August is the time of the summer when people start stocking away all those American flags put out for the Fourth of July celebrations and putting away the star-spangled outfits they carefully assembled this summer for Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour.
This year I won’t be taking down my flags, and I hope I’m not alone. Because the flag should be embraced and displayed more proudly than ever by liberal-leaning Americans who have generally conceded this core American symbol as something central to the right-wing conservative brand.
Long before the Trump administration began its campaign of deportations, DEI attacks and direct assaults on women’s rights, LGBTQ progress and anything that smacked of pluralism, well-funded conservative groups, through signaling and symbolism, established an exclusionary notion of who constituted a “real” American.
Sometimes you have to fight for a country that will most certainly break your heart.
The American flag is a key part of that. The performative flag pins on suit lapels. The over-the-top phalanx of flags at rallies and political events, the T-shirts and bumper stickers, the whoosh of an unfurled flag rippling behind commentators supporting conservative causes. The underlying message is that anyone opposed to the conservative cause wasn’t truly, fully, authentically or acceptably American.
Well, that is unacceptable, and acknowledging that conservatives have, indeed, co-opted America’s most patriotic symbol is the first step in combating this exclusionary notion of who a so-called real American is. The flag belongs to all of us citizens of the United States, but the right wing’s aggressive flag-waving is designed to make us forget that. And here’s the thing: Polls show that it’s working.
A CBS News poll conducted just ahead of the Fourth of July found that 91% of respondents who identified as Republicans say they “sometimes” or “often” fly the flag as a symbol of patriotism, compared with 64% of independents and 51% of Democrats.
Even more revealing were respondents’ thoughts on what they take displaying the flag to mean. Forty-two percent said they assume a person flying the flag is conservative. Only 10% assume a person displaying the flag is liberal.
That is troubling. When people start to let go of their rightful claim to the core symbol that should unite and encompass everyone, it makes it easier to snatch away a person’s stakeholder status. I wrote about this in a book I published last year called “Our Hidden Conversations, What American’s Really Think About Race & Identity,” based on my work at The Race Card Project, where I have collected hundreds of thousands of candid stories about race, identity, culture, privilege and belonging from hundreds of thousands of people from all corners of America.
Many of those people talk about their place in America and whether they or their children will be “American enough,” not just based on paperwork or legal status, but based on the social norms that took root at this country’s founding and created a hierarchy based on skin color, lineage, immigration status and money.
But the flag ideally shouldn’t be concerned with those characteristics. It’s something all of us should be able to claim — much like the sky, it is too powerful a symbol to concede. As I wrote in my book, “It carries our hopes and disappointments, our blood and our bounty too. Our pain. Our plunder. Our promise. In her seminal book, ‘The White Album,’ Joan Didion said, ‘A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.’”
These words should speak loudly to us right now. Didion was talking about California, but we should hear a siren song for all of America.
That is one reason I so love the short documentary released last month called “Reclaim the Flag” from Alex Bittar and Bruce Cohen, who conduct bracing interviews with several leaders in the LGBTQ community about what the flag means to them in this moment. Each person is holding a little flag — the kind that gets waved at a baseball game or a parade — when they are interviewed. And even though the flag as an item and as a symbol should rightfully belong to them, that isn’t the way most of the people interviewed see it.
“When you walk past a house that has an American flag stoked up in the yard, your immediate thought about that person is — I’m not welcome here — that it’s a sign of bigotry and a sign of fear, and how sad is that?” said musician and actress, King Princess.
Comedian Chris Klemens said, “I see someone hanging a flag and I’m like — you would hit with me with a car if you had the opportunity.” He was laughing when he said it. He’s a comedian, after all. But this was gallows humor.
George Takei, the actor and activist who portrayed the helmsman Sulu on the USS Enterprise in the “Star Trek” TV series, describes learning about the flag as a young child in a forced incarceration camp/war relocation authority concentration camp where his Japanese American family was sent to live during World War II. He learned how to talk about liberty and justice for all in that camp while gazing through a window in a tarpaper building that looked out over razor wire and a sentry tower with a sniper in case anyone tried to escape. The reason I advocate for this film and hope many will watch it on YouTube is that it culminates in the very hopeful message captured in its title: Reclaim the flag. Symone, the drag superstar who goes by one name, notes: “You reclaim the flag by not letting it go and realizing that this is not just one person’s flag; it is everyone’s flag. Just as they think it was promised to them, it is promised to us, too. You don’t have to reclaim what’s yours, darling.” When people start to let go of their rightful claim to the core symbol that should unite and encompass everyone, it makes it easier to snatch away a person’s stakeholder status. As the film progresses, one after another, the same people who felt the flag was a symbol of division begin to interrogate why that happened and what they can do as individuals to shift that paradigm. “The Reinvention of an inclusive America is a gigantic project,” said author Andrew Solomon. “Reclaiming the flag is a piece of it. It has to be incorporated in our marches. Into our protests. It has to appear not only at the Democratic convention. Not only at the pride parade but everywhere. There is no reason that we can’t say that this symbol of America is our symbol too instead of feeling like this is a thing that we have run away from. We can put it on the bumpers of our cars. We can put it on our mailboxes, but we all have to do it. It cannot be a few of us. It has to be a reclaiming by the whole population of those of us who believe in an open and liberal world.” That to me sounds like a good idea. I have been giving a thumbs-up to people I see displaying the flag lately, even when I know we aren’t political or cultural allies. It makes for some strange looks and sometimes for discomfort when they gawk and wonder what we could possibly have in common. I’m OK with that. I want them to know that the flag is mine, too. I was raised by two postal workers who were oddly patriotic during my childhood when flying big flags and wearing flag emblazoned clothing were out of step with the “Say it Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” culture of the ’60s and the ’70s. They were proud Black Americans who decided to love a country that didn’t love them back, and their point of view has come in handy as I tell my own adult children that you sometimes have to fight for a country that will most certainly break your heart. I wrote the chapter in my book about America with them in mind. “America is yours. It’s flags. It’s anthems. It’s tragedies. It’s flaws. It’s confounding complexities. The ‘me’ in America includes us, and if we critique or complain it does not invalidate our deed. As long as we are here, it is ours to claim … and yes, sometimes to cry over.”
Michele Norris is a Senior Contributing Editor for MS NOW. 
