It is hard to grasp the idea that people who we have accepted as decent members of our society behave in some very dark ways and believe in some very dark things. This is not a profound revelation for many people who find themselves swimming in the darkness, but it bears emphasizing in the weighty moment we find ourselves in. The protest movement started by Colin Kaepernick has indisputably gotten much more attention after the president’s pathology led him to elbow his way into this conversation, but I want to leave our fearful leader aside for the most part. I have had the displeasure of witnessing many people vehemently insisting that they are not racist while using all manner of invective to decry the protesting athletes.
Those opposed to the protests seem to publicly fall into two camps that I wish to discuss here: those who supposedly revere our national symbols and are thus offended by any disruption to these rituals that involve, and those who fear that the message of the protest will be lost or rejected because of the former. I will not waste my time discussing those who question the need to protest at all; such people are, at best, too lazy to read a newspaper from time to time and thus their uninformed opinions should not be taken seriously.
This first group holds the flag and the anthem as sacred national symbols not to be challenged, and who insist the rituals that we engage in to support them must not be disrupted, no matter what the cause. However, reverence to the flag has never stopped people putting it on all manner of kitsch[1], or mistreating their flags by letting them touch the ground[1:1] or leaving them out in the rain[1:2], or even defacing them in those “Blue Lives Matter” monstrosities[1:3], just to name a few examples. I seem to have missed the outrage over all those affronts. Also, the narrowing of these symbols to represent troops, police, firefighters, etc. is curious – are they the only valid patriots in this country? What about the teacher, the nurse, the social worker, or anyone working for a better America? Bob Costas made this point on CNN a few weeks ago – when he goes to Yankee Stadium for a game, the “American hero” honored is never one of the latter professions – only one of the former.[1:4]
Further, we must think about what the flag means to all those who we call Americans. What does the flag mean to the descendants of slaves?[1:5] While the story is more complex than can be laid out here, in some cases the British promised freedom to the slaves of those fighting for independence if they joined the Loyalist armies. After the war, the same sacred flag flew over one of the world’s greatest slave powers, as the labor of black people was stolen to build an economic powerhouse -- and many of the very buildings that our government still resides in today. It is not hyperbolic to suggest that American slavery is a historical atrocity on the level of the Holocaust, with the only difference being that the early American slaveowners were more interested than the Nazis in maximizing the economic value of the lives they utterly controlled. We should also not erase that the United States was one of the last Western powers to abolish slavery,[1:6] and that even from the beginning of the republic, many Americans were vocal about its moral stain on our country. It is also true that from the Civil War and beyond, the American flag has been on the anti-slavery side, but the history of this country is inescapable and must be reckoned with.
To reckon with this history, we must also be willing to see how it is involved in structures that define our lives today. I was spurred to write this essay because of the unpleasant experience of debating someone on social media who contended that the anthem protests were counterproductive because they risked offending broad swathes of people otherwise opposed to police brutality against African-Americans. The history of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s should give people pause about contending that avoiding offense is the key to acceptance by white audiences; the polls available from the time clearly show that wide swathes of Americans disapproved of the movement’s tactics.[1:7] This is despite the conscious effort of many of the movement’s leaders to play into respectability politics (notice how in so many of the pictures of civil rights protests, the protestors are in their Sunday best?) and to invoke moral language reminiscent of the language of liberty that the Framers used. These efforts did not prevent a violent backlash in many parts of the country (including areas outside the South), and did not make their movement more popular. In fact, most of the gains made by the movement were won in the courts and by applying pressure to key actors (i.e. politicians) rather than trying to win the impossible game of broad acceptance.
Of course, some social movements have been able to succeed in some areas by both making gains in the legal system and pursuing broad acceptance (for example, the effort to legalize same-sex marriage), but these movements have been able to frame themselves as efforts to expand rights that require little structural change (the parts of the LGBT rights movement that do demand structural changes have, predictably, been met with substantial backlash). Movements that demand major structural change, like Black Lives Matter and its fellow travelers, will always invoke a backlash, no matter how gentle they try to be with the people whom they ostensibly would like to persuade.
A universe in which police departments harass, abuse, and murder black people, in which black children are trapped in failing public schools with lead in the water and mold in the air while white children go to shiny private schools, in which the median black family has a mere fraction (and a declining one) of the wealth of the median white family, does not arise by accident. It arises because white people have constructed a society in which their comfort is privileged, and they continue to uphold it, in many cases without explicitly pursuing the goal of black suffering.
If American society is a house, white supremacy is the foundation it is built on – but we must remember that the foundation is not passive; it is active, working to hold the whole thing up every minute of every day. It is immaterial whether you tell people nicely that their houses are built in a destructive way – there is a natural human resistance to hearing such news, even when they say they agree with the conclusions.[1:8] If you’ll allow me to torture this analogy a bit further, white Americans are acting as if they are upset that the person who tells them they need to totally renovate their house was a bit brusque with them, when the real problem is that they’re upset that they need to go to the trouble of rebuilding their house. Rebuild it they must, though, or, as James Baldwin once wrote: “This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity... is destroying them; and this not from anything blacks may or may not be doing but because of the role a guilty and constricted white imagination has assigned to the blacks.”[1:9]