“An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe in it.”
If you walked into a business meeting with your fly undone. Or if you were sitting at dinner with friends at a nice restaurant and had a big piece of spinach visibly stuck in your teeth. Or were about to meet your new in-laws for the first time wearing a T-shirt of their least-favorite football team.
Would you want someone to tell you?
Many people might not take it upon themselves to point out such flaws. Even a close friend or relative might avoid the subject for fear of embarrassing both of you.
But if you did point out the pants, or the teeth, or the BYU shirt, most of us would take some pains to be gentle about it. Properly done, the exchange of information would lead neither the person raising the issue nor the one getting the news to see it as an attack on anyone’s character or worthiness as a human being.
So even people who are totally sympathetic to the cause of Black Lives Matter, in Utah and around the world, might wish that the leader of the local BLM chapter had been a little more diplomatic when she posted on social media the statement: “When we Black Americans see this flag we know the person flying it is not safe to be around. When we see this flag we know the person flying it is a racist.”
Chapter founder Lex Scott was honest in telling The Tribune that the point of the post wasn’t to win friends and influence people so much as was to be actively confrontational to get attention. Which it did, including pushback from people who respect the flag and see no basis for such condemnation of those who fly it.
Most of us would disagree with the conclusion that anyone who would fly an American flag these days “is not safe to be around.” But, given the increasing number of violent acts targeting Black people, by police and by self-appointed vigilantes, it makes sense that Blacks in America might be looking for some clues as to where they might not want to go, out of self-preservation.
Now that we are no longer so brutal as to put up signs in restaurants and waiting rooms that say, “Whites Only.”
There is no question that Old Glory is getting a bad rap these days and, even if Scott is overstating her case, it’s not just from Black people. Ever since Donald Trump made the move from highly leveraged Monopoly player and reality TV star to politician, the American flag has increasingly been associated with racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and downright violent expressions of white nationalism.
From tiki torch marches in Virginia to an overt attempt to overthrow the government of the United States by violent means on Jan. 6, the 21st century fascists among us have prominently carried or worn the flag in a clear attempt to associate their own vulgar causes with true American patriotism. Even though it is the polar opposite of true Americanism.
(Johnny Milano | The New York Times) Peter Treiber Jr., a farmer in Greenport, N.Y., in front of his truck painted with an American flag, July 1, 2021. In a Long Island town, neighbors now make assumptions, true and sometimes false, about people who conspicuously display American flags.
The phenomenon was noted in a recent New York Times article, which told the story of a Long Island produce vendor of more or less progressive views who was told by a customer that his display of an American flag nearly put the customer off visiting his potato stand. She had just assumed that the large flag meant he was, “some flag-waving something-or-other.”
It is reminiscent of when Spike Lee, star film maker and close personal friend of Charles Barkley, said way back in 1991, “Black people can’t be racist.”
Which he immediately, and rightly, explained meant not that Black people can’t be as prejudiced as anyone else, but that with so little political or economic power at their disposal, Black people could never impose the kind of institutionalized discrimination that Blacks have suffered in America for 500 years.
(To have known that Lee’s statement was much more nuanced that the first sentence, though, you’d have had to have read the whole interview. Which, would have meant admitting that you read Playboy magazine. For the articles.)
A long-time newspaper editor whose job I inherited once said that a newspaper should never make an enemy ... by mistake. If you are out to offend or repel someone, do it out and proud. Otherwise, be respectful.
If we want the flag to be everyone’s flag, we are going to have to work to reclaim it, not just by displaying it in supportive and welcoming circumstances, but by demonstrating the the nation it represents is not as violently racist as it might sometimes appear.
That’s all.
As Shakespeare’s Cassius might have said, The fault, dear friends, is not in our stars (and stripes) but in ourselves.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) George Pyle.
George Pyle, opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune, is the sort of person who might display the banner of the United Federation of Planets.
gpyle@sltrib.com
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