The Cost of Making America Great Again: Disparities in Sentencing in the Trump Era
“Today’s lynching is a felony charge. Today’s lynching is incarceration. Today’s lynch mobs are professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree. A felony is a modern way of saying, ‘I’m going to hang you up and burn you.’ Once you get that F, you’re on fire.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow
I. Introduction
In America, there currently exist two classes–those with felonies, and those without. Tragically, or perhaps by design, there exists a wide discrepancy in who holds the weight of those felonies. Often, the brown and black skinned bodies of America are tasked with bearing the burden of the felony. In fact, in some instances, it may seem as though the justice system specifically targets them. From the Reconstruction Era to the enactment of Black Codes to the atrocities committed by Jim Crow, there has existed a second class in relation to justice. Richard Pryor famously quipped, "They give [black folk] time like it was lunch. You [going downtown…] looking for justice, that's just what you'll find — just us." The discussion in this paper will revolve around the discrepancies, both real and imagined, and ask the reader this: at what cost is it to make America great again?
It would take chapters to start from the atrocities committed during Reconstruction after the Civil War to the current era. For space constraints, we start during the turbulent late-1960’s. The country was divided. Riots along with a demand for a change of the status quo had many Americans feeling concerned with the direction the country was heading in. Richard Nixon had emerged from a previous losing campaign to become the Republican Party frontrunner. During the Republican Party convention of 1968, Richard Milhous Nixon brokered a deal with Southern Democratic leaders, known colloquially as “Dixiecrats”, to join the party of Abraham Lincoln. These traditionally Confederate states would join a political party usually known for upholding civil rights and would intertwine the ideologies of corporate white America along with poor, rural white America.
II. The Nixon Era
In private tapes, Nixon was quoted as saying, “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” Indeed, Nixon’s campaign was engineered to help him win in a turbulent time of white fear. By nominating Spiro Agnew, whose tough policies towards the black riots in Baltimore had made him a national figure, Nixon tried to court George Wallace’s, an avowed segregationist, supporters. Nixon's campaign could be portrayed as a moderate version of George Wallace’s; no busing for racial balance in schools, relentless attacks on permissiveness, crime, and the Supreme Court's liberal decisions, and a restoration of “family values” along with patriotism. All this was a part of what he called his "southern strategy." Richard Nixon also took advantage of fractures in the Democratic Coalition by unifying the Republican Party behind a “Law and Order” platform. He attacked the Democrats by attacking those who he viewed as rebels. He blamed the failing war effort in Vietnam and the growing black and antiwar sentiments on the Democrats’ weakness. He stated, “The long dark night for America is about to end.,” and called for a tough government stance on those who he viewed as rebels in America. "It is too late for more commissions to study violence. It is time for the government to stop it," he declared. He continued, "We must cease as well the granting of special immunities and moral sanctions to those who deliberately violate public laws–even when those violations are done in the name of peace or civil rights or anti-poverty or academic reform." Nixon positioned himself to capture the conservative vote of the Southern Democrats who were deeply troubled by social unrest. He conflated the statistics of crime, rebellions in the inner-cities, civil rights demonstrations and student protests, securing the white supremacist vote. Along with his emphasis upon crime and the willingness to politicize the crime problem, Nixon recognized that the country needed to stay divided in order for him to win. With an aggressive but careful campaign against the Supreme Court, which was headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren at the time, Nixon reminded the electorate what had helped cause these divisions: the excesses of liberalism in general with the assistance of an overinvolved Supreme Court. The Nixon campaign and Nixon the candidate devoted near-excessive attention to the Warren Court.
a. Nixon and The Supreme Court
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren had been at the forefront of America’s shifting laws in favor of individual civil rights. Under the Warren Court, most of the modern-era landmark civil rights cases were decided. These included: Brown v. BOE (1954), which outlawed segregation in schools; Mapp v. Ohio (1961), which established that evidence seized in an illegal search could not be introduced at trial; Baker v. Carr (1962), which allowed federal courts to protect the rights of a voter is state legislators did not correct malapportionment in voting districts; Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), which declared that an individual accused of a felony has the right to an attorney in a trial if he cannot afford one and the perhaps the most controversial at the time, Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which required a suspect to be warned of their right to remain silent before being questioned.
