Can Americans patriotism coexist with their countrys shameful past?
WASHINGTONThis week, the Republican leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, stood in the Capitol to describe Americas history of racism as a problem that was dominated by members of the Democratic party. It was, he said, an ongoing problem. Today, the Democratic party has doubled down on this shameful history by replacing the racism of the past with the racism of critical race theory. They continue to think of race as the primary means of judging a persons character, McCarthy said, expressing his support for removing statues of Confederate leaders from the Capitol. America is not a racist country, he said. It was wrong when it was the segregated lunch counters of Jim Crow, and it was wrong when it was the segregated classrooms of critical race theory.  There was plenty that was puzzling about his logic, but the argument was unsurprising. Puzzling: while he said it was Democrats whod always supported the racists symbolized by the Confederate statues, every Democrat in the House voted to remove those statues while 120 of McCarthys Republican colleagues voted to keep them; the academic concept of critical race theory he invoked does not teach that race is a means of judging a persons character, and does not segregate classrooms  it is a lens for understanding racism as a set of systemic legal structures that persist in U.S. society. Unsurprising: making a boogeyman out of the until-recently obscure academic concept has become an American right-wing obsession  an openly calculated move engineered by a conservative activist named Christopher Rufo that has seen Fox News ramp up its fear-mongering machine; just this week, Republicans in the House were told in a memo to lean in to the culture war because the backlash against critical race theory is real.  So here was McCarthy, on schedule and as advised, leaning in. The backlash over critical race theory may be real, fed by over 1,300 Fox News mentions in 3.5 months and leading to outraged protests at school board meetings across the country. But the concept of critical race theory being depicted in these attacks bears little relationship to the academic theory. Quickly put: critical race theory is primarily a graduate-school-level concept that has been around for about four decades and was obscure until conservative activists ramped up anger about it. Actual critical race theory basically says that racism is ingrained in U.S. society and institutions. It is not taught in elementary or high schools, or even often in undergraduate university classes. Well, wokeness. Anti-racism as defined in Ibram X. Kendis influential book How to be Antiracist. The desire to confront, in history class and in institutions of government, the darker chapters of U.S history  not just slavery, but Juneteenth and the Tulsa Race Massacre, Jim Crow laws and residential redlining and voter suppression and the war on drugs. The movement, decried by Donald Trump in his edicts that defined the backlash against critical race theory in the dying days of his presidency, to take down statues and celebrations of Confederate leaders and rename government institutions that memorialize them. People telling them to check their privilege.  That last example may get to the heart of things. Critical race theory, as I understand it, actually describes a system of systemic racism. The popularizers of Kendi-style anti-racist thought (which is not critical race theory in any academic sense, but is inspired in part by it) say that if a system has created an unlevel playing field, then it has almost by definition underprivileged some people. And that means it has given unfair advantages  privileges  to other people. Those other people, in U.S. society, are white. In the eyes of those leading the backlash, talking about this serves primarily to make white people feel guilty. Which is where people like McCarthy get the whole look at race as the primary means of judging a persons character line of thought. And this has led, in the most visible effect of the backlash, to a wave of bills in Republican states governing what can and cannot be taught in history classes to schoolchildren and even to university students. Teaching the history of racism in the United States as something that infected the structures of government, not just in slavery but in many other ways that persisted through much of the 20th century, and that persist today, is, they say, unfair to white children who might be taught to be ashamed. Whats more, they say it is, in the words of the Trump administration when he was in the White House, anti-American; unpatriotic. Canadians have recently been confronting this concept, of whether patriotism and celebrations of national pride can coexist with a recognition of deeply shameful episodes in a countrys history. The discovery of mass unmarked graves filled with the bodies of Indigenous children on the sites of residential schools has made vivid to many Canadians the evil that those schools represented throughout most of Canadas history as a country  from their founding in the 1800s right up until the 1990s when the last of the institutions was closed. Following along from Washington, Ive seen both in news media and on social media, how reflecting on this has led to waves of people calling to cancel Canada Day celebrations this year. You dont shoot off fireworks to celebrate your country while people are mourning the deaths of their children who were killed by your countrys government, is the gist of the sentiment Ive seen. Thats understandable. Initially, Canadas Conservative party Leader, Erin OToole, said such ideas were tearing down the country  which sounds, at least as a fragment of a speech, like the Republican talking point that acknowledging a shameful past is somehow a betrayal of the country as a project. This week OToole struck a more sombre tone, suggesting observance of Canada Day in light of the recent news might be a chance to reflect on how the country has fallen short of its own ideals and recommit to reconciliation and to making sure that dark chapters of our past, like the horrible residential school program, should fuel our desire to meet the calls to action that have been out for six years and provide a road map for us.  