Blacks are just as proud and patriotic as any other American
Think about it for a moment. For more than a century, British colonists in North America had practiced a particularly cruel brand of slavery, a system of bondage intended not just to exploit the labor of Africans but to crush their spirit as well. Backs were whipped and broken, families systematically separated, traditions erased, ancient languages silenced. Yet a black man — to many, nothing more than a piece of property — chose to stand and die with the patriots of Boston.
Now think about the Buffalo Soldiers and the Tuskegee Airmen. Think about Dorie Miller, who, like so many black sailors in the segregated U.S. Navy of the 1940s, was relegated to kitchen duty — until Pearl Harbor, when Miller rushed up to the deck of the sinking USS West Virginia, carried wounded sailors to safety and then raked Japanese planes with fire from a heavy machine gun until he ran out of ammunition.
The subject is particularly relevant now that the first African-American with a realistic chance of becoming president, Barack
Obama, has felt compelled to give a lengthy speech explaining his own patriotism. It is not common, in my experience, for sitting U.S. senators to be questioned on their love of country — to be grilled about a flag pin, for example, or critiqued on the posture they assume when the national anthem is played. For an American who attains such high office, patriotism is generally assumed as a given.
It seems that some people don't want to give Obama the benefit of that assumption, however, and I have to wonder if that's because he's black. And then I have to wonder why.
The fact that African-American patriotism is never simple doesn't mean it's in any way halfhearted; to the contrary, complicated relationships tend to be the deepest and strongest. It's a historical fact that black soldiers and sailors who fought overseas in World War II came home to Southern cities where they had to ride in the back of the bus — and that they were angry that the nation for which they had sacrificed would treat them this way. To some whites, I guess, it may seem logical to be suspicious of black patriotism — to believe that anger must somehow temper love of country.
It doesn't, of course. It never has. Black Americans are just more intimately and acutely aware of some of our nation's flaws than many white Americans might be. This generalization is less true of my sons than of my parents, and I hope that someday it won't be true at all. But only in the past half-century has the United States begun to fully extend the rights of citizenship to African-Americans — and only in the past year has the idea that a black man might actually be elected president been more than a plot device for movies and television shows. We're someplace we've never been.
Recent comments
If our (the virtuous right) reasons for disliking the Obamas are...
Mark B | July 4, 2008 at 9:36 p.m.
Not all African-Americans are patriotic in the same way as the author...
General Ization | July 4, 2008 at 5:36 p.m.
And yet they want to remind everyone they are african.
Go...
Anonymous | July 4, 2008 at 5:32 p.m.