Nixon’s description of the problem did not ignore racial issues but dwelled most upon the idea of a collapsing societal respect for public order, which could still easily be interpreted as putting blame on civil-rights agitation and the fallout from the country’s history of racial injustice. As his campaign progressed over the next year, it became particularly adept at using coded language and going just far enough in its rhetoric to ensure that race connected to these problems of lawlessness. Nixon blamed collapsing respect on “permissiveness” and “sympathy for the past grievances of those who have become criminals.” These “dog-whistle” words connected the profile that many Americans had of criminals and deviants with Black individuals and antiwar protestors. Nixon and those in his campaign structure knew that he could not invoke racism as explicitly as Harry Byrd and his son had done with the Dixiecrats or as the segregationists had done. However, he could make appeals in a subtle but still effective manner. Unlawfulness and disorder therefore connected to urban unrest and Black people. Being tough on crime presented an effective means by which Nixon could communicate his sympathies to disenchanted white Americans. On November 5, 1968, Richard Milhous Nixon was elected the thirty-seventh president of the United States.
Nixon nominated an ally, Warren Burger after CJ Earl Warren announced his retirement in 1968. Burger was a hardliner for “law and order” and a strict constructionist reader of the constitution. Nixon also introduced William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court. He was nominated to fill the vacancy left by Justice John Marshall Harlan II and while it was expected the Burger Court would rule differently from the Warren Court and maybe even overturn some decisions, the Burger Court went against those preconceived notions. In United States v. U.S. District Court (1972), the Burger Court issued a unanimous ruling against Nixon’s desire to nullify the need for a search warrant and the requirements of the Fourth Amendment in cases of domestic surveillance. Then, two weeks later in Furman v. Georgia (1972) the court, in a 5–4 decision, invalidated all death penalty laws then in force, although Burger dissented from the decision. In the most controversial ruling of his term, Roe v. Wade (1973), Burger voted with the majority to recognize a right to privacy that prohibited states from banning abortions. However, Burger had abandoned Roe v. Wade by the time of Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (1986).
b. Nixon’s War on Drugs
In 1971, Nixon originated the War on Drugs. This was not for any benevolent purpose, but for purely political reasons. Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser John Ehrlichman, in an interview published posthumously in Harper’s in 2016, revealed the true aim of the War on Drugs was to criminalize the administration’s “two enemies: the anti-war left and black people.” As Ehrlichman expounded, “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news.” Nixon’s formal declaration of a war on drugs deliberately was established to link urban crime control to the suburban marijuana subculture by portraying narcotics pushers and heroin addiction as universal threats to white suburbia. Although heroin remained an urban-centric problem, the White House sought to generate hysteria about a nationwide “pandemic” based on the claim that narcotics addiction “directly afflicts the educated, middle-class, churchgoing stereotype of the average American just as it afflicts the black, poverty-stricken ghetto dweller.” The administration requested that network television programming enlighten middle-class parents on the danger, resulting in specials such as ABC's “Crisis in Suburbia: The Hooked Generation.” The president also was quite critical of marijuana legalization, which he said would encourage youth “to start down the long dismal road that leads to hard drugs.” In June of that same year, when Nixon officially launched his federal government’s “all-out offensive” against the “public enemy number one,” he asked for unbridled “compassion” for the poor “victims” as well as justice for the craven “peddlers.” Time’s coverage of this “all-out offensive” revealed the effectiveness of the administration’s strategy, as the magazine reinforced the stereotype that “once confined to black urban ghettos,” drug abuse was a now a problem that would infest “the heartland of white, middle-class America.”
c. The Impact of Nixon’s War on Drugs
The marijuana decriminalization movement of the 1970s revolved around the candid view that white middle-class Americans should not have their futures ruined by policies designed to protect them from shadowy international trafficking and black urban drug markets. In 1972, the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse backed a policy of decriminalization that called for the abolishment of legal sanctions for personal use but the preservation of felony penalties against for-profit distribution. Although Nixon rejected the report, eleven states decriminalized simple marijuana possession during the 1970s, and most of the rest adopted the federal misdemeanor model. Most states also shifted to more flexible penalties for marijuana dealers and added the variable “possession with intent to distribute” charge, which only boosted the racial double standard separating a recreational white middle-class subculture from a criminalized black urban market. Combined federal and state marijuana arrests increased from 292,179 in 1972 to 445,600 in 1974, largely through street-level narcotics sweeps in urban centers.