This is closer to how President Joe Biden has framed the challenge of confronting a racist past in his own speeches. Only with truth can come healing and justice and repair. Only with truth, facing it, Biden said telling the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre in June. In that speech, he tied that history to a longer story of the Ku Klux Klans influence on the country, and how that hate became embedded systematically and systemically in our laws and our culture. He called on the country that elected him to acknowledge this, to confront it. And to act on that knowledge. We should know the good, the bad, everything. Thats what great nations do: They come to terms with their dark sides. And were a great nation.  The talk of racism embedded systematically and systemically seems to fit the right-wing conception of critical race theory  or at least bear its influence. But in Bidens conception, it is not unpatriotic. It is a prerequisite for real patriotism. It is the thing that has led to the moments in his countrys history that inspire not shame, but pride. Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... If you walked out of McCarthys speech at the Capitol and wandered a few minutes across the National Mall to the Tidal Basin, youd encounter two monuments to figures who seem to be talking to each other, across the water and across centuries of U.S. history. On the east side of the basin is the monument to Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. founding father and third president, built in 1943. It memorialized the man who wrote We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...  which came to be embraced as the founding premise of the American project. He was also a slave owner who fathered six children by a woman he owned as property, and who never acknowledged those children, and was an open racist. On the west side of the basin, the figure of Martin Luther King Jr. emerges, carved from a slab of rock in 2011, facing the statue of Jefferson. King was a 1960s civil rights leader who said he had a dream that his country would eventually, finally live up to those words Jefferson wrote. He demanded the acknowledgment and dismantling of a system of racism that long outlived slavery to become embedded in the laws and culture of the U.S. He was widely hated in his own time, investigated as a threat by the FBI, assassinated. Standing there on the eve of the Independence Day holiday weekend puts the fights over how to understand U.S. history in a certain perspective. If you are building monuments to the countrys history, it strikes me you need to look at both figures, looking at each other. Together they say that if there is greatness in the country worth celebrating, it is not a state but a process. In his speech this week, McCarthy quoted Abraham Lincoln saying America was built on a unifying vision, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal. But as Michael Hirsch of Foreign Policy wrote last year, The United States of America was born in a state of profound hypocrisy: the equality for all of the founders was not extended or even meant for all, the vision of liberty was severely restricted. But the example of Lincoln (whose own memorial you can see from the basin beyond Kings) is a demonstration of what has been admirable in the country that grew up out of that hypocritical founding. For Lincoln and King  and the suffragettes, and a host of others who fought to extend liberty and equality to more and more people, to move closer to ensuring that all meant all. They followed the principles articulated by the founders rather than their example. The unifying vision was to make their country live up to those principles in a way the founders did not. Perhaps as Americans grapple with how understanding dark elements of an ongoing history relate to patriotism and national pride  and as Canadians do the same with their own ongoing systemic sins  there is a key in that realization. I have quoted the poet Langston Hughes before  his 1935 poem Let America Be America Again about the land of the free that dreamers dreamed in a vision that is still unrealized captures the spirit of confronting a countrys failures past and present, not in shame but in patriotic resolve:  O, yes,  I say it plain,  America never was America to me,  And yet I swear this oath  America will be! Or as Barack Obama said in his most famous speech on race, words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every colour and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. Instead, he said, it required generations of those fighting to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.  Acknowledging that gap does not tear the country down, in other words. It is the very thing that has built it up. Read more about: