Taking Back Our Flag

Photo: a slowly unfurling American flag braves the snow on a winter morning. The flag, high atop a flagpole, is surrounded by bare trees and framed on the left by an evergreen powdered with snow. With red for courage, blue for justice and white for innocence, the Stars and Stripes means different things to different people. 

     There is something inherently powerful about the symbols of America - the vivid crimson, white and navy of our stars and stripes rippled by a steady wind across a summer-blue sky, the majesty of a bird of prey with a pure white head and tail, and a terrifyingly sharp golden beak. The strains of our "O, say can you see" over loudspeakers at games and festivals; the monuments of our national heroes - Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and King.

    When I came to the US, I was five years old and starting kindergarten. I memorized the Pledge of Allegiance in school, learning to hold my hand over my heart while I recited it along with the other kids in my class. Then, as a teenager, recognizing that, though I was outwardly different from the other kids, I could also sport a US flag sticker on my bookbag or as a decal on my first car. I felt a love for this country, though it is not the one of my ancestry, nor the one of my birth.

    For my parents, mainly my father - who was the one who expressed his patriotism wholeheartedly and avidly supported the country they had chosen to emigrate to, America signaled the freedom to do as you wished. They came here for the standard of education, for the spirit of capitalism which said you could have anything you wanted if you worked hard enough for it. They left behind everything they knew to forge a new identity for their young family, in a place where - though foreign and sometimes excluding them, they could realize their wants and dreams through steady determination and unflagging temperance. 

    Even as a young adult and a parent, I would still get misty-eyed at the sight of a waving flag over a night sky bursting with fireworks. America was a country, but also a concept. America was the melting pot where people from all over the world could pool their resources to the common good and that would take care of them when times got hard. I finally got my US citizenship at the age of 30, after living in the US for 25 years, long after my own parents had become citizens, after I had married an American, and had two American children. I wept on that warm day in San Antonio, Texas, dressed in a crisp blue dress with large white polka dots and holding a rolled up piece of parchment that was supposed to be my certificate of citizenship. I wept because it felt like the country I had pledged to had finally opened its arms to accept me.

    The more I learned about life, the world, and my country, I began to see the cracks in the veneer: the flag covered all manner of sins. It shrouded the evils of enslavement, it buffeted through gales of discrimination and oppression. I began to see the flag as the Native Peoples would have seen it. I felt the waves of unjust treatment of undocumented immigrants whose only crime was being born too many miles to the south, or too many years after the border between countries encroached on the ancestral lands that weren't theirs any longer.

    I learned that the Civil Rights movement was not a granting of fair access, but a hard-fought battle to wrench back entitlements that were somehow taken. I learned that the reason I did not know, as a full-grown adult, the whole story of Harriet Tubman, of Rosa Parks, of Ruby Bridges, was because I was never taught. These stories made me doubt the allegiance I had stated. If the flag I had pledged as a child denied liberty and justice to all, was it even worth my pledge?

    Suddenly, the flag had become a symbol, not of freedom for all, but of freedom for some and bondage and exclusion for others. 

    Over the history of humans, symbols had become corrupted by flags. The swastika, for thousands of years, symbolized "well-being" for Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains. Their fervor for this happy-good-luck symbol was imported to the US in the early 20th century and it was used in advertising, for decoration, and even the Girl Scouts called their magazine Swastika! When Hitler adopted the symbol - black hakenkreus (hooked cross) on a circle of white, surrounded by red, everything changed. Now that symbol, and indeed that flag, signifies hatred to the world, and terror to Jews, who were murdered under the sanctity of that flag.

    Even in this country, we've seen a symbol that was barely used during the American Civil War - the Confederate "battle flag" become a standard for white supremacy and racist opposition to civil rights. Some say that it means good-hearted "rebellion" to them, and that it stands for Southern Heritage, but at the time of the Civil War it was not considered the flag of the Confederacy. For Black Americans, the sight of the flag provokes the same fear, distrust and terror that the swastika flag does for Jews. 

    Fast forward to today, when flags, like the "Thin Blue Line" that flies over the Madison County Sheriff's office - to the opposition and distaste of anti-racism groups, symbolize to some the persecution and mistreatment of people of color and immigrant groups. Flags continue to be heavy symbols, bringing a lot of baggage for such placidly waving things. When a flag stops being a point of pride and starts being a representation of oppression, mistrust and fear, then it has ended its usefulness as a symbol. 

    But I believe that the American Flag - Old Glory - has a future as an enduring marker of freedom, equality, valor, and unity. For that to happen, however, those who have felt betrayed or suppressed by this flag must endeavor to take it back. Immigrants who made this country singularly great, descendants of formerly enslaved peoples who built this country, Native peoples who gave up everything to watch a new nation born on their shores, LGBTQ people who face discrimination still, and anyone who feels that the flag does not stand for them, should know that it does. And by taking back a symbol that bears so much hope, we can begin to unite a country that is separated by rural and urban, wealthy and modest, young and old.

    It is only through efforts on every American's part that our Star-Spangled Banner will continue to "wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave." Though the flag is complete, our work is not yet finished.