How Black artists are reclaiming the American flag

Imagine your average Fourth of July party. There are probably hot dogs on the grill, everyone is clad in red, white, and blue, and it culminates in a fireworks show. It may sound like a lovely way to spend a day off. But for a lot of Americans, the celebration, and the flag itself, are more complicated than that.

That’s the question that Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in show, is setting out to tackle this holiday weekend: What’s the relationship like between Black people and the American flag?

Specifically, one listener wanted to know, in the wake of the red-white-and-blue spectacle of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter and Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show, how that conversation has evolved over time.

This is something Ted Johnson thinks a lot about. Johnson, who is Black, is an adviser at the liberal think tank New America, a columnist at the Washington Post, and a retired US Navy commander. “The flag has sort of been hijacked by nationalists — folks who believe either America is perfect and exceptional, or at the very least, anything that it’s done wrong in the past should be excused by all the things that it’s done well,” Johnson told Vox. “And that is not my relationship with the flag. It’s much more complicated because there has been tons of harm done under that flag.”

How do Black Americans square that harm and that pride? And how has that relationship changed through the years? Below is an excerpt of the conversation with Johnson, edited for length and clarity.

One way to tease out this relationship between Black Americans and the flag is to talk about the experience of Black service members. What’s that history?

One of the earliest instances is the story of an enslaved man named Jehu Grant in Rhode Island during the Revolutionary War. The man that owned him was a loyalist to the Brits. Grant was afraid that he was going to be shipped off and sold to the Brits to fight for them. So he runs away, joins Washington’s army and fights in the Continental Army, and then his master shows up and says, “You’ve got my property, and I want it back.” And the Army turns him back over to the guy that owns him, where he serves for many years and eventually buys his freedom.

When Andrew Jackson becomes president in the 1820s, he makes it policy to provide pensions for those Revolutionary War folks still alive. And so Grant applies for his pension and is denied. The government says that services rendered while a fugitive from your master are not recognized.

That is the relationship of Black service members to the flag. It represents a set of principles that many would be willing to die for and also a way of life that intentionally excluded Black folks for no other reason than race and status of their servitude. And so if you look at any war, you will find Black folks in uniform who have both been oppressed in the country they represent, and are willing to die for that country because of the values it stands for and for their right to be able to serve and benefit from the programs that the military has made available to folks.

My grandfather served in the military and I never got the chance to really talk with him about that experience. But I’m curious if you can speak to the motivations of Black Americans who continue serving, especially during the Jim Crow era.

Pre-Civil War, a lot of enslaved Black folks that decided to fight did so because they believed their chances at liberty, emancipation, and freedom were connected to their willingness to serve the country. Then we get the draft and a lot of the Black folks that served in the early part of the 20th century were drafted into service. They weren’t eager volunteers lining up as a way of earning their citizenship, but the fact that the vast majority of them honored that draft notice even though they were treated as second-class citizens was a sort of implicit demand for access to the full rights of the Constitution.

I’d be remiss if I say that folks joining today, for example, are doing so because they love the flag. The military has a great pension program. The military offers great programs if you want to buy a home or if you want to get an education. So there’s a sort of socioeconomic attractiveness to the military that I think explains why Black folks continue to join the military post-draft.

But it is also because there is a belief that the United States is ours as well. We have a claim of ownership. And to claim ownership also means you must sort of participate in the sacrifice.

When a lot of those service members came back from war, they were met with systemic institutionalized racism. How were people continuing to foster that sense of patriotism despite all that?

When Black folks were coming home from World War I and II, many were lynched in uniform.They weren’t even excused from the racial dynamics by being willing to die for the country.

One of the most famous genres of music in this period was called coon music. One of the songs was about Black people not having a flag. They talked about how white folks in the Northeast could fly flags from Italy, Ireland, wherever they’re from. And white people in the States could just fly the American flag. Black people could fly none of those because we didn’t know where we were from and the United States is not ours. And so in this song, they say the Black flag is basically two possums shooting dice and that would be an accurate representation.

Wow. That is some classic old-school racism.

Yeah, the song is called “Every Race Has a Flag, but the Coon.” And so we are very familiar with the red, black, and green pan-African flag. This was Marcus Garvey’s response to this coon genre of music.

There’s this idea among Black Americans of, We built this. Of course I’m going to reclaim this. Of course I’m going to have pride in it because I built it. I think that’s what we’re seeing with a lot of the imagery now.

But what about Black artists and also Black people in general who say, Our ancestors may have done all this work, but there really is no way to be a part of this and maybe we should not be trying to be a part of this?

If you take pride in the flag because you believe America is exceptional, you’re going to find a lot fewer subscribers to that belief system than one where your pride in the country means being proud of the people you come from and proud of the arc of your people’s story in this country.

On the latter, you will find people who are very proud of what Black people have accomplished in this country. For me, patriotism means honoring those sacrifices, those people that came before us. It does not mean excusing the United States from its racism, from its perpetuated inequality, or for putting its national interests ahead of the people that it’s supposed to serve. So it is very complicated, and there’s no easy way through it.

I will say that I think part of the reason we’re seeing more folks willing to sort of reclaim the flag for their own is because of Gen X. My generation was the first one born post-Civil Rights Act of 1964, so Jim Crow was the experience of our parents. Those experiences connected to the hijacking of the flag to connect it to explicit statutory racism feels generations removed from folks who have grown up in America where opportunity is more available, where the Jim Crow kind of racism is not as permitted. And while the country is not even close to being the kind of equal nation it says it was founded to be, it’s made progress.

I think a reclamation of that flag by Beyoncé and others is a sort of signal that yes, we built it. Yes, we’ve progressed here. And no, we’re not leaving. There’s no “go back to Africa.” This is home. And if this is home, I’m going to fly the flag of my country. There’s lots to be proud of about what the country has achieved and by Black Americans in particular. And for me, that is all the things that patriotism represents, not the more narrow exclusive version that tends to get more daylight.

I think one thing we need to discuss is the definition of Black we’re using here. I am what they would call Black American. My ancestors are from Alabama and Arkansas. They were formerly enslaved.

But Blackness in America now has a much wider net. I have so many friends whose parents are immigrants from the Caribbean or Africa. And it’s interesting in this moment where there are lots of conversations about what it means to be Black, and who gets to claim it, we’re also seeing this flag resurgence.

I think probably true that there are more Black people who are first-generation Americans today than there have been since they started erasing our nations of origin during slavery. That means Black American doesn’t just mean people who descended from slaves. It means Black people of all kinds.

When we talk about Black politics, we don’t consider the Black immigrant experience. When we talk about Black Americanism or Black patriotism, we often don’t account for the Black immigrant experience, except to the extent that that experience is shed and the American one is adopted. Those views sort of get thrown into this pot of Blackness instead of disaggregated to show how Black folks from other places who become Americans have a distinct relationship with the country that also affects their relationship with the iconography of the country like the flag, the national anthem, and this reclamation of red, white, and blue.

There may be some Black artists — I think of Beyoncé — who are reclaiming this imagery, but we also can’t ignore who has a majority stake in it. When people think of the flag, they think of white people. Is that changing?

It is, but slowly. If you ask people from around the world to picture a stereotypical American, they’re not picturing LeBron James, despite the medals he’s won at the Olympics. They’re probably picturing a white man from the Midwest.

The fact that so much of our nation’s history is racialized means that many of the nation’s symbols are also racialized. And to deracialize the things that were created in its origin is a long-term process. I do think it’s beginning to happen. I think it’s going to be some time before we get to a de-racialized conception of the United States.