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.”)
—Langston Hughes
Langston’s dream was and still is for many a “dream deferred,” and although our nation’s historic responsibility for these moral failures is unconscionable, it isn’t irreparable. At this moment in our country, when so many of the programs designed to support our collective well-being are actively being dismantled — from youngest to oldest, people who fought for this country, people who have been the victims of brutal racism, and my students who work hard to bring their best to our future — people face yet again a dream deferred.
Pretending that our country has always been in the right allows mutations of these brutal deeds to live on, hiding in the deceitful misuse of patriotic notions like merit, freedom, equality and justice. This malevolent ruse ensures the privilege of dreaming for only a select group while inflicting brutal injustices on too many. When “kings connive” and “tyrants scheme, ” “our more perfect union” dies along with the truth.
Candace Samora, a Roaring Fork High School senior, writes about dreams.
Many American children grew up watching Disney — pretty princesses in castles waiting for charming princes to rescue them from evil. Pocahontas was among the “princesses” but she was not royalty, she was Native American, and in her tribe, there was no royalty. Born in 1596, Matoaka, nicknamed Pocahontas, grew up in a sedentary society as part of the Powhatan tribe. Like many acquainted with her story, she was 11 when she first came into contact with English settlers. Matoaka would become the first recorded instance of missing and murdered Indigenous women and children.
Once upon a time, I was once a little girl who watched the Disney rendition of “Pocahontas.” On an old box TV that only played VHS tape, I witnessed the world’s interpretation of Native Americans. My imaginary history of the Americans was far from the truth because it was based on a false perception of my people. Growing up, that facade burned away to the concrete truth: Native Americans have always been a target for the violence that built the foundation of America.
Colonization is present, it’s an enslavement of Natives who are reduced to a feathered image. I have family that kill themselves rather than face the struggles imposed on us by generations of colonization. I know of girls that go missing because the brutality of our history is still thriving. I have heard the words of domestic abuse survivors, I have seen the tears of a sexual assault victim, and I see children who do not care for their traditions because tradition comes with the history of genocide.
Perhaps we think by averting our eyes we can protect our family, our lives, and weather the storm. But as Martin Luther King Jr. observed, too many good people are more comfortable with order than justice. The threat is the “appalling silence and the inaction of the good people in the face of injustice.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates describes the contagious comfort many Americans find in forgetting our past horrors, “Forgetting is a habit. They forget because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful dream, to live down here in the world.” I would argue the dream is not the problem. After all, the spirit of our dream is justice.
Our collective dream is a good dream: self-evident truths, all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among these being Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It has been violence, manipulation, the demonization of certain people, and the scapegoating by tyrants and kings that kill our “dream.”
Bryan Stevenson states,
The big problem we have in the United States is that we don’t actually know our history. We don’t know about the centuries of racial injustice. We don’t know about the native genocide. You say “native genocide” and people have no idea what you’re talking about. They think you’re saying something radical. We’ve invested a lot of time in creating false narratives about slavery, about enslavers, about the South, about the North, emancipation, about abolitionists … Only when you understand what you did, can you then begin to calibrate all the things that have to happen for you to try to make peace. For you to recover.
Our conscience must be an honest witness, innocence our power, and truth the tether to our best selves. We must tell our own story to understand how we are all complicit in allowing systemic indifference and outright injustice to stifle our right to seek, as Plato states, “the full vision of being.” Let us not fear our history, not fear what we actually know to be true but have averted our eyes from seeing for so many years. It is only our refusal to tell the truth that now threatens the dream we claim for our country.
Langston Hughes ends his poem “Let America Be America Again,” with:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!