BY GARY YOUNGE
During my first week in the US I went to the Mall in
Washington, DC, for the fourth of July. With flags billowing and
picnic baskets disgorging, I remember hearing John Wayne’s voice over
a loudspeaker, extolling the nation’s innate virtues, followed by a
huge cheer. Within half an hour, he was joined by some Martin Luther
King championing, once again greeted by applause.
I admit I was confused. Which America were they
rooting for? The gun-toting, swashbuckling land of the settler or the
non-violent home to the struggle for equality? Or was there more than
one?
This is what I’ve always found both impressive and
enraging about American patriotism. I love its flexibility – the
notion that however problematic, majorities of every race, ethnicity
and religion found a place for themselves in the national story. The
trouble is that story all too often slips from a celebration of shared
citizenship to a proclamation of genius – as though being an American
is in itself a higher form of human being.
This has always struck me as a virus that can find its
home in any political body. For many, being American is understood not
as a starting point from which a greater understanding of the world
might be achieved but an end point, after which the rest of the world
ceases to exist. Badges and placards announcing that "Peace is an
American value" or that the war in Iraq was somehow "un-American" make
me every bit as uncomfortable as the more traditional bellicose and
belligerent jingoism. In my experience, sentences that start: "As an
American…" rarely end well.
In Britain, patriotism is an altogether rather
embarrassing and more rigid affair. Generally speaking, flags and
anthems are for sporting events, royal weddings, jubilees and
nationalists – all of which in some way hanker for former glory. I
don’t begrudge the joy of thousands who braved the rain to watch the
flotilla of boats float along the Thames last month but I don’t share
it and have never found a way to relate to it. British patriotism, it
seems, exists not so much as love for your country but for its past.
We are great, goes the logic, because we were better. Hence the
football chant when Britain plays Germany – "two world wars and one
world cup" – reaching back almost 50 years for some sense of cultural
superiority.
As such, British identity – and this goes for most
other European national identities – has long suffered from the
illusion not of genius going forward but purity going backwards. Being
British, in the minds of many, is not a work in progress but an
artefact inherited from the past. As a black Briton whose parents came
to the UK from Barbados in the early 1960s, this is the kind of
nation-love I can do without. It harks back to a time before I existed
and effectively celebrates it because I wasn’t there.
Britain doesn’t have an Independence Day; it simply
looks askance as most of the rest of the world celebrates independence
from it.
For me, growing up, it felt that there was no way
to become British. It was an identity you either accepted wholesale or
did without. I did without.
So I have long looked upon the fourth of July with a
twinge of envy. If there must be nation states then I would rather
there be a national identity I can relate to. If I’m going to pay
taxes, I might as well get the badge.
But more recently, I have come to relate to it with
more than just anthropological interest. For I now have an American
son. Over the five years since he was born I have made my peace with
the fact that I will eventually lose him to a vaguely familiar world
of little league, dental braces and phonetic spelling. But the notion
that I may also have to give him up to the unwieldy beast of American
identity is far more tricky.
Not only have I never been a patriot. Before I came to
the US, I’d actively avoided them. So how to make sense of the fact
that I might be raising one?
For while I understand the appeal of Independence Day,
there has long been tension between black America and American
patriotism. In his famous speech, ‘What to the Slave is the Fourth of
July?’ in 1852, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass explained to his
mostly white audience: "This Fourth of July is yours,
not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into
the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you
in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony… What,
to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that
reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross
injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim."
But I have also seen that while African Americans may
be far less prone to patriotism than most other Americans, and
whatever scepticism may exist, they are far more patriotic than any
other black minority I have ever seen and, I would argue, far more
patriotic than white Britons. Just as Martin Luther King’s dream was
"deeply rooted in the American dream", so the African American
challenge to the national polity has long been for it to live up to
its promise rather than to live down its past.
So when the fireworks are set off and the anthem is
sung, do I tell my son to do like his peers and put his hand on his
heart and sing along? When the flags are handed out, will I encourage
him to take one? When he asks to hang one from the front door will I
wince?
Or will I just be relieved that – unlike me – he has
never had to experience the automatic dislocation between race and
place, in the knowledge that none will see any incongruity between the
colour of his skin and the crest on his passport? Given that most
Americans of his generation are not white, he’ll grow up in a country
where minority is a purely political designation, not a demographic
one. True, as a black boy, his odds of going to prison will be higher
than those of his going to university. But the bottom line is that
whatever he thinks of America or being an American, he will never feel
like a guest in his own home.
He will never be in any doubt that he is American. Nor
will other Americans. And that’s saying something.
(Gary Younge is a feature writer and columnist for The
Guardian based in the US. This article was published on guardian.co.uk
on July 4, 2012.)
Courtesy: The Guardian; guardian.co.uk