d. Jimmy Carter Joins the Fray
In the late 1970s, the federal government intensified this discretionary war on marijuana in response to pressure from a nonpartisan network of white groups from affluent inner-ring suburbs. The Carter administration was initially in approval of the federal decriminalization of marijuana possession and worked to bring to the forefront of the American consciousness a public health emphasis on urban heroin addiction. However, the course was reversed following the enrollment of local anti-drug activists who ascribed marijuana experimentation by adolescents to the “commercialized drug culture” and absentee parenting. Marsha Schuchard, a liberal Democrat and mother of three confronted with evidence that her teenage daughter was a marijuana smoker, used her connections within her upscale Atlanta suburb and threatened a mass uprising against the Carter administration’s campaign of the “new mythology of ‘harmless marijuana’” and the federal government’s flop in halting the deluge of drugs into “ordinary mainstream American [read: white] neighborhoods.” The continuation of the myth of the Black urban drug pusher infiltrating suburbia continued. In 1978, Schuchard and other anti-marijuana crusaders founded a group known as the National Parents’ Resource Institute for Drug Education (PRIDE).” The Carter administration embraced PRIDE’s outline by announcing that marijuana interdiction would be the top priority of their War on Drugs. They also launched an adolescent prevention campaign, featuring Schuchard’s manual on forming zero-tolerance neighborhood groups along with a shock-value documentary, “For Parents Only,” about adolescent marijuana smokers and their inattentive, and in some cases unaware, parents.
III. The Ronald Reagan Era
Where Nixon could be characterized as the father of the War on Drugs, Ronald Reagan could be characterized as the godfather. Reagan intensified and rededicated the United States to a drug free America. His strategies included increasing the anti-drug enforcement budget, the creation of a federal drug task force, and fostering a culture that demonized both drug use and drug users. Between 1982 and 2007, the number of arrests for drug possession tripled, from approximately 500,000 to 1.5 million. Drug arrests now constituted the largest category of arrests in the United States. Racial and ethnic disparities in drug-related arrests also deepened. While in 1976 blacks constituted twenty-two percent of drug-related arrests and whites constituted seventy-seven percent of these arrests, by 1992 blacks were now accounting for forty percent of all drug-related arrests while whites accounted for fifty-nine percent of them. Throughout those decades, Blacks only comprised about twelve percent of the total population, while Whites were about eighty-two percent.
In The New Jim Crow (2010), Michelle Alexander argues that Reagan’s “drug war from the outset had little to do with public concern about drugs and much to do with public concern about race. By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined ‘others.’” Bipartisan anticrime policies and the Republican establishment’s neglect of urban public health, including the cutting of funding to many hospitals that helped with addiction certainly shaped the repressive crackdown in minority neighborhoods. All of this was done in the name of conservatism and austerity. This all led to Nancy Reagan’s campaign for drug-free youth, launched in 1981. However, some within Washington noticed that the unofficial stance of the establishment was to tackle the drug problems of whites only.
a. Reagan’s War on Drugs
In October 1982, Reagan formally declared his war on drugs. After Nancy Reagan had started to help President Reagan by painting a dystopian portrait of the drug problem in America, the president promised to incarcerate the “pushers” who trafficked marijuana and cocaine. No one was safe from the political hysteria, leading some high-profile Democrats such as Senator Joseph Biden to criticize Reagan for not seeking even harsher mandatory-minimum penalties. The administration’s response to this exhibited its innate white middle-class construction of the drug crisis, as officials boasted of stopping grammar school-aged children from smoking marijuana and “beautiful people” from snorting coke. In 1983, the White House and NFP collaborated on The Chemical People, a PBS special that resurrected gateway and pusher tropes from the 1950s and 1960s to rally American parents against the drug “epidemic.” White suburban teenagers recounted how experimenting with marijuana turned them into LSD burnouts and heroin addicts leaving watchers of the programs slack-jawed. This included the shock-inducing cute white girl who had ended up a twelve-year-old junkie prostitute on the Chicago streets. The push included the indoctrination of children by introducing a coloring book that had pictures of suburban victims being preyed upon by evil urban drug pushers looking to get them addicted to drugs and crime.
