Johnson: Trump wants to Make America (Jim) Crow Again
This is an opinion column.
We’ll still have helped build the house where he now resides.
We’ll still have been the first to die in the quest for freedom in this new nation.
We’ll still have invented a torrent of products we use every day — products he likely savors, like potato chips.
We’ll still have designed iconic architectural marvels that shape skylines and neighborhoods across the nation.
We’ll still have conducted trailblazing, game-changing medical discoveries that keep us alive.
We’ll still have done research to combat Alzheimer’s, to treat blindness (by perfecting cataract surgery), to improve the safety and efficacy of chemotherapy.
Now, here’s an insipid irony: The very folks who wail and whine about being targeted by “cancel culture” are trying to cancel us — Black history, culture, opportunity and our future.
Along with everyone else who’s not like them.
They’re trying to cancel efforts to address decades, centuries of systemic inequities that still manifest today.
They’re trying to squash strategies created to simply allow everyone to equitably arrive at the starting line —not the finish line.
They’re trying to prevent companies from hiring and promoting talented people who are not like them.
They’re trying to stifle free speech and choke intellectual growth at colleges, to control curriculums involving people not like them.
Donald Trump wants to Make America (Jim) Crow Again.
But you know what? It won’t work.
No matter what theyt do ….
We’ll still have military heroes who represented our country with honor and dignity and whose sacrifices — for our freedom and democracy — will be appropriately remembered, celebrated — and taught.
We’ll still have climbed to the pinnacle of every industry to become CEOs of some of the nation’s biggest companies, defying headwinds.
We’ll still have been redlined, too.
We’ll still have soared into space and created the formulas and mathematical equations that allowed us to do so. And we will reach the moon.
We’ll still have been the first American to reach the North Pole.
We’ll still have the most powerful woman in media and the generation of women she’s inspired to be all they are called to be and build all they are called to build.
We’ll still have founded major corporations and become millionaires and billionaires.
We’ll still have marched, and some died, for the right to be — for rights afforded all Americans at the voting booth, on the bus, in our schools, in our stores…everywhere. Especially in Alabama.
We’ll still have been lynched, which will be taught, too — and never forgotten.
We’ll still have invented blood banking and the transfusion process that saves countless lives every day.
We’ll still have occupied the highest, most powerful office in the land, a presidency whose biggest scandal was wearing a tan suit.
We’ll still have coached and quarterbacked so many Super Bowl champions it’s not even a thing anymore.
We’ll still have created communities that birthed great wealth — even if they were destroyed, snatched from us, along with our lives, on countless occasions.
We’ll still have created country music.
We’ll still have crushed through myriad barriers in every field, crashed through them and conquered.
We’ll still have the G.O.A.T. in more spaces than can be counted, including one who showed us how to stand on our beliefs and became maybe our most endured champion ever.
We’ll still have performed in theaters that once segregated or barred us, on stages where we were attacked. In Alabama.
We’ll still have been Freedom Riders who traveled into the pit of racial hell in the South, stopping at Greyhound stations in places such as Montgomery and Birmingham, simply so Americans of any culture could sit next to each other on a bus.
We’ll still have excelled at elite universities and HBCUs and will continue to do so.
We’ll still often be the best qualified for the job.
We’ll still tell our stories — still teach, enlighten and awaken those who want to know the whole truth about how our nation was built and who built it. We want to know all who contributed to the highs and perpetrated the lows.
We’ll still be a diverse nation whose strength will thrive in our collective experiences and perspectives, and weakness will be exposed and exploited if we continue to refuse to see beyond our own mirrors.
We’ll still protest injustice, inequality and inequities wherever we find them, as should we all.
We’ll collectively stand so that it benefits all of us: African Americans and other people of color, veterans, the disabled, anyone who has been disrespected, demeaned or diminished — even white women, among the biggest beneficiaries of the efforts Trump is canceling.
We’ll still have overcome a president who diminished and demeaned us and doused hard-fought gains in the federal workforce and beyond.
We’ll overcome another.
This administration can strip us from websites and threaten universities into ripping any recognition of people not like them from their campuses.
They can bully the nation’s capital into jackhammering us from the pavement.
They can attempt to whitewash the progress America has made to undo the knee on the neck that choked generations of people not like them.
They can bark at and threaten colleges, including the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who’ve embraced scholars whose journey is being financially supported by Americans who want to recalculate the inequitable number of Black Ph.D.s in this nation.
They can hit every “delete” button at their disposal. They can do all of that and more.
It won’t work.
It won’t work because our — and I mean all of us who are not like them — our historic contributions cannot be erased.
Our talent cannot be ignored. Our economic juice cannot be, either.
How we shape the culture cannot be diminished. Our boldness cannot be doused.
Our stories cannot be muted.
Our boldness cannot be dampened.
Keep trying. It won’t work.
Because we’ll still be — all of us who are not like y’all.
Let’s be better tomorrow than we are today. My column appears on AL.com, and digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, Instagram @roysj and BlueSky.