Let America Be America Again: Compare And Contrast Essay

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Alexis de Tocqueville and Langston Hughes both have their own ideas about what America is, was, and should be. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America praises American democracy in which everyone is included. This inclusion allows for democracy that everyone can be a part of and feel like they are contributing. On the contrary, Langston Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again” depicts an excluding America that does not treat everyone equivalently. Hughes portrays America as a misrepresentation that does not uphold the ideals that it is so famous for. The two works contrast in many ways but do have some similarities. Although their ideas are different, politics is still a choice. Tocqueville describes politics as a choice that everyone should make as it benefits them all while Hughes describes politics as a choice that some do not have the power to take part in. The differing sentiments between Democracy in America and “Let America Be America Again” stem …show more content…

Although he believes it was better in the past, he sees America as some sort of fraud because it was never a bastion of freedom. This quote, “O, let my land be a land where Liberty / Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, / But opportunity is real, and life is free, / Equality is in the air we breathe. / (There’s never been equality for me, / Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”) (Hughes, 11-16) captures the fabrication that America was never the home of the free. There is this concept that America is a place of freedom and equality but Hughes understandably does not see it this way. He utilizes examples of many groups of people that have been persecuted either racially or economically such as poor white people, black slaves, Native Americans, and immigrants (Hughes, 19-22). These persecuted groups are overlooked and not given the basic freedoms promised in

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