During the “crack epidemic” of the 1980s, the dichotomy of suburban white addict/victims and Black ghetto criminals continued to make up the prejudiced context of the war on drugs and stimulate the cross-party rush to intensify mandatory-minimum sentences. President Reagan often receives the credit, but Democrats are not without fault. Democratic drug warriors such as Joseph Biden and Charles Rangel played leading roles in crafting draconian drug laws including the Anti–Drug Abuse Act of 1986. Congress enacted the law with marginal dissent, even though the racial and spatial inequities of its 100-to-1 crack to powder cocaine sentencing disparity would lead to more minorities being arrested and given longer sentences. 500 grams of cocaine now triggered the same penalty as only 5 grams of crack as if inner-city residents were the ones who could afford 500 grams of cocaine. During this crucial phase in the expansion of mass incarceration, Ronald and Nancy Reagan persisted in amalgamating recreational pot smoking with heroin addiction and crack cocaine as an epidemic that was “killing our children.” They reminded parents that “no one is safe” and urged teens to “Just Say No!” In American politics, except for the shocking death of African American college basketball star Len Bias from a cocaine overdose, white middle-class youth disproportionately were featured as “victims” and not customers of cocaine traffickers. In 1986, Newsweek ran an exposé, “Kids and Cocaine: An Epidemic Strikes Middle America,” which featured marijuana-to-crack gateway anecdotes about white suburban youth, including a fourteen-year-old white cheerleader rescued from a ghetto crack house by the police and her parents. In “Crack’s Destructive Sprint Across America,” New York Times Magazine warned that in 1989, the plague “has leaped across the city lines into the middle-class suburbs” due to Jamaican traffickers invading America’s “heartland.” Crack USA, a 1989 HBO documentary about Palm Beach County, Florida, portrayed the pristine suburb being attacked by the “crime and violence of the big cities” and associated a black male street dealer boasting of all the “money in the drug game” with two white fifteen-year-old girls confessing cocaine addiction from the safety of a private treatment facility. It was never explored what led this male to enter the “drug game” in the first place.
b. Reagan’s Supreme Court
Although there has been much focus on the drug war and how it decimated the populations of minorities, it cannot be glossed over that Reagan made sure to elevate a conservative Justice to the Chief Justice position of the Supreme Court. Chief Justice William Rehnquist had been known as one of the most conservative justices of the Warren and Burger Courts and upon his elevation in 1986, he moved the Court to the right. He was in favor of states’ rights, having written a memo as a law clerk for the Supreme Court on Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), stating that, “I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be re-affirmed.” Filling his now vacant associate justice seat was Antonin Scalia. This perfect storm on conservatism led to what had been characterized as the modern era Dred Scott decision in McClesky v. Kemp. Michelle Alexander of the New Jim Crow opined,
“McClesky versus Kemp has immunized the criminal justice system from judicial scrutiny for racial bias. It has made it virtually impossible to challenge any aspect, criminal justice process, for racial bias in the absence of proof of intentional discrimination, conscious, deliberate bias … Evidence of conscious intentional bias is almost impossible to come by in the absence of some kind of admission. But the U.S. Supreme Court has said that the courthouse doors are closed to claims of racial bias in the absence of that kind of evidence, which has really immunized the entire criminal justice system from judicial and to a large extent public scrutiny of the severe racial disparities and forms of racial discrimination that go on every day unchecked by our courts and our legal process.”
