HENRI BROOKS: AN AMERICAN PATRIOT
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX
David McCullough is such a good
writer that he had me running to a bookstore
to buy a book about a dead white man. His John Adams biography reads like a
novel or a love story, and offers provocative food for thought. What is an
American patriot? What does patriotism mean? Who ranks our nation’s
interest over self-interest? Our nation’s ideals over our own ideals? What
does “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness mean”, and who were these
inalienable rights meant for? The Adams biography explores these questions,
and more, and takes some of the tarnish off the image of the petulant,
temperamental, and brilliant one-term second President of the United States.
As I read, I found myself liking John Adams far more than I thought I would,
and liking Abigail Adams all the more, still. John Adams was a simple, but
intellectual, man who lived within his means, was brutally frank, abhorred
the slave trade, eschewed political games, and suffered electoral defeat for
all of it. McCullough portrays him as a great American patriot.
Patriots like Adams embraced our nation’s flag and fought for it against
all odds. There are another brand of patriots, though. They are the honest
and scathing critics who both embrace American and abhor its hypocrisy.
These passionate patriots sometimes burn the flag and, at other times, simply
refuse to pledge it. They laugh at those who tell them to “love it or leave
it” because their criticism is as much an act of love as John Adams’
electoral myopia was. They sacrifice themselves, and also, goodwill, to make
the point that our country’s promises fall far short of its realities.
My patriot of the month is Tennessee Representative Henri Brooks, a woman
after my own heart. She has not pledged allegiance to the flag when her
legislature opens its sessions at any time since she was elected a decade
ago. She says she’s not pledged the flag since she was in third grade,
because the flag is a flag of slaveholders. Still, she believed enough in
our democracy to run for and attain public office five times. Contradiction?
I think not. I think the woman is holding our nation’s feet to the fire
of
its standards of “one nation”.
While many African Americans have fought for our flag, some have been
lynched in uniform because “one nation” is more rhetoric than reality.
Racial profiling and differential unemployment rates (whites had unemployment
rates of 4 last month, compared to more than 8 percent for African Americans)
speak to our different realities. My throat closes and my words turn to dust
when I hear or try to speak the words “indivisible, with liberty and justice
for all”. When some folks wrap themselves up in the Confederate flag, our
divisions are all too evident. When more than half of our nation’s prisoners
are African American, the notion of “justice for all” is a bad joke called
“just us who can afford justice.” All it takes is a swift browse through he
Civil Rights Commission’s report indicating that black votes were five times
more likely to be thrown out than white votes were in Florida to dispel the
notion of “one nation”.
While exercising her right of free expression for nearly a decade,
Representative Heri Brooks has usually stood in respect and deference to her
colleagues’ participation in the Pledge of Allegiance, while failing to
participate in an oath that offended her. Her actions have made recent
headlines because she sat one day, instead of standing, and Tennessee House
Speaker Jimmy Naifeh decided to jump up in her face and force a floor
confrontation, reprimanding her before hundreds of people. She went to the
ACLU to clarify her right to refuse to pledge the flag. They supported her,
and the rest has been a matter of headlines.
I used to fail to stand or acknowledge the flag, but in recent years peer
pressure has nudged me into conformity. I’ve been compelled to stand from
a head table or podium when an African American youth, part of the color
guard, locks eyes with me, silently encouraging me to go along with the
program. Or, I rise because standing would take attention away from the
purpose of a gathering. Silently, I kick myself, but also edit the words I
say, making them my own. , “I acknowledge the flag of the Racist States of
America, and to the Division for which they stand, many nation under whose
God, with liberty and justice for some.”
The real way we pledge allegiance to a flag is to make the promise of
“one nation” a reality. Until that is the case, Henri Brooks has my respect
and admiration.
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