As your instructor, I was not allowed to overtly campaign for or against a presidential candidate. However, since I teach about logic and fallacies and public discourse and sexual harassment and argumentation and current events, I was nevertheless able to encode my certainty that a Trump presidency will be a disaster for women, POC, and the poor, into my teachings.
Anyone who has read Alice in Wonderland understands the notion of tumbling down a rabbit hole and suddenly feeling that your clothes are on backward and inside out. I suspect a few of our discussions or films or readings left some of you with an uncomfortable or sour feeling; I know that to one or two of you the things we have addressed seemed unduly harsh. And while I understand those sensitivities, an active and engaged populace is nevertheless entitled to the harsh and uncomfortable truths of the ways in which our nation has fallen short of our democratic ideals.
It is possible to constructively criticize our nation in the interests of the pursuit of the common good, that is, democracy and social justice. American democracy is certainly ripe for critique. It is a hot mess of contradictions when it comes to theory and practice, across groups, situations, contexts, and histories. It still wrestles with equal treatment across groups, situations, contexts, and histories.
I believe firmly that democracy is the best system currently available for governing. However, as a fairly new concept, “democracy” – certainly American democracy - is a work in process. And I encourage you to notice & pay attention to those cracks and crevices in the façade of our American democracy as a perfect unified whole.
The problem I address arises when the process of becoming that is our American democracy is understood as a monolithic whole, something already accomplished at some point in the far distant past, a Democracy where fairness and opportunity reign, a land of peace and beauty, the City on the Hill. “Mission accomplished”, as it were.
Without a doubt, the American Revolution and drafting of the Bill of Rights were events of world historic proportion. The U.S. Bill of Rights remains a living document to this day in that it is theoretically subject to revision. But democracy requires an actively engaged populace, and that’s where you come in.
In order to make the changes necessary to more closely align the rhetoric we espouse with the tactics used to bring about those changes, we must examine how our democracy actually works, and the ways in which it falls short.
It is in that spirit I offer the following poem for you to take for inspiration as you move forward from our time together, in COM 1, COM 3, COM 5 and/or the speech team. The poem, written by Langston Hughes in 1935 –resonates now just as powerfully as it must have then in terms of race and class and by extension, other vectors of oppression such as gender, religion, and/or sexual orientation/identity.
The poem is a bittersweet meditation on bringing the “theory” of American democracy into alignment with the “practice” of American democracy. It represents my very highest hopes for this America, of which I am simultaneously so very critical, and so very proud. #ILoveMyStudents
Let America Be America Again
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be 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 be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold!
Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—
O, Pioneers! I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me?
The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again, America!
O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
- Langston Hughes, 1935