Since the 1950s, state governments and the American political culture have repeatedly construed the war on drugs as a suburban crisis and situated white middle-class youth as innocent victims who must be shielded from both the Black urban illegal drug markets and the unfair criminal drug laws. Scholars have articulated time and time again that the U.S. drug war is a racial caste system used for social control of sorts. The drug war is one that affects urban minority populations the most and is an extension of the punitive war on crime, not focused on rehabilitation at all. This drug war has been characterized as the foundation of the “new Jim Crow” in the contemporary era of mass incarceration. Multiple studies have documented the systematic injustices produced by racially and geographically targeted enforcement policies. These usually have insulated most white youth from incarceration. By the year 2000, according to Sentencing Project data, African Americans and Latinos embodied three-fourths of all drug offenders in state prisons, even though whites comprised a large majority of illegal drug users and dealers in the United States. The criminalization of Black and Brown bodies is no new trend. National surveys confirm the suspicion of many black and brown mothers that urban and suburban teenagers sell and consume illegal drugs at nearly identical rates, yet inner-city black residents are the ones who are disproportionately arrested and incarcerated for violations involving marijuana, long the most popular recreational drug among affluent white youth.
IV. Trump’s New America
Nixon’s 1968 campaign, waged on behalf of the “forgotten Americans,” served as a model for Trump’s own presidential race. Like Trump, Nixon divided the world into the kickers and the kicked. Where Nixon railed against the rebels and those who opposed the status quo, Trump did the same by resurrecting a Reagan-Bush slogan of "Make America Great Again." Protesters of his policies, were forcibly removed from his rallies, and in some cases, were beaten. "If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, OK? Just knock the hell… I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise," Trump was quoted as saying at an Iowa rally on February 1, 2016. “You see, in the good old days, law enforcement acted a lot quicker than this,” Trump stated at a rally in Oklahoma City, The New York Times reported, as officers moved toward a protester. He added, “A lot quicker. In the good old days, they’d rip him out of that seat so fast. But today everyone is so politically correct. Our country is going to hell—we’re being politically correct.” Trump used these dog whistle words to get his constituents to believe, just as Nixon had done, that the world was literally falling apart around them. Trump worked to paint them a picture of their beloved institutions of family values and law and order being destroyed by a new liberal America, and he portrayed himself as their only savior.
Because of Trump’s denigrating comments about Mexicans and Muslims, and his equivocal condemnations of white supremacists, Donald Trump has waived in an era of condemnations of any perceived bigotry. In an August 2016 Suffolk University/USA Today poll, 76 percent of Democrats said Trump is a racist. When Black Lives Matter activists interrupted a speech by then-candidate Bernie Sanders, Trump had no problems letting it be known that he thought it was “disgusting.” This has made it particularly hard for activists who protest police brutality, such as the Black Lives Matter Movement to be taken seriously by right-wingers and conservatives. Trump has gone as far to state that, "I think they're trouble. I think they're looking for trouble," during a Fox News interview with Bill O'Reilly. This shift in attitudes has indeed alarmed experts who assert that the rise of Trump has caused a spike in hate crimes. The number of hate crimes based on a person’s racial or ethnic background rose to 3,489 from 3,310 the previous year, with crimes against Blacks overwhelmingly the most commonly reported type of racially motivated crime.
But Trump’s stances related to race and crime aren’t new. Trump very publicly called for the death penalty to be reinstated in New York just to be given to the Central Park Five who were wrongfully convicted. The Central Park Five were a group of four African-American teens and one Hispanic who was coerced into confessing to a horrific rape that they did not commit. One individual later recalled, "I would hear them beating up Korey Wise in the next room.” “They would come and look at me and say: ‘You realize you’re next.’ The fear made me feel really like I was not going to be able to make it out.” Harkening back to a time when mob justice was the rule and Nina Simone sang of strange fruit swinging from the poplar trees, Trump spent $85,000 dollars to take out advertising space in four of the city’s newspapers, including the New York Times. Under the headline “Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!” and above his signature, Trump wrote: “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence.” Even after Matias Reyes, a violent serial rapist and murderer already serving life inside, came forward and confessed to the Central Park rape, stating that he had acted by himself, Trump doubled down on his sentiments. After a settlement agreement was reached with the Central Park Five, Trump submitted an opinion piece stating, “Settling doesn’t mean innocence, but it indicates incompetence on several levels.” Trump felt that he was right to feel this way, referring to police and prosecutors initially involved in the case that had long maintained the five boys were involved in the rape, even after the convictions were thrown out. These reversals came after a re-examination of DNA evidence proved it was Reyes’ semen alone found on Meili’s body. Trump was not concerned with reality or the implications of lynch-style justice.
