Come out of your bunker, Donald Trump, and concede that America never was great

Over the weekend, as American cities writhed in pain and burned in response to the death of George Floyd — and, more broadly, in response to the systemic racism ingrained in American law enforcement — President Donald Trump was nowhere to be seen. He was not consoling the American people, or offering words of unity. He was not calling for a détente. He was not using his pulpit and the divine rhetoric often used by the great men who came before him to inspire Americans to find reason amid conflict. Instead, he was holed up in a bunker.

The ultimate instigator — the man who has made it his mission to burn down the infrastructure of civil discourse in the United States, and whose rallies are often seen as the blueprint for this new era of unrest — wanted no part in the correction of true injustice. And that’s because this battle isn’t just one he doesn’t understand; it’s a battle he’s deeply afraid of.

More than one white person failed to understand the underhanded meaning of Trump’s 2016 (and now 2020) campaign slogan, Make America Great Again. When people like me pushed back, saying that America was never great, we were accused of not being patriots. But the truth is that for Black Americans, America never was great, because this country has always been a story of toil and spent promises. Tell the story of the United States and tell a story that begins with the molasses trade and slavery, that metamorphosizes into indentured servitude and a protracted battle for civil rights, and that arrives in a modern-day society where kneeling in civil protest is seen as disrespectful, but where any manner of ordinary daily activity is punishable by death.

The Black backs that white people stepped on to get ahead for all these years makes it impossible for the community to rise to the top without help. In 2019, the Economic Policy Institute established that Black workers are paid roughly 15 percent less than white workers. The median household income for Black American households is $40,000 per year, and the median household income for white American households is nearly twice that: $70,000.

And when they aren’t being paid less, or being mistreated by a racist law enforcement system, Black people are being ignored by the medical community. The United States’ maternal mortality rate is the worst in the world for developed nations. But Black women are nearly three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women, according to a 2019 report released by the National Center for Health Statistics.

A president who wishes to make America great, in any real sense of the word, would want to tackle these problems — the problems of inequality that run so deep that they haunt the very bones of our nation. They are who we are. They are the building blocks of America, and we cannot divorce ourselves from them. In order to fix the United States, we must acknowledge our complicity in the structure of racism. We must acknowledge the power of our language when we call Black members of our community thugs, or when we fail to understand the anger that precedes a riot. We must see that the flames of burning cities don’t rise just from the death of George Floyd, but also from the deaths of Eric Garner, Philandro Castile, Amadou Diallo, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, Freddie Blue, Torrey Robinson, and every other named and unnamed man and woman who lost his or her life in this fight. We must see, too, that all of this has been going on for a very, very long time, and that communities are tired.

The answer, of course, is not to hide in a bunker, fearfully waiting out the end of days. That cannot make America great today, or tomorrow. If the president needs a beacon in dark times, he can look to his predecessor, Barack Obama, who is not in hiding. “We have to remember that for millions of Americans, being treated differently on account of race is tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal’ — whether it’s while dealing with the health care system, or interacting with the criminal justice system, or jogging down the street, or just watching birds in a park,” Obama wrote in a statement over the weekend, before moving on to tips about how these protests can be a “turning point for real change”. This is what leadership looks like.

America was never great for many members of this nation, and burying our heads in the sand cannot revise our dirty history. The answer is to face the truth head-on, to allow the shame of our past to provide a path toward our future. Only then can we truly make America great. Come out of the bunker, Mr President. There is no other way, and there is so much more to be said.