Make America Great Again or Make America White Again?

That is the question I ask in my short, but timely video “American Diversity Whitewash” that takes apart the fake image of diversity sold to Americans for decades and how it has helped create the white-washed world of Donald Trump.

The video is based on my collage “American Diversity Whitewash,” which will be on view at The Hecksher Museum in Huntington.

Critiquing the politics of belonging, the centerpiece of the collage features a John Hancock Insurance ad from 1947 directing us to look at diversity as seen through a white-only lens. “No two families are alike,” announces the headline to this mid-century advertisement.

Yes, there is great diversity in America, the vintage ad seems to imply … that is, as long as you are white, middle-class, and Protestant.

This old-fashioned recipe for what is a real American is still used by the Trump administration and his supporters. Emboldened white supremacists are tearing at the fabric of democracy as entitled white Americans are frightened by the browning of America.

Watch Video

Reimagined as a video in collaboration with John Martin and narrated by me, it is filled with vintage ads and illustrations from my vast collection, becoming a cinematic collage.  I wanted to take the glossy myth of America as presented in the popular media of mid-century America, that mythical place that Trump wants us to return to, and tear it up frame by frame.

Using bold, unsettling visuals, I can expose the fantasy of “real Americans” that keeps resurfacing in modern politics.

What feels urgent is how these visual myths are being actively repackaged in contemporary political culture. They are being repurposed by the U.S. Department of Labor in their series of posters touting The American Dream and Our Homeland that look eerily like the vintage illustration. Relying on nostalgia and simplification, they present a version of America that is aspirational on the surface while leaving out diversity

I want to invite the viewer to look again at the images we think we already know, which, like a toxic overspill, have never really left us. Now they are being reframed and recharged in the present to shape what we believe America still is or should be.

Make America Great Again or White Again? We all know the answer as we watch the race to redistrict and return to the Jim Crow era.

We are living in a time when “Make America Great Again” means erasing who America became.

NOTE:
A special thanks to John Martin and Seth Chitwood for their invaluable skills in producing and editing.

Exhibit

I am honored to have my collage and video “American Diversity Whitewash” included in The Hecksher Museum of Art’s Long Island Biennial with the timely theme “Just Powers.”  Responding to the legacies of the Declaration of Independence, the exhibition brings together diverse perspectives of artists to reveal how democratic ideals of freedom and liberty are experienced, interpreted, challenged, and reimagined today.

The Heckscher Museum of Art 2 Prime Avenue Huntington, N.Y. 

© Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream, 2026. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Sally Edelstein and Envisioning The American Dream with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.