This stance against minorities has led to policies and rhetoric that ignores the racial disparities of drug crime prosecution. Donald Trump has continued this disregard, by calling for the death penalty for drug crimes. During a 2018 rally, Trump stated, “You kill 5,000 people with drugs because you’re smuggling them in and you are making a lot of money and people are dying. And they don’t even put you in jail,” Trump said. “That’s why we have a problem, folks. I don’t think we should play games.” Trump has neglected to call for the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies that pushed for the over-prescription of opioid narcotics to be brought to trial; it would seem that he views only black and brown bodies as the real drug dealers. Trump has also called for a bigger federal presence to battle the “carnage” in big cities, namely, Chicago. Perpetuating the stereotype of black, urban violence, Trump sent twenty additional ATF agents to Chicago. However, funding for programs to combat gun violence, gang activity and resources to attack the root of the problem were not proposed.
a. Trump’s Supreme Court
Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court mirrors that of Nixon’s nomination of Warren Burger. Gorsuch, like Burger, is viewed as a likely conservative voice on the Supreme Court and this was evidenced by signing onto a dissent along with Justices Thomas and Alito in Tharpe v. Sellers. In Tharpe, Keith Tharpe was sentenced to death for the murder of Jaquelin Freeman. Several years after his trial, Tharpe’s lawyers were able to interview one of his jurors, Mr. Barney Gattie. The resulting affidavit stated that Gattie knew Freeman, and that her family was “what [he] would call a nice [b]lack family.” Continuing, the affidavit stated that Mr. Gattie’s felt, “there are two types of black people: 1. Black folks and 2. Niggers.” Mr. Gattie stated that Tharpe “wasn’t in the ‘good’ black folks category,” according to the affidavit, and if Ms. Freeman had been “the type Tharpe is, then picking between life and death for Tharpe wouldn’t have mattered so much.” However, because Mr. Gattie felt that Freeman and her family were “good black folks,” the affidavit continued, Mr. Gattie thought Tharpe “should get the electric chair for what he did.” Mr. Gattie’s affidavit went on to explain that “[a]fter studying the Bible,” he had “wondered if black people even have souls.” The affidavit also noted that some of the other jurors “wanted blacks to know they weren’t going to get away with killing each other.” Subsequently, a few days after this first affidavit was taken, Mr. Gattie claimed in another affidavit that he was intoxicated during the first affidavit and that he had been bamboozled. Presented with this evidence, Neil Gorsuch felt that there was no error in sentencing Mr. Tharpe to death, and signed a lengthy dissent that essentially said there was no point in remanding his case to the Court of Appeals, because it would only serve to “delay justice to Jaquelin Freeman.” In fairness, Gorsuch did cast the deciding vote in an illegal immigrant deportation case, drawing the ire of Trump in private. However, his history of opinions of cases that deal with race drew the attention of the NAACP, leading them to call for him not be confirmed and as an enemy to the progress of the Court.
In 2006, an ACLU investigation revealed that African-Americans represented more than 80 percent of crack cocaine defendants even though whites made up almost two-thirds of the market. The contours of the war on drugs may be shifting yet again with the growing calls for the legalization and/or decriminalization of marijuana. However, the criminalization of blackness and decriminalization of whiteness remains deeply entrenched in American political culture. There still exists a long-standing divergence between a public health strategy in the white middle-class suburbs and a crime-control agenda in urban minority neighborhoods.
V. Conclusion
The black and brown skinned bodies of America have always borne the burden of crime reduction. Over policing, agenda-driven programs, and racial inequality make it that much harder to be a minority in America. The advancement of a demagogue, who has a history of being racially insensitive, if not all-out racist, only will further this divide. Black activists must be aware that they cannot fight this battle alone. The deaths of Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King, Jr. along with countless others should serve as a reminder that not only should alliances be sought with liberal whites, but moderate whites as well. The price of making America Great Again is enormous. It is a tragic reality that it is often paid for with black and brown blood.