Native American Student’s Grade Docked For Refusing To Say Pledge Of Allegiance: “My People Risked Our Lives For Our Land, For Our Freedom”

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/​2​0​1​6​/​0​9​/​1​6​/​n​a​t​i​v​e​-​a​m​e​r​i​c​a​n​-​s​t​u​d​e​n​t​s​-​g​r​a​d​e​-​d​o​c​k​e​d​-​f​o​r​-​r​e​f​u​s​i​n​g​-​t​o​-​s​a​y​-​p​l​e​d​g​e​-​o​f​-​a​l​l​e​g​i​a​n​c​e​-​m​y​-​p​e​o​p​l​e​-​r​i​s​k​e​d​-​o​u​r​-​l​i​v​e​s​-​f​o​r​-​o​u​r​-​l​a​n​d​-​f​o​r​-​o​u​r​-​f​r​e​e​d​om/

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