Step 10: Separate Idolatry from Patriotism

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly. The world is messy; there are ambiguities… People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.” - Barack Obama, 10/29/19

I’ll get back to that quote in a moment…

So we’re down to the last two key steps in this plan to extract racism (to the best of our ability) from our daily lives. Today, I don’t intend to get biblical, but I do want to talk about the negative impact of Idolatry. When I drafted the blueprint for this series a couple weeks ago, I had no idea how timely *this* step would be, as it was before we saw so much movement around taking down statues and paintings (both at the governmental and criminal level), before a re-ignited conversation around removing the confederate flag in even more places, and of course, before we said goodbye to Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben.

And all of those changes feel pretty darn good, but we’re not out of the woods yet. For instance, just when I thought it was safe to maybe trek down to Talladega and try one of those “Krispy Kreme Burgers”, we learned that the ONE black driver who championed the removal of the Confederate Flag found a noose in his locker this week. That’s correct (and maybe a smidge ironic) someone decided to take a stance to defend THAT flag (a symbol often dismissed as “heritage not hate” by its supporters) with a NOOSE (a symbol representative of “pure unadulterated hate”). Yep.

Why do we keep ending up in these situations where there is a political debate over when it’s time to just let something like a flag, or a “graven image” go into the pile of history, but out of our daily view? I believe that the best thing we can do as citizens is to double down on our emotional attachment to the Constitution and the documents that frame the ideals of the American Experiment, and to start to distance ourselves from our canonization of the people who helped create them and shape our journey from there to here.

Admittedly, this crosses into a political conversation, and to the best of my ability I’ve tried to keep these suggestions as apolitical as possible. Really. Each day, I’ve been doing my best to scan conservative media as well as the Facebook walls of some of my most conservative friends in tandem with drafting these posts to ensure I’m presenting a way forward that could theoretically appeal to anyone interested in progress for black skin, regardless of who they intend to vote for in November.

In this particular investigation, I’ve learned a few things. We see an underlying belief on the right that our Founding Fathers are ‘untouchable’. We also see a romanticism of symbols and figures of hate and oppression, and a deep admiration for people who fought on the wrong side of the Civil War. It can end up feeling like anyone with a white face, a jacket denoting military involvement (regardless of which side they fought on), and preferably a beard --- should be shielded from critique and are as worthy of our unadulterated praise and gratitude as modern-day Beyonce. An undying loyalty to those leaders and figures who came before is then conflated with patriotism. This is a dangerous form of Idolatry. When this type of worship is connected to patriotism, there can ‘be no wrong,’ in our reflections on their ‘Sainthood’ and our collective inability to live with cognitive dissonance means our brains swoop in to clean up the mess. Thus, the defenders of those leaders’ most unsavory actions make ridiculous sounding assertions -- for example, ownership of slaves is often forgiven readily, dismissed as an anachronistic mistake like owning Bell Bottoms or Pet Rocks. “But Everyone else was doing it at the time!” becomes a common refrain.

I’ll do my best now to deploy the non-binary thinking I preached about last week: While slavery was most certainly an atrocity I’m not sure we’ll ever erase the stains of, I’m not saying that slavery disqualifies the important work done by our Founding Fathers. I’m just suggesting maybe we don’t need so many statues of them. (Let the record show, however, I am suggesting without reservation that we don’t need a single statue of a confederate leader.) In an admittedly interesting speech by conservative lightning rod Ben Shapiro, he suggested the US was founded on Freedom and not Slavery, and brought attention to an often ignored portion of the “I Have A Dream” speech, when MLK Jr. said “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” It has been argued, by historians more qualified than me, that the constitution was written with the goal of one day truly living up to the promise of equality even if it could not be realized then. The ideals of the American Experiment are one of the few lights at the end of the tunnel on dark days in this nation when you have black skin. There’s beauty to the idea that as citizens we’ve all agreed to unite around a Constitution that shines as a beacon around the globe and promises us we can do better.

I included the Obama quote at the very top to ground myself in writing this step for discussion. Less tone-deaf than the ill-timed “Good People On Both Sides” argument of our current President, it still gets at the underlying idea that it is possible to be a good person and have wildly different views on a variety of things. Any binary claims as to the greatness of a person (unless it’s Beyonce) are inherently flawed because humans are flawed. We are now, we were yesterday, and we will be tomorrow. So, as much as we may love Lincoln for freeing the Slaves, as much as we may love Obama for breaking a seemingly unimaginable racial barrier, it doesn’t behoove us to worship these people. We teach our children to revere many of our previous leaders, and that is an irresponsible way to build allegiance, to build patriotism. It’s more important that children learn the reasons to love the Gettysburg Address or Obama’s “No Red or Blue America” DNC speech of 2004. Yes, let’s learn about the people who got us where we are, but our gratitude for their humanity doesn’t require worship. It doesn’t require statues. We can channel that love and gratitude into engaging with the things they did right, learning from the things we did wrong, and time and time again, coming back to the ideals of the American Experiment that bond us all.