Once upon a Time When Patriotism was What You Did

Abstract

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. --James Baldwin I AM A patriot. To most people who know me that statement probably comes as a surprise. Critical, yes. Radical, perhaps. But patriot? Not her. Yet I make this statement with the same vehemence that Cornel West asserts that he is a Christian (and I am one of those, too). (1) The reason this declaration seems so strange to most people is that, like many words in the English language, the term patriot has been hijacked by an increasingly narrow and undemocratic sector of society. Other words that have fallen into this category include Christian, liberal, multicultural, and religious. George Lakoff asserts that progressives have to learn to recapture the public discourse by reframing the debate. (2) I believe we are in a much worse place than simply lacking the ability to frame the debate. Indeed, I want to argue that there is no debate to frame. Instead there are shouting matches. Everything is already settled, and if you do not subscribe to the current dominant orthodoxy, you are unpatriotic and godless. Your very presence is a threat to the society. According to conservative pundit Ann Coulter, you are a traitor. (3) In this article I hope to address the challenge of in this current age. I want to challenge those who are patriotic enough to criticize common discourses about the nation and national policies to work on recapturing the language so that real debate is not only possible but valued. And I make my argument in a time when this bold kind of is being eroded in favor of a new patriotism that is more akin to indoctrination than critical and analytic citizenship and civic discourse. My thinking about is deeply autobiographical. Having grown up as an African American in the Fifties and Sixties, I have clear memories of what being an American meant in that era. For one thing, it meant participating in regular air raid drills in schools--huddling under our desks, away from windows, in anticipation of an attack by the Communists. It meant recognizing Communism as the worst evil that could happen to the nation and identifying and rooting out Communist influences wherever they appeared. It meant that, after the Soviets successfully launched Sputnik, it was part of my duty to be a good student and that when I became one I was participating in the national defense. Indeed, when I made my way to college, I was eligible to borrow money for tuition and fees at extraordinarily low interest rates (or not pay the money back at all if I decided to teach in a low-income community) thanks to the National Defense Education Act. It also meant that some people had to be excluded and persecuted for their collaboration with Communism either through party affiliation or through association with known Communists. Thus people like Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, heroes in my eyes, could not be spoken of in open conversation. It meant a war hero like Dwight Eisenhower was a more valuable national leader than an intellectual like Adlai Stevenson. My vision of patriotism, the nation, and my role in it was also shaped by the race relations of this period. In the early 1950s, African could legally be excluded from attending schools that white children attended. A 14-year-old boy from Chicago could be killed (beaten, lynched, castrated, and drowned) for whistling at a white woman. Children could not expect to go to school with members of racial groups and social classes different from their own, even if it meant they had to go miles outside of their neighborhoods to a school with inferior resources. In short, racial and ethnic encapsulation was a way of life, and we could be Americans only within our own groups. I knew that we were because there were photos of my dad and the other adult men in my family--uncles and cousins--on display throughout our home, smiling out at me in their military uniforms. …