First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech last night at the Democratic National Convention was as beautiful as she is. In it, she drew a glowing portrait of her husband President Barack Obama and his former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, on her way to accepting the Democratic presidential nomination.
Yet, she fell short of capturing the full reality of the America we live in — not to mention the house she lives in.
“I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves,” she said in line she used previously at her commencement speech this year to graduates of the City College of New York.
Yet, the truth is, those who built the “White House” in the late 18th century — so named, in 1901, by Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, the same year he invited African-American Booker T. Washington to dine with him in a protocol-breaking first — included free and enslaved African Americans, plus Virginia and Maryland-based laborers, skilled and non-skilled — not to mention European immigrants predominantly from Ireland and Scotland, the ancestral home of Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump.
“Stonemason Collen Williamson trained enslaved people on the spot at the government’s quarry at Aquia, Virginia. Enslaved people quarried and cut the rough stone that was later dressed and laid by Scottish masons to erect the walls of the President’s House,” according to the White House Historical Association.
That Obama only got a slice of the story right perfectly comports with the concluding sentence of this passage, designed to deliver a blistering blow to Trump, when she said, “So, don’t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn’t great, that somehow we need to make it great again, because this right now is the greatest country on Earth.” A greatness that includes, she said, her daughters, “two beautiful, intelligent, black young women,” being able to “(play) with their dogs on the White House lawn,” and to envision, along with all Americans, a ‘woman as president.’
It is a poignant story.
But, it’s not the whole story.
Under President Barack Obama, the “greatest country on Earth” co-exists with millions of out-of-work and impoverished African-American teens who cannot put enough food on the table, let alone imagine themselves playing with their dogs in a rarified setting — to say nothing of running for president. Instead, they often become entangled in a life of crime and other bad and debilitating circumstances.
That’s not greatness but degradation.
Dinesh D’Souza lays out a major reason for it in his film, “Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party.” In it, he unpacks this history, illuminating how African Americans are enslaved in drug-infested, crime-ridden urban ghettos of Democrats’ making in what are essentially the 21st century version of antebellum plantations where Democrats of yore enslaved their ancestors. By contrast, not one Republican politician participated in the “peculiar institution,” as slavery was known, their raison d’être being to dismantle it. After the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, setting free our enslaved brothers and sisters, the Democrats blocked Republican-sponsored Civil Rights legislation, established the Ku Klux Klan as the Party’s military wing, and championed segregation.
How “the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation” that Obama called out last night, existed, and still exists, albeit in a different form, is the secret the Democratic Party desperately wants to keep under wraps, perhaps even more than the Wikileaks’ revelations.
Given the ideological bubble Obama was formed, and has lived, in, compounded by the White House’s cloistered setting, of which Ronald Reagan said, “You’re a bird in a gilded cage,” her incomplete narrative is understandable. Yet, Americans are unsatisfied.
Making America safe again.
Making America work again.
Making America strong again.
That’s what Trump means by making America great again. Including cutting the roughly 50 percent unemployment rate among young, drifting African Americans. Which is why, come January 2017, it’s a good bet, an American businessman of Scottish descent named Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated next president of the United States of America.
Mary Claire Kendall is a Washington-based writer and author of Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends. She served four years in the George H.W. Bush Administration as Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary for Health.
