Patriotism Felt Wrong and Embarrassing Until I Refused to Let It

All three of us were crying, and the two staffers behind Booker, as he stared at Jackson and told her, “You have earned this spot. You are worthy. You are a great American.”

What if refusing to allow the American flag to be a hate symbol is part of the active citizenship, the critical patriotism, that I am compelled by?

But it was when he talked about “a love in this country that’s extraordinary” and the way Jackson’s parents, like so many immigrant Americans and minority Americans, “didn’t stop loving this country even though this country didn’t love them back” that I started thinking that I have been negligent, simply turning my back in anger on the idea of taking agency in my identity as an American.

I have been so focused on loving the people this country doesn’t love back that I have overlooked the ways in which I could reclaim this country by loving them not just as myself but on behalf of this country. What if I said, “As an American, I love you. It is not just me but the America in me that loves you. That is grateful to you. That sees your Americanness, too, and holds it up.” It is American to acknowledge fully our nation’s history of exploitation and violence. It is American to say, “This nation was founded on a genocide and I hate that and I cannot change that and so now my American work is to look at what I can do to repair the wound of our founding, the ongoing wound of our existence.” It is American to say, “This nation was built by enslaved Black folks, its railroads were built by Chinese migrant workers paid less than white workers would’ve been while whites spread disgustingly racist lies about them.” It is my American work to tell these truths as I try to make the American existence less harmful and more inclusive and also reparative.

I have been consumed with anger at the late-stage capitalism this country revolves around, and I have wrongly allowed myself to believe that is America. That America is exploitation and abuse and a scarcity mindset and redbaiting and fearmongering and hyperindividualism and bootstrap ideology. But why should it be? I am America, as much as anyone. I am a Jewish Lebanese-Armenian Icelandic child of immigrants, descendent of refugees, and I am also American.

For our antiracism project at the small town library, we are reading the Jason Reynolds “remix” of Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped, which includes an introduction from Kendi, who writes:

I was taught that ignorant and hateful people had produced racist ideas, and that these racist people had instituted racist policies. But when I learned the motives behind the production of racist ideas, it became obvious that this folktale, though sensible, was not true. I found that the need of powerful people to defend racist policies that benefited them led them to produce racist ideas, and when unsuspecting people consumed these racist ideas, they became ignorant and hateful.

Unsuspecting people. Even after I read this, the next day when I was thinking about it, my brain had changed it to “ignorant people.” And then I tried to redefine ignorance, and was defining it as “unknowing,” because I was reaching for the same idea Kendi is holding up. People who consume racist ideas are transformed by them. No one starts out racist. No one has a racist core. That can be so hard to remember, or accept, when some folks are so loudly fucking racist. But it also gives us the slimmest sliver-shred of hope: If they are not made of poison, then perhaps they can still be unpoisoned.

Part of my American work might be to actively believe in the promise of this country that its most marginalized residents, Black folks and trans folks and immigrants among them, see and create. That true solidarity means making the sometimes Herculean-feeling effort to create it right along with the most hopeful among them. Hope is a verb, a friend pointed out to me recently. It takes effort.

I heard it as a responsibility passed to me when Booker said to Jackson, “You faced insults here that were shocking to me—well, actually not shocking,” and also when he talked about an exceptional love for this country and told her, “You are here because of that kind of love,” and also when he again made me sob as he told her, of those shocking and also not shocking insults, “It’s not going to stop. They’re going to accuse you of this and that… but don’t worry, my sister. Don’t worry. God has got you. And how do I know that? Because you’re here. And I know what it’s taking, for you to sit in that seat.”

“This country’s getting better and better and better,” he said, and I was surprised to find I could almost believe him.

I struggle with language like “the greatest country in the world,” because exceptionalism sounds a lot like supremacy to me and that gets my hackles up, sets me on edge, on alert for danger, for tyranny. But better and better and better—I can hope for that. I can work toward that. Because greatest or not, it is my country.

I will confess that I still feel some embarrassment, or maybe it’s nervousness, at being so ardently, vocally hopeful—at being this earnest patriot. But anger and frustration and disappointment are not generative emotions, they are draining ones. So I’m committing to be part of that “we, the people” Langston Hughes wrote about who “must redeem.” I am going to do my best to help unpoison the “unsuspecting folks” who people like Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn prey on. And like Booker said, I am really going to work—to try—not to let the loudest, meanest voices steal my joy, or my country.