Yesterday, Independence Day, I laid in bed from about 4am to 6am listening to a variety of Americans answer whether or not they were proud to be an American. Apparently, a recent Gallop poll revealed that the percentage of Americans claiming to be very proud or proud had slipped. As I listened carefully to the responses, I realized that C-Span was asking the wrong question. They should have been asking whether we love our country, not if we are proud to be American. To be proud of someone or something indicates approval and acceptance of what that person or entity has achieved or stands for. It was evident that those who see the trouble in our streets and problems with our government or who are grabbling with the racist history of the nation more often struggled to say they were proud Americans. However, the least educated seemed to be gushing with pride. For this, I blame our K-12 educational system and the history books that were designed to engender a sense of pride and patriotism by omitting or downplaying the warts, failures, and misdeeds of the country.
I was taking an American history class in college when I got my first glimpse of the true history of America. And what I learned wasn’t at all the rosy picture that was painted for me in K-12 where Christopher Columbus discovered America; where indigenous people gladly moved into missions and onto reservations; where cheerful African slaves picked cotton for their caring planation owners and then were freed by Abraham Lincoln because white Americans came to believe slavery was wrong because of a book called, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. The Civil War was about succession and states’ rights, not about slavery and both sides were to be respected and honored. Women were given the right to vote because the country evolved. Nothing was ever mentioned about the immigration policies and legal discrimination that shaped the demographic and economic structure of the country in a way that privileged whiteness. The heroes of the nation who fought and died in our wars were all white males. The classic books were by white authors. The museums were packed with art from white people and even today only 1.2% of the art in our national museums are by black artists. It is likely even fewer are from other minority groups.
The seeds of the cognitive dissonance between what I was programmed to believe about America and the reality I was living needed further explanation. Our school system was created to turn out patriotic adults who believe that America is the best place in the world “with liberty and justice for all”. The rich and powerful need ordinary Americans to be proud enough of their country to willingly pay taxes and to die for it so they can maintain their place. But knowing the actual history puts that blind patriotism in jeopardy. In my gut, I knew something was wrong. The narrative and the reality didn’t match up. And so, I began to read. I read a lot. One of the first books to provide me with a much clearer understanding of U.S. history was, “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong” by James W. Loewen. There were others, but notably, “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson helped me better understand my family’s journey from Mississippi to Detroit, to California. And finally, “A People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn.
Granted, the actual history of the U.S. does not make one overly proud. So, it is not surprising that as Trump inadvertently exposes this dark history by scheduling a rally during Juneteenth close to the site of the 1921 Black Wall Street massacre near Tulsa, Oklahoma, the nation as a whole is exposed to a horrifying piece of American history that has been locked away from view. And Friday, yet another episode of American horror stories was revealed when he held his rally at Mt. Rushmore amid protests from the Lakota Sioux Indians who claim that land as sacred and we learn how it had been stolen from them-a ruling upheld by the Supreme Court in 1980. His current actions also reveal that monuments to traitors and slave perpetrators standing in public places in the south were erected in order to proclaim white supremacy during the time of Jim Crowe. I’m grateful that his inadvertent exposure is helping to destroy a collective false pride and invigorate the need for change.
While I don’t claim to be a proud American, I do claim to be a patriotic American who loves my country and will work hard to see her reach her full potential of her promise. I actually think that loving America is better than being blindly patriotic based on a sense of pride predicated upon a mythology and ugly hidden truths. As a nation, I think it’s like we are learning for the first time that our parents are not perfect. But like children, once the shock wears off, they realize that they love their parents none the less and will protect them at all costs based not on their perfection, but on love and devotion to them. So on this Independence Day weekend, I can say with confidence that I love America. And one day, maybe I will be proud of her, too.