and is now lost pine for their elevated class, their inscrutable religious domination, the old days of brutal Law and Order. They're blind to the reality that this nation is only Great when more than a single class, a single faith, a single race, feels it is so. It is only Great when a single man is not standing before the disillusioned, promising he is the sole cure, the barrier to the foreigners, to the gays and Muslims and terrorists and fear, to the change, to the loss of power and wealth and glory, even as he sits on a throne above the common man.
It is only Great when “cultural celebration” isn’t you posing for a photograph on Cinco de Mayo, eating a taco salad, to show how much you love Mexicans.
It is only great when your ex-wife, Ivana, doesn’t say we need legal immigrants, because, “whose going to clean up after us”?
It’s only Great when you are not telling us it no longer is so.
You may promise that America will be Great Again. But, for the commoner, the different—for me, we will lose the Greatness we have worked centuries to achieve. The greatness we had before you said we lost it. The greatness we have all fought, died, protested, voted, campaigned, and sat in prison to achieve.
But, after all, these are all just words—which you’ve said aren’t worth all that much. Just words.
