Was America ever great, now is not, and needs the likes of Donald Trump to make it so again? Or was America never great and needs the likes of Krystal Lake to remind us of that? And who, pray tell, is Krystal Lake anyway?
To start with, the 22-year-old Lake is, to resurrect a term from the 1960s, black and beautiful. She holds a job at a Staten Island, New York, Home Depot to support herself and pay for tuition while attending college. Not quite two weeks ago, she came to work donning a custom-made cap emblazoned with the legend ‘America Was Never Great’, clearly a play on Donald Trump’s slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again”, and one meant to slap the smile off the faces of the New York tycoon’s supporters.
An outraged customer took a picture of Lake and posted it online. The post received countless hateful responses, racist vitriol and even death threats from Trump supporters and others, who exemplify the underbelly of bigotry in American society. But that was just for starters. Home Depot, America’s biggest retailer, with stores in all 50 states, not only threatened to fire Krystal, claiming that the workplace is not where you make a political statement, but pledged to take steps to ensure that in the future employees “do not promote political messages” and do not wear items that “reflect political statements”.
You may think that the issue of whether or not an American citizen, at the workplace, can wear a cap with a seemingly controversial legend printed on it, is too trivial or too nebulous to make the subject of a political column. I do not. I believe that Lake has raised, perhaps unwittingly, an important question that touches on core principles in American constitutional law — the right of Americans to express their views, including unpopular and controversial ones, anywhere they choose to do so, including one’s place of employment.
Home Depot doesn’t get it. The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights is clear in prohibiting the abridgement of citizens’ right to free speech, regardless of how seemingly offensive that speech may appear to other citizens. The free exercise of ideas is permitted not just in the workplace, but on one’s soap box, one’s rooftop and one’s street corner, as well as on one’s op-ed page, one’s place of worship and one’s classroom — it being, of course, understood that that right does not extend, by virtue of common sense, to someone, say, shouting “fire” in a crowded movie theatre.
That notion of free speech is so ingrained in the ethos of America’s public discourse, so much a given, that you will look at a man challenging it like he is a hair in your soup. And then take him to court! The folks at Home Depot are not aware, it seems, that a legal precedent in American jurisprudence has already been set that prevents them from infringing on Krystal Lake’s sacrosanct right to speak her mind, even at the workplace.
The precedent? The Tinker vs Demoines landmark ruling.
Mary Beth Tinker was a 13-year-old student who was suspended from school in 1965 for wearing a black armband in class to protest the war in Vietnam. School officials claimed that “her action upset the smooth and efficient functioning of her algebra class”. Mary didn’t like that one bit. She filed a suit, which, in 1969, finally reached the Supreme Court. Speaking for the majority, Justice Abe Fortas at the time wrote that the “symbolic speech” expressed by Mary’s armband “may start an argument or cause a disturbance, but our constitution says we have to take this risk”, adding that “schools cannot be enclaves of totalitarianism”.
Nor can places of employment be that either. If a student can wear an armband in a classroom — an armband that “may start an argument or cause a disturbance” — then an employee at Home Depot can wear a custom-made cap that may upset the sensitivities of Trump supporters. In short, “we must take this risk”.
What, moreover, is Krystal proclaiming by the legend, ‘America Was Never Great’? And Trump by his, “Let’s Make America Great Again”?
Krystal, an African-American, is invoking her parents’, grandparents’ and grand-grandparents’ struggle against the gruesome spectacle of southern segregationist culture, a time when black folks had to deal with “Whites Only” toilets and brutal white vigilantes (who at times morphed into lynch mobs) and the memory, transmitted orally, of those unspeakable journeys on slave ships that arrived in the New World with their human cargo.
Trump’s slogan, on the other hand, is betrayed by its use of the adverb “again”, which effectively highlights the fact that America is in decline and should be returned to its former Waspish glory, when it’s wealth and global pre-eminence in the 1950s few Americans doubted and its status as a “great” nation few foreigners challenged. Donald Trump, the one and only among other Republican presidential contenders, has the elan, stamina and audacity to do it, unlike “low energy Jeb”, “little Marco [Rubio]” and “lying Ted [Cruz]”. (No word about the lasagna-gobbling Chris Christie.)
Have your pick: Krystal, a perceptive black and beautiful African-American from Staten Island on a spiritual quest for self-assertion — invoked teleological level — - or The Donald, a dumb-and-dumber tycoon from Manhattan on a chaotic quest — invoked on a delusional level — to return the US to its former imagined status as a predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, Christian, Protestant “shining city upon a hill” with deep and abiding confidence in its overwhelming power.
And me, the columnist? I’m just a dancing Muslim who, if you believe Trump, along with thousands upon thousands of my fellow-Muslims, pirouetted and gyrated in the streets of Jersey City in September 2001, as I supposedly celebrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York! And Krystal, thanks to you, for without adversarial voices like yours — acting as a tension-producing agent that propels us forward towards a richer discourse — America one day may, at last, become great.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
