By Calvin Hill
It was in a 9th grade assembly in the auditorium of JHS 22 that I learned that Jehovah’s Witnesses do not pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States or acknowledge the national anthem. No one ever complains about it, expresses outrage, or offer even minor levels of condemnation.
As narcissistic Donald Trump denigrates athletes who choose to kneel in protest of the racial inequality that still exists in the United States more than 241 years after the declaration of American independence, 63 years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, 53 years after the Civil Rights Act, 52 years after the Voting Rights Act, and 51 years after the Miranda decision, a self righteous gaggle of Trump supporters and TV and radio talk show hosts who spend from one to three hours a day, 5 days a week pontificating about whatever crosses their minds and railing about the opinions of others, earn substantially more money than the athletes they criticize. They also claim to be staunch believers in the Constitution of the United States. In truth, they are the ultimate bearers of hypocrisy by ignoring the indisputable fact that the right of Mr. Colin Kaepernick to his form of protest is not only in the same paragraph of the constitutional amendment that governs a religion’s right of refusal to recognize the anthem – it is in the very same sentence.
The draft deferring Mr. Trump, who likely learned the ins and mostly outs of housing discrimination at the foot of his daddy, who had been arrested at a KKK rally, is so out of touch with the patriotic nationalism, of which he now speaks, that he needed his immigrant wife to elbow him and remind him to place his hand over his uncaring heart during the playing of the national anthem. After insulting the mother of a military man who gave his life for his country, a retired naval officer and US Senator, whose current diagnosis may end his life of service for this country, and an American judge simply because his parents were born south of the border, Donald Trump has yet to coherently explain what is endearing or patriotic about passing classified information to the Russian ambassador at the expense of an ally, hiring a compromised advisor being compensated by foreign governments, soliciting a hostile foreign government to hack the correspondence of an American citizen, and bragging about his outstanding ability to sexually assault women.
Our flag is a symbol that recognizes our country. The national anthem is our fight song. And it is the Constitution of the United States that we are obliged to fight for, not the symbols. It is the constitution that is sworn to be defended against all enemies – not the flag or the anthem. In fact, with a majority vote of the US House of Representatives and the US Senate, the flag of the United States and the national anthem can be changed with the stroke of a pen by the President of the United States. The constitution – not so easily.
Unfortunately, it is the artificial construction of whiteness that constantly fuels the absurd narrative that the First Amendment makes our country’s institutions and traditions protest appropriate for some, but not for others. Recent protests, peacefully undertaken by black athletes and their sympathizers, over the continuing lack of racial and judicial equality also points to the discriminatory nature of their detractors – particularly the one presently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Trying to deduce a moral equivalence between Antifa and the KKK and the neo-Nazi groups only attempts to validate the privilege and superiority of whiteness. Were it not for Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and the covert extension of slave laws into modern America, there would be no groups or organizations like Antifa, Black Lives Matter or the NAACP. If the symbols of the Stars and Stripes and the national anthem were objects of patriotism and not whiteness, there would be no need for legislating civil and voting rights and criminal justice reform. There would be no need for a political party to forge a nationwide, targeted, all out assault on the right to vote against those Americans who had the audacity to vote for a black man to be President of the United States. And it was the importance of being white that led American citizens to depreciate and dishonor what their country stands for when they lynched, dismembered, castrated and burned their fellow American citizens, as spectacle, while they were still clothed in the uniforms that truly denote American patriotism. Burning the flag is sacrilege – burning the uniform, with black soldier attached, was as American as apple pie.
While we witness a war of words, that could possibly incite a nuclear catastrophe, between a juvenile delinquent with a bad haircut and a young Asian autocrat, we are engaging ourselves in a war of words that avoids the realities that race plays in American society based on what is legitimate protest and who may engage in it regardless of wealth or occupation.
Professional athletes are engaged in a business for which they are paid to do a specific job. Protestations aside, they are no different than Americans who work for GM, GE, Amazon, Fox News, AMTRAK, ABC, NBC, CBS, and the denizens of loudmouth radio – none of whom are required to report for work, stand at attention and listen to the national anthem. Many years ago the television affiliates of ABC, NBC and CBS went off the air at late night to a picture of Old Glory blowing in the wind as the Star Spangled Banner played – usually loud enough to wake you if you fell asleep during “regularly scheduled programming.” It is highly doubtful that even the most loyal patriot rose from his slumber, or his lounge chair, to honor America at midnight – not even a ratings obsessed television viewer or reality show host playing at politics.
For anyone to say that kneeling during the national anthem to protest the injustice of unarmed black men and women being shot to death by law enforcement “insults the flag and the military” is very unfair, infinitely misguided and totally absurd. But for Donald Trump to say it is an absolute disgrace. He has insulted prisoners of war and the memories of those who can no longer rise for reveille and stand in honor of the country they served.
This can be expected of a charlatan who lies with the kind of ease and simplicity that most people blink their eyes and reads from a Teleprompter with all the confidence and difficulty of a 5th grader whom I tutored when I attended JHS 22. We need to expect better from those who went to other “great schools,” were taught civics, and learned that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and that Frederick Douglass died decades before they were born.
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