Starting in second grade, California high school student Leilani Thomas has been refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States. For years, she told Sacramento ABC affiliate KXTV, she’s been quietly affirming her First Amendment right to free speech, a right encompassing the freedom to dissent, to critique the powerful, to think and act as a self-determined human being. Thomas is also Native American. As such, she has expressed complex feelings regarding the United States and its flag. Until now, however, there has been no incident, no controversy, no media coverage of steadfast actions borne of personal conviction. She is not a politician stumping for vote, or a selfie star hoping to gain followers. She is a teenage girl trying to make it through the social gauntlet of high school.
Then San Francisco 49ers backup quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided to take a political stand by not rising to his feet when cued by the familiar strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” His reason? “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. …There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” He is sitting down, in other words, in order to stand up for social justice.
National anthems amplify the collective political unconscious, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” is no exception. As the Intercept’s Jon Schwartz pointed out, a racist legacy of anti-Black violence is baked into that particular song. Francis Scott Key was not only its lyricist but a slaveholder, Schwartz noted, and in the song he “literally celebrates the murder of African Americans.” The crucial lines come in the third stanza: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” The dark glee of those words charges the refrain, “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” with chilling sadism, even as they add the intolerable weight of history to Kaepernick’s controversial comments.
When we sing the national anthem during the capitalist pageant that is professional football, yet insist on sticking to just the first stanza because, we reason, it’s so very long and we are anxious to get to the game, we collectively agree to the anomie of historical amnesia, refusing to see the wholeness of a vivid and seemingly deathless pattern of racist violence while insisting: I paid to be here. Now entertain me!
But Thomas’s protest is prior to Kaepernick’s in more ways than one. For before the Pilgrims, before the colonies, before the foundation of the United States took it away, this land belonged to indigenous peoples. To acknowledge this simple fact mutates the meaning of “land of the free and the home of the brave” once again. Thomas refuses to pledge allegiance to the flag because her people are victims of genocide at the hands of the U.S. government.
Read more here: http://www.salon.com/2016/09/16/native-american-students-grade-docked-for-refusing-to-say-pledge-of-allegiance-my-people-risked-our-lives-for-our-land-for-our-freedom/