Make America What Again?

The Tulsa Race Massacre had profound effects on American society and the generational wealth of a significant part of our population. It has been estimated that rioters decimated more than $200 million of Black property in today’s dollars. Yet popular accounts of the day, and even to this day, are both scant and mostly wrong.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Image courtesy The National African-American History Museum(©)

I have a general question for the people who, in 2026, are still wearing those red hats sold by finer clothiers everywhere... well, actually pretty much nowhere these days.

The question is simple: When you say “make America great again”… Which America, which era of America are you referring to?

I mean, Specifically?

Are you talking about when women were prisoners to their relationships and couldn’t file for divorce? When they were forced to spend their lives with abusive men? When police would return them to their abusers if they tried to run away?

Are you talking about the America that experimented on the Tuskegee airmen? The Tulsa massacre? The Gilded Age of the robber barons, where civilians had no workplace protections? Where wages were not livable and created conditions resembling chattel slavery? Where our life expectancy was 45 years because people were worked to their literal death?

Are you talking about the genocide of Native Americans? The trans-Atlantic slave trade? The indentured servitude that followed?

When you say your magic incantation “make America great again,” what era exactly are you talking about?

Are you talking about the repatriation of Mexicans at the beginning of the 20th century? The Johnson-Reed Act? Plessy v. Ferguson? Operation Ajax? Operation Paperclip? The Bay of Pigs?

Are you talking about dropping atomic bombs on hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians? About spreading smallpox to commit biological warfare against Indigenous populations?

Do you want to make America segregated again? Are you talking about the generation where there was no such thing as marital rape, and a husband could brutalize his wife with absolutely zero consequences?

Are you talking about Virginia’s Act XII? Breaking the Juneteenth promise? The Chinese Confession Program? Are you talking about the America where gay people were forced to hide… where they were thrown in prison for their sexual orientation?

The Comstock Act? The New Deal’s exclusion of farm workers? Are you talking about Teddy Roosevelt’s violent overthrow of Panama… or Hawaii… or any of the other atrocities committed in the Pacific Islands? Are you referring to the way the CIA overturned democratic elections in Guatemala and Ecuador?

The Wilmington Coup? The attacks on the Black Panther breakfast program? The My Lai massacre? Wounded Knee? The brutal murder of Emmett Till? What imagery are you trying to invoke when you say this?

What exactly does “make America great again” mean?

Seriously, wouldn't an alien encounter be more interesting, and maybe even a lot more fun?

(©)the author