Our History or his story?
1st July 2019 · 0 Comments
They’re doing it … again; this time straight up in our faces.
From the moment enslaved Africans set foot on American soil 400 years ago, European-Americans have been erasing, covering up, ignoring and not documenting the contributions of African Americans which made and continues to make America great. Pick up any U.S. History book and see to what extent the contributions of African Americans are included.
In 2016, Nathan “Nearest” Green finally received recognition for his distilling recipe for the wildly popular Jack Daniels Whiskey. Little has been written or taught about Lewis Howard Latimer’s invention of the light bulb, which burned for hours and revolutionized electricity or his drawings for Alexander Graham Bell, who used them to get the patent for the telephone, or Garrett Morgan’s gas mask and traffic signals, or “The Real” Elijah McCoy’s game-changing invention for trains or Granville T. Woods’s 50 mechanical engineering patents, or Sarah Breedlove Walker (Madame CJ Walker’s hair products), or Marie Van Brittan Brown’s first closed circuit TV security system; or Henry Sampson, inventor of the cellular phone, or Lonnie Johnson’s Super Soaker, or Mark E. Dean’s three PC patents and co-creation of the IBM personal computer, or Dr. Patricia Bath’s Laserphaco Probe, that corrects cataracts during eye surgery; or Zora Ball, who at seven years old in 2013, became the youngest person to ever create a mobile game app, which was unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania’s Bootstrap Expo.
We could go on and on, but you get the point.
Today the erasure and/or discounting of African-American contributions continues to happen but now it is in plain sight. No more ignoring or covering up. No, it’s upfront, in our faces, and it’s personal.
And no one has tried harder to erase the contributions of African Americans than the current Racist-in-Chief in the White House, Donald J. Trump, beginning with his proclamation that Africa, the ancestral land of today’s African Americans, is a shithole country.
Trump is the biggest practitioner of erasing the contributions of African Americans from American History, as evident by his relentless and unjustifiable attacks on Barack Obama, America’s first African-American President.
Everyone knows about Trump’s failed efforts to kill President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), now affectionally called “Obamacare.”
Trump accelerated the attack on Obama’s legacy that started from the moment Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. While Obama’s Inaugural Ceremonies were taking place, white Republicans in Congress, led by U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell, conspired in a secret back room meeting and vowed to say no to any and all legislation Obama put forth and to deny all his judicial nominees.
McConnell launched an effort to kill what he derisively dubbed Obamacare, but the democratic majority in the House and Senate got it through in 2010, providing healthcare to millions of Americans, who had never had access to medical care previously.
Crazed and incensed over seeing the first African American elected as POTUS, whites, under the leadership of the so-called Tea Party and aided by partisan gerrymandered districts, rushed to the polls in 2012, to push the party of racism, the Republicans, into a slight majority in the Senate; in spite of Obama’s reelection. McConnell’s campaign to overturn Obamacare went into hyperdrive but, wonders of wonders, most whites loved Obamacare, once they learned the law was the Affordable Care Act and not really named after President Obama.
With a year to go before the next presidential election, McConnell refused to allow Obama’s pick for the U.S. Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, to even have a confirmation hearing, much less put his nomination to a vote on the Senate floor. McConnell held the seat open on the highest court in the land for a year, until Trump was in the Oval Office.
Trump’s election was an in-your-face expression of white angst and resentment. White Republicans pulled every trick in the book to put this virulent racist into the Oval Office, who openly represented white privilege, white supremacy, and proclaimed his hatred for Black and brown people.
Once elected, Trump went to work overturning all of Obama’s hard won legislative victories. Trump pushed for and got Brett Kavanaugh, an accused sexual predator on the Supreme Court and rather than taking care of the people’s business, he went straight to work on trying to kill Obamacare. He failed in the Senate, when Senator John McCain, a Republican who was dying of cancer, cast the final needed “No” vote, with a thumbs down gesture that reverberated around the world.
Now Trump is claiming that he will protect people with preexisting conditions, Obamacare’s most popular provision, and he is campaigning on the lie that his healthcare plan (which doesn’t exist now and never will) is going to be the most affordable, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, Trump’s so-called “Justice” Department is petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).
In 2017 and again in 2018, the Washington Post confirmed that Trump’s top priority is erasing President Obama’s legacy. The newspaper documented 189 “roll-backs” (erasures) of Obama-era rules and regulations relative to the environment, labor and finance, healthcare, civil rights, worker and consumer safety, government reform, immigration and education, among other milestone laws. And that was just over the past two years.
That’s what Trump’s executive orders, with his skyscraper, indecipherable signature, are all about. And the Hypocrite-in-Chief had the nerve to criticize President Obama’s use of executive order to keep Dreamers in the U.S.
Trump wasn’t in the oval office a full year before he withdrew the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement that President Obama signed with 11 other countries in 2016. In 2018, Trump withdrew from another of Obama’s agreements, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known as the “Iran Nuclear Deal,” which curbed Iran’s nuclear activities in return for the lifting of sanctions that had been imposed by the UN, U.S., and EU.
Trump reversed Obama’s plan to withdraw from Afghanistan by sending more troops in, is about to start a war with Iran, has abandoned any plans for real peace in the middle east and Trump is cavorting, colluding, and conspiring with America’s enemies; including Russia, North Korea, and an assortment of dictators whom he “fell in love” with. Trump is jailing children and putting them in cages on the southern border. None of which Obama did or approve of doing.
Trump is no Obama. He is the exact opposite. Every step he takes to erase Obama’s legacy, further illuminates the fact that he is not only jealous of Obama and hates him for being an African American, but also that he has no idea of what it takes to be a president.
Despite his efforts to erase Obama’s accomplishments, Trump’s actions are only making Barack Obama a greater living legend than he already is and cementing the good work he did and attempted to do for this nation.
President Obama is and always will be more popular than Trump. When Obama left office in January 2017, his approval rating was 59 percent. In June 2019, Trump’s approval rating was 43 percent, down from 46 percent in April 2019, according to the Gallup Polls.
President Obama’s legacy of being one of the best presidents of the United States is secure and unshakeable, as time will tell, and history will show.
As Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
And justice will prevail in the civil and criminal cases against Trump, who would do well to try to stay out of jail, instead of trying to erase an African-American man’s legacy.
This article originally published in the July 1, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
