Through careful examination of language patterns, word choice, and rhetorical structures, the proclamation reveals concerning patterns of marginalization masked behind celebratory language.
Exclusion Through Language
The proclamation’s systematic othering operates through precise grammatical choices that linguistically distance Blacks from American identity. This manifests in three key patterns:
First, consistent use of third-person pronouns (“they,” “their”) rather than inclusive first-person (“our,” “we”) when discussing Black achievements, creating what linguists term “exclusionary deixis.”
Second, passive voice constructions that minimize Black agency, as in phrases like “have been among our country’s most consequential leaders” rather than active constructions that center Black leadership.
Third, the repeated qualification of “American” with racial modifiers creates a linguistic hierarchy where unmodified “American” implicitly means white, while others require hyphenation – a pattern dating to segregationist discourse.
Selective Representatives
The proclamation’s careful curation of Black representatives reveals a calculated political strategy through three distinct patterns.
First, it pairs historically radical abolitionists (Douglass and Tubman) with contemporary conservative voices (Sowell and Thomas), creating a false equivalence that obscures these figures’ sharply different stances on systemic racism.
Second, by elevating only conservative Black voices from recent decades, the document implicitly delegitimizes modern civil rights leadership and progressive Black thought.
Third, in choosing Tiger Woods as the sole cultural representative, the proclamation not only reduces Black cultural achievement to athletics but specifically selects an athlete known for distancing himself from Black identity – reinforcing the document’s broader pattern of elevating those who minimize racial critique.
Strategic Erasure
The proclamation’s most revealing feature lies not in what it says, but in what it systematically erases through calculated omission. This erasure operates on three temporal levels to minimize Black resistance and agency:
Historical erasure: The document entirely omits the civil rights movement, obscuring the mass mobilization and collective struggle that forced institutional change. By jumping from abolitionists directly to contemporary conservative figures, it creates what historians call a “silence gap” that erases decades of organized Black resistance.
Contemporary erasure: The proclamation ignores modern Black excellence across multiple fields – the scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and innovators who continue to shape American culture and technology. This omission reinforces the document’s reductive focus on athletics and conservative politics as the only spheres of Black achievement.
Future erasure: By avoiding any mention of ongoing systemic challenges – from wealth inequality to criminal justice reform – the proclamation preemptively delegitimizes current civil rights advocacy. This creates what critical discourse analysts term a “closure effect,” where past achievements are used to suggest that no further struggle is necessary.
Together, these carefully crafted omissions work to present a sanitized narrative that erases both historical resistance and contemporary critique.
Political Manipulation
The proclamation’s rhetorical strategy systematically subordinates Black history to political self-promotion through several calculated moves. The document’s pivotal phrase – “as America prepares to enter a historic Golden Age” – reveals this manipulation in three ways:
First, it repurposes Black achievement as merely instrumental to a future defined by the current administration rather than celebrating historical contributions in their own right.
Second, it employs what critical discourse analysts call “temporal displacement,” shifting focus from historical injustices to an imagined future while avoiding discussion of present-day challenges.
Third, by positioning the administration as the agent of this “Golden Age,” the text transforms what should be a commemoration of Black resistance and achievement into a vehicle for white political authority – a rhetorical move that paradoxically reinforces racial hierarchies within a document meant to challenge them.
Regressive Bias in Language
Even basic style choices reveal bias. The proclamation uses lowercase “black” when referring to Blacks, ignoring current editorial standards that recognize “Black” as proper noun when referring to racial and cultural identity. This deviation from contemporary standards suggests either careless oversight or a deliberate calculated rejection of linguistic norms around racial discourse.
The proclamation’s framing of “black American” rather than simply “American” perpetuates a deeply rooted linguistic tradition of exclusion dating back to Woodrow Wilson’s successful “America First” Presidential re-election campaign of 1916. 
This horribly racist slogan, emerging from earlier racist nativist movements, established a rhetorical framework where “American” implicitly meant “white,” while all others required qualifying adjectives – “Black American,” “Chinese American,” etc. By consistently placing racial and ethnic identifiers before “American,” this linguistic pattern reinforced who could and couldn’t claim unmodified “American” identity.
The 2025 proclamation returns to this long-gone error: even in a document meant to celebrate Black achievement, the text never refers to its subjects simply as “Americans,” but always with the preceding racial qualifier. The White House thus has resurrected Wilson-era KKK rhetoric that “America First” linguistically marks certain races (“black Americans”) as perpetually denied the category of “true” Americans.
Drawing on theories of “linguistic subordination,” this pattern of modified Americanness serves to continuously reaffirm a racial hierarchy where whiteness remains unmarked and normative, while other identities are perpetually marked as different and secondary. The intentional racism in “America First” is thus to signal to non-whites they are American second and thus always outsiders.
Institutional Power Through Language
The above analysis hopefully has clarified how the White House’s 2025 proclamation operates as an instrument of racial hierarchy by implementing three interlocking mechanisms of linguistic power:
First, it employs grammatical structures that systematically position Blacks as objects rather than agents of American history – from exclusionary pronouns to passive voice constructions that minimize Black agency.
Second, through strategic representation and calculated omission, it constructs a narrative that delegitimizes collective resistance while celebrating individual achievement in ways that reinforce existing power structures.
Third, its temporal manipulation – moving between selective past and mythologized future while avoiding the contested present – creates what critical discourse analysts call “narrative closure,” where acknowledgment of historical figures serves to deny contemporary injustice.
These patterns matter because presidential proclamations don’t merely describe reality – they actively shape it. Military intelligence officers know this. Disinformation and propaganda experts recognize this.
When the highest office in American government employs linguistic strategies meant to subtly reinforce racial hierarchies while appearing to celebrate diversity, it reveals how institutional power operates through corrupted language to maintain racial hierarchies while denying their existence.
