Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(27)



*

Black folk have, throughout history, displayed their patriotism by criticizing the nation for its shortcomings. And they, in turn, have been roundly criticized. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who fled from slavery, offered a famous oration on the meaning of Independence Day, asking, “What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” The great black poet Langston Hughes grieved in verse, “There’s never been equality for me, / Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’” When Martin Luther King, Jr., said that America “is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and opposed the Vietnam War, he was branded a traitor who, according to black journalist Carl Rowan, had created “the impression that the Negro is disloyal.” Muhammad Ali was stripped of his title and run out of the ring for his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War.

Now all of these figures are celebrated: King’s birthday is a national holiday and Ali was given a hero’s burial not long ago. Michelle Obama, once pilloried as ungrateful and unpatriotic, is more popular than her husband, and Barack Obama, once assailed as unpatriotic for not wearing a lapel pin of the American flag, won not one but two terms.

My friends, none of these black figures hated the nation. Instead, they wanted the nation to straighten up and fly right. Douglass refused to join the chorus of black voices yearning to return to Africa and decided to stay put in America. Hughes was hurt by America but longed for her acceptance when he titled his poem “Let America Be America Again.” Martin Luther King, Jr., declared that white America had to do blacks right, yet he spoke for most of us when he said, “We ain’t going nowhere.”

What some of you are missing is that Kaepernick is the best kind of American there is: one willing to criticize his country precisely because he loves it so much. James Baldwin said it best when he wrote, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Both Baldwin and Kaepernick have offended you so greatly because they insisted on separating whiteness from American identity. The two are neither synonymous nor exhaustive; they neither signify all that America means, nor can they possibly radiate the full brightness of her promise. Donald Trump is missing the point when he says that Kaepernick should “find a country that works better for him.” Instead, Kaepernick believes so deeply in this country that he is willing to offer correction rather than abandon the nation—and to donate a million dollars in support of racial justice causes. But innocent whiteness recoils at such instruction. It pushes back against the notion that it could possibly learn anything from a black body kneeling on white sacred territory. But it is that same territory that profanes and then swallows the bodies of unarmed black folk. We must see Kaepernick’s criticism as love—the tough love that America needs. Even though his decision not to vote in the 2016 presidential election was a grave political miscalculation, Kaepernick’s social protest remains a vital, valid gesture.

*

The opposition to black displays of dissent rests on a faulty premise and a confusion of terms. Many of you who oppose our dissent because of patriotism are really opposing us because of nationalism, and, whether you know it or not, a white nationalism at that. There is a big difference between nationalism and patriotism.

Nationalism is the uncritical celebration of one’s nation regardless of its moral or political virtue. It is summarized in the saying, “My country right or wrong.” Lump it or leave it. Nationalism is a harmful belief that can lead a country down a dangerous spiral of arrogance, or off a precipice of political narcissism. Nationalism is the belief that no matter what one’s country does—whether racist, homophobic, sexist, xenophobic, or the like—it must be supported and accepted entirely.

Patriotism is a bigger, more uplifting virtue. Patriotism is the belief in the best values of one’s country, and the pursuit of the best means to realize those values. If the nation strays, then it must be corrected. The patriot is the person who, spotting the need for change, says so clearly and loudly, without hate or rancor. The nationalist is the person who spurns such correction and would rather take refuge in bigotry than fight it. It is the nationalists who wrap themselves in a flag and loudly proclaim themselves as patriots. That is dangerous, as glimpsed in Trump’s amplification of racist and xenophobic sentiments. In the end, Trump is a nationalist, and Kaepernick is a patriot.

Beloved, there appears in this flap to be a confusion of symbol and substance. The worship of the flag is, too, a form of nationalist idolatry. It is not respectful love. It confuses the cloth with conviction. The power doesn’t reside in the flag; it resides in the ideals to which the flag points. The worship of the flag gets us nowhere, nor does enthusiastically embracing the troubled song that accompanies it. Listen to the third verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which includes the words, “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” Whiteness was pitched into the nation’s collective memory through song in the same way that it was stitched into the nation’s pride through a waving banner.

Most of us know nothing of our anthem’s political pedigree or its racist implications. That’s why American hero Jackie Robinson wrote in his autobiography, I Never Had It Made, “I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag. I know that I am a black man in a white world.” What can lift the Stars and Stripes higher are the real-life practices that make that flag and that song meaningful. If we cite the Bible, and yet fail to live according to its codes, the Bible becomes just another book. But when we live it, it becomes powerful. If you believe it, the words of scripture say that we become living epistles in whose life others read the presence of God.

Michael Eric Dyson's Books