Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
By Chido Nwangwu. Follow on X (Twitter) @Chido247
I believe that America is better, greater and richer from the fruits of its great diversity. It is the promise of America. It is the greater beauty of this land. It is also one of its greatest challenges.
The United States President Donald Trump blamed, without showing any any evidence, the two most recent administrations led by two former Presidents from the Democratic Party, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the new policy initiatives known as DEI (diversity, equity and inclusivity) at the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Transportation, for the January 29, 2025 plane collision near Washington DC.
An American Airlines plane crashed into the Potomac River after colliding with a military BlackHawk helicopter as it approached the Reagan Washington National Airport around 9 p.m.
On Thursday morning of January 30, 2025, as aviation security personnel and other officials were digging and searching for any survivors, aviation accident clues and tech information regarding the January 29, 2025 plane crash (which killed 67 people), the reelected President Trump, In his first visit to the White House briefing room since returning to the White House on January 20, 2025, initially began with a moment of silence…. Thereafter, he said:
“I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary.” Trump added “Only the highest aptitude. They have to be the highest intellect and psychological aptitude that were allowed to be qualified for air traffic controllers…. That was not so prior to getting there … and then when I left office and Biden took over, he changed them back to lower than ever before. I put safety first. Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen because this was the lowest level. Their policy was horrible, and their politics was even worse.”
Trump falsely claimed that the FAA website stated that persons with conditions such as “hearing, vision, missing, extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism” were “all qualified for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country.”
The insinuation was obvious. It was repugnant and unfair. It challenged and re-opened the debate across America about diversity, the color of your skin, the content of someone’s character and their qualification to serve in order to make organizations, agencies and corporations look like the United States of America!
Coincidentally, for the third time in U.S. history, Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the U.S Inauguration of President Donald Trump happened the same day, on Monday, January 20, 2025. It was a significant overlap, especially for the two men whose lives reflect opposite worldviews on race, State power, human equality, environmental protections, emotional intelligence and hundreds of reminders of the position of the United States in historical questions and current events inside the U.S and around the world.
Rev. Bernice King, the late King’s youngest daughter and CEO of the King Center, said a few days before the January 20, 2025 inauguration of Trump as the 47th President (having served as the 45th), that “it gives the United States of America and the world the contrast in pictures. Is this the way you want to go — or is this the way you want to go?”
Into 2025, we see along the trajectory of history that some of President Trump’s positions and actions against “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) constitute, substantial, existential moral threats to the works and legacy of the truth-teller and prophet, MLK.
In respect and honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jnr., it is important to bear witness to history in realistic ways to better assess the present to make sense of the road ahead. I try to do those.
On July 15, 1994, I visited the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta, Georgia, for the first time as a member of a committee of a few African ambassadors, African-American professionals, and a handful of continental Africans assembled by the late Rev. Leon Sullivan, longtime advocate for equal rights for South African and American Blacks, to plan aspects of the 1995 African and African-American summit in Dakar, Senegal.
As we walked into the premises with the late Dr. King’s son, Martin Luther King III, I recalled the historic black-and-white videos of Dr. King’s vision, his unique poetic cadence, the flowing timbre of his voice, the inimitable rhyme and rhythm that punctuated his manner of speaking.
First, on the critical issue of race, racial identity and politics, in the course of political fights in Washington DC and locally, we listen and continue to read the impassioned, partisan drivel that Dr. King fought for a “color-blind society.” No! From research of King’s works and views on this and related issues, the claim that the late, revered King fought for the emergence of a “color-blind society” amounts to nothing more than a grandiose distortion of history.
Second, the mantra pretending to establish a “color-blind society” merely serves as a wedge issue and fund-raising code for contortionists of King’s vision and work.
In particular, King sought recognition and respect for the diversity of our backgrounds and origins. He specifically demanded that we neither be judged nor discriminated against because of the color of our skin.
Like other continental Africans in America, recent immigrants and citizens of the United States of America who have been blessed by the graciousness, business opportunities, global breadth and hospitality of other Americans, I have cause to be thankful for benefiting from the vision, personal sacrifice and peaceful soldiering of the late but great Martin Luther King,Jnr. who stood up for diversity. It’s a good thing.
I believe America is better, greater and richer from the fruits of its great diversity!
•Dr. Chido Nwangwu, author of the forthcoming book, MLK, Mandela & Achebe: Power, Leadership and Identity., is the Founder of the first African-owned, U.S-based newspaper on the internet, USAfricaonline.com, and established USAfrica in 1992 in Houston. He has appeared as an analyst on CNN, ALJazeera, SKYnews, and served as an adviser on Africa business to Houston’s former Mayor Lee Brown. Follow on X (Twitter) @Chido247
