Make America Great Again Trump Symbol

(CNN)It matters that they wore "Make America Great Again" hats.

I'm talking about those high school kids in the video that went viral over the weekend, the one that showed the young men laughing and jeering while an older American Indian man drummed and sang. It seemed at first to be an obvious case of white bros acting shamefully, but and so another, longer video showed the same meet with more context and new characters -- a racist fringe grouping of black men, who identify as members of the Hebrew Israelites, and who seemed to have been the principal provokers of tension and aggression.

This twist in the story gave the whole country a case of interpretive whiplash, feeding frenzied new rounds of statement over who the existent victims were, and who was being disgraceful to whom.

But that's a pointless debate. Based on independent reporting, those students should share in the arraign, despite their denials stating they were innocent bystanders.

The Native American protester could have inadvertently fabricated things worse fifty-fifty if he was sincerely trying to calm things. The Hebrew Israelites hurled insults at merely nigh everyone who crossed their path. We can even enquire why there weren't more than adult chaperones to counsel those students to do the only sensible affair: shut upwards and walk away. That would accept shown real courage and wisdom.

Have at information technology. Choose whichever facts that will fuel your outrage. Only I won't go involved in that considering the debate threatens to obscure a broader, more of import truth, that we are living through what feels like a "back to the back of the bus" moment for many people of color.

That's why those MAGA hats matter.

That'south why it matters that they were young white men representing the Christian faith supposedly for a march to accent the sanctity of all life -- while wearing those hats.

It matters that this occurred under a President who won his part by openly spouting narrow-minded rhetoric, who kicked off his entrada saying Mexican immigrants were rapists and bringing crime, later spending several years spreading the bigoted conspiracy that the first blackness President wasn't fully American, and who defended white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, equally proficient people.

That context cannot be divorced from the image of the MAGA chapeau any more than than the Confederate flag can be divorced from the brutality of chattel slavery. And yet, every Donald Trump apologist will try to say otherwise -- that information technology'southward just a hat, or that information technology is worn by different people for unlike reasons. How do I know? Because I've listened to like excuses in my native S Carolina near those who wear or fly the Confederate flag. They do then to honor their ancestors, I've been told, or to embrace Southern heritage, or because they are exercising their Start Amendment rights.

The MAGA lid, like the Confederate flag, wouldn't elicit outraged reactions if it were only a piece of textile that harkened back to foretime days never to be relived. Just it isn't. Information technology is a signifier for those who believe America was great during some point in the past they dare non name, knowing if they practice, it would reveal a time when it was worse for people of color. When was America "not bad"? When millions of blackness people were slaves? When hundreds of thousands of black men were sold to U.s. companies via convict leasing? Maybe during the eye of Jim Crow, the height of lynching, or when black people struggling with drug addictions were viewed as criminals to be controlled, not fellow human beings needing help?

The Confederate flag wouldn't elicit such outrage if that flag didn't fly on statehouse lawns and in statehouse buildings and in other public spaces for and so many decades, even into the 21st century. But information technology did, and does. That MAGA hat wouldn't elicit such outrage if Trump were just a man who used bigotry for his own ends, and a reality Telly star instead of President of the United States. Just he is President of the Us.

That truth was underscored by this past weekend'southward events, which seemed to have begun with a verbal confrontation betwixt white students from a Southern Christian school and a small group of black men about Americans never heard of. The difference between the two: those students represented the demographic that most strongly supports Trump -- a man who had the power to essentially steal people'south children at the edge without knowing whether they would e'er be returned to their families -- while the group of blackness protesters constituted literal street preachers shouting into the air current.

There'southward no mode to sensibly defend the Hebrew Israelites. Their ugliness fanned the flames that became a storm this by weekend. Even so, at that place's an of import element to the relative power represented by the Hebrew Israelites and the students from that mostly-white Catholic high schoolhouse. But one of them supports a man who has both spouted detest-filled language and has the ability to scroll back Obama-era oversight of police force enforcement to curtail law brutality and unwanted shootings -- and that's the one those students chose to proudly align with.

That matters.

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Source: https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/21/opinions/maga-hat-has-become-a-potent-racist-symbol-bailey/index.html

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