Growing up, there was no expectation from my family that I perform gratitude, allegiance, or patriotism towards the United States of America. Not in my attire, speech, or actions. When Lisa Frank put out flag shaped notebooks, I didn’t get one. When my teachers and counselors noted that I didn’t rise as other students sang the Pledge of Allegiance with conviction, my grandmother signed the pink slip without question.
I have never understood the faith or hope that folks have in this country. This includes the government, its citizens and its “values.” The United States is a place that has always been excellent at disappearing people, legitimizing revisionist history, and reinforcing antiBlack racism.
At the end of June, I traveled to Oregon to sleep and to write, thinking the noise from constant fireworks wouldn’t be so loud there. Throughout the nine hour drive from California—where between the 1840s and 1860s, state legislators and citizens worked hard to ban Black people from immigrating or residing—American flags were everywhere. And, though it was quieter, I could not escape the realities of anti-Black racism or the ways that Oregon specifically institutes it.
In 1844, the Provisional Government of Oregon ruled that Black settlers would be excluded from Oregon’s borders. These Black Exclusion Laws stated that any Black person who refused to leave Oregon would be publicly whipped, by “not less than twenty or more than thirty-nine stripes,” to be repeated every six months until they left.
Given this history, it’s no surprise that today Oregon’s population of Black residents is only 3%. These seemingly progressive, hippy states have vested interests and a shared history in ensuring Black folks don’t receive the bare minimum: housing access, resources and food.
On the fourth of July, I sat in the passenger seat of a car opposite the train tracks in Oregon, waiting for a train to go by. I watched as a white woman with red, white and blue highlights in her hair stroked a gun. Two of her three children smiled at her while playing nearby, and she waved with her free hand. The other child kicked up water in the river, his hand gripping a light green toy gun.
As the river frog nearest his leg and shooting hand hopped away, it was not lost on me that white freedoms and white supremacist violence are intrinsically linked. The protections that white folks experience just by being have never been afforded to others, especially Black children.
In 1942, United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to forcibly intern Japanese Americans, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Japanese Americans in turn shielded themselves (and their houses) with American flags in hopes that they’d be marked good citizens. They were still given seven to ten days to pack up their belongings before being imprisoned for an undefined amount of time. They never gained access to their homes again.
Folks who regard America as anything but violent are terrible historians at best. The cracks in these myths of progress are all around us. They are embedded in our school systems, housing policies, air quality, food resources, and prisons.
Once the train passed and my partner and I crossed over the tracks in my car, I got to see more of the park. It was full of barbecue pits, flowers, white men drinking beer out of cans and dirty beach blankets on the grass. In the parking lot, three pickup trucks huddled close together, their engines revving. One quick look to the side and I saw Confederate and American flags displayed proudly.
When the music boomed louder, one of the men flashed a smile and all I heard were screams. I looked around and no one seemed affected. There was no shuffling, no movement, no break in conversation, even in the one I was having. The light turned green.
Ten miles from where my partner and I were staying, seven fascists were arrested for harassing a Black family on vacation. The police formed a barricade around the family and escorted them from the beach back to their hotel.
For the last week, reports of federal agents grabbing protestors in unmarked cars in Portland, Oregon are all over the news cycle. And not even two weeks after returning from Oregon, Trump has threatened to deploy more federal agents to my hometown, Oakland, California.
I keep coming back to the function, patterns and histories of patriotism in this country because none of this is new. And I believe that when we remember that fact, we get stronger in our strategies of dismantling the systems and ideologies that produced them in the first place.
Last month, four white men in Wisconsin allegedly poured lighter fluid on a Black teenager through her car window and attempted to set her on fire. Before I left home, I promised my own family that I would not let my car windows down, no matter what. But I let them down anyway, reasoning that allowing white people to dictate the way I move is no way to be free.
But after hearing the scream, I rolled my windows up, remembering stories of unmarked cars snatching up family and community members in broad daylight on our block. Still my belly held tight with worry. I remembered my grandmother telling me whenever she and her family went on road trips, they kept their windows rolled up, no matter how hot it was in the car. They never pulled over at rest stops.
The physical, emotional and institutional violence that white supremacy requires from its agents is not relegated to the current moment. The hate crimes being highlighted are made possible because of the history of violence in this country and the way violence is wielded outside of it.
I’m both anxious and weirdly grounded by the familiarity of this moment. This country has always exercised the practice of institutional and generational theft. From its very insurgence, America has attempted to revise history and shirk its responsibility of displacing people, stealing land, and murder.
Throughout the world, but especially in the US and other countries in “The West,” protests against mandatory mask wearing are on the rise. In Utah, one hundred anti-maskers attended a commission meeting, ignoring social distancing rules. These folks believe that the coronavirus is a hoax and the mandates on mask wearing are compliance ploys and political tools of manipulation.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is suing Atlanta over their mask mandate because he believes it violates his emergency orders of encouraging face masks but not requiring them.
The dangerous, undying, exhaustive and boring characteristics that some white Americans mistake/ adopt as endearing personality traits point to the larger, transactional, codependent nature of capitalism and white supremacy.
Protecting statues, inanimate objects, and “values” over Black lives is a particularly American thing. The refusal to also recognize the ways white folks are willing to risk their lives and the lives of their loved ones as an expression of their patriotism and a commitment to destroying Black, Brown and Indigenous lives is U.S. history in a nutshell.
The lessons I learned from my family’s active disinterest in patriotism are ones rooted in acknowledging just how fucked up this country has always been. These are lessons passed down from my uncles who fought in the Vietnam war to family members who’ve been jailed and then forgotten about to Black femmes in kitchens outlining the ways we organize our families, bills and communities. These expressions of not being indebted to the United States, of not feigning misguided allegiance are what keep me clear in my commitment to preserving Black presents and futures.
Reading Suggestions:
The Negro Motorist Green Book by Victor H. Green
Whiteness as Property by Cheryl l. Harris
Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement by Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and KEndal Thomas
Amber Butts is a writer, organizer, grief worker and educator from Oakland, CA who believes that Black folk are already whole. Her work centers Black children, Black mamas and Black elders. It asks big and small questions about how we move towards actualizing spaces that center tenderness, nuance and joy while living in a world reliant on our terror.
Amber comes from a long line of hairdressers, storytellers and loud women from The South. She likes cheese, comic books and sings off-key.
