Beloved, this became clear with the uproar over the decision of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick to kneel, instead of stand, during the playing of the national anthem. He did so to protest injustice against black folk. Despite the backlash, Kaepernick says, “[I am] going to continue to stand with the people that are being oppressed. To me, this is something that has to change, and when there’s significant change—and I feel like that flag represents what it’s supposed to represent, and this country is representing people the way it’s supposed to—I’ll stand.”
Kaepernick has been accused of being a traitor to the nation, a disruptive, self-aggrandizing narcissist, and a loathsome human being who disrespects the military. Clearly, it is still difficult to talk about race in an informed and intelligent fashion. And clearly conservative forces are arrayed against athletes, making it difficult for an athlete of color to forge ties to his people, and to speak out about issues that affect a significant portion of his fan base. My friends, can you not understand how this highlights the hypocrisy of a sport that has given second chances to players like Greg Hardy and Ray McDonald, who were accused of domestic violence? That warmly embraces Ben Roethlisberger, twice accused of sexual assault? And yet the sport is enraged at a player making a humane gesture of identification with the victims of racial violence?
Kaepernick has been criticized for his lack of patriotism. The accusation is nothing new. Black folk have been viewed suspiciously throughout American history because of a willingness to be critical of the nation even as they love and embrace it. How many of you who claim that Kaepernick is unpatriotic realize that many black men put on an American uniform and fought overseas, only to return home to be spurned and denied the rights for which they fought? How many of you realize that black soldiers who had fought valiantly for American liberties sometimes returned home to die on the lynching tree because racist whites resented them for wearing the uniform or hoisting the American flag? How many of you know that in 1976, the year of the Bicentennial, during a Boston City Hall demonstration against court-ordered busing, a white student protester turned an American flag, tied to a pole, into a weapon to viciously assault Ted Landsmark, a black lawyer?
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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.
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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.