Let’s be honest, it’s hard for a goodly chunk of Democrat Party voters to celebrate Independence Day every year, as they hate the U.S.
It’s hard to celebrate the Fourth of July this year
In 1975, PBS aired an episode of the documentary series Bill Moyers Journal called “Rosedale: The Way It Is”, about the firebombings of black families’ homes in Rosedale, then a predominantly white area of Queens, New York. A disturbing two-minute clip from the documentary — in which a mob of white children and teens verbally and physically abuse a group of Black children who were biking through the neighborhood — went viral after being posted on Twitter last year, prompting The New York Times to seek out those involved. They could find none of the assailants, but they tracked down a dozen of the victims, most of whom are now in their fifties.
As they were on their “bike hike,” they told the Times, they saw people gathered beneath an American flag, and, thinking it was a parade, they went over to have a look. “I laugh about it until this day, because it was a parade,” said Mark Blagrove, now 57. “To get the Black people out of Rosedale.” The children had stumbled into a rally for a white supremacist group then active in the area, and within seconds, they were surrounded and assaulted with racist epithets and stones.
“The American flag is the image when I think about that incident,” Renée Lipscomb-McDonald, now 58, said. “That’s the symbol that pulled us into that situation, because of the idea that we live in America, the American flag means good things … They took that beautiful image and turned it into something ugly for me.”
That’s right, The Week writer Jacob Lambert really went back to 1975 to find a way to show his hate for the flag (in mostly Democrat voting NYC), which is surely causing other Democrats to agree on how much they hate the American Flag.
On this Fourth of July, I’ve been thinking about those words, that video, and about how our symbols can mean radically different things to different people. On one side of that Rosedale street, the flag symbolized a place in which non-whites were unwelcome; on the other, it represented aspiration and hope. But as the crowd closed in, the latter meaning collapsed. In that moment, for both groups, there was only one way to interpret the flag.
In post-George Floyd America, with the nation’s racist rot exposed to a degree of sunlight not seen in years, Lipscomb-McDonald’s disillusionment seems appropriate. The ugly version of America feels unsettlingly present, as does the obvious fact that for the country’s people of color, it has always felt that way. Amid the rage and sadness of recent weeks, our rhetoric and our symbols — the soaring eagle, the land of the free — have come to feel like relics, as does the holiday on which those symbols coalesce.
See, when one person does something bad, which had nothing to do with the flag or really America (and let’s not forget that Minneapolis overwhelmingly votes Democrat), we have to hate on America and the flag. Especially on Independence Day. But don’t you dare say Democrats are unpatriotic and hate America.
Celebrating Independence Day — really celebrating it — has always necessitated a certain suspension of disbelief: We are asked to wear the colors and wave the flag as if it is V-Day, as if living here can bring us only joy. In some years — and especially for white people like myself, towards whom the American system tilts — this is not so hard to do. But in 2020, the prescribed exuberance feels out of step with our grim reality.
There are 6 more paragraphs of America hate. Are you surprised? Interestingly, these people never actually leave despite hating the nation so much.
