Progressive Patriotism: Truth-Telling on the Fourth of July by Ron Malzer
As we head into the July 4th weekend marking the 245th anniversary of independence from King George’s England, we have a new battle on our hands. It was launched this past year, in the form of a right-wing campaign for the whitewashing of America’s centuries-long history of structural racism.
Critical race theory, a decades-old perspective on structural racism, is currently caught in the crosshairs. The hard right, usually secretive, Koch brothers-funded organization ALEC, declared in December: “The 1619 curriculum is infecting our schools. Diversity training is taking over our workplaces. How do patriotic Americans respond?”, then replying with a call for “reclaiming education and the American Dream.”
Note the use of the word “infecting”, and ALEC’s wrapping into the American flag its call for history suppression, labeling this distorting of history “patriotic”.
Florida’s Republican Governor Rick DeSantis responded to the call, signing into law last month a ban on teaching critical race theory. With zero evidence, he denounced this history approach as “teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.” Never one to avoid advocacy for re-writing reality, Senator Ron Johnson urged right-wingers to “run for school board. Don’t let them teach critical race theory.”
There is no honest way to describe America’s multi-century history of chattel slavery, “Indian removal”, and other atrocities of America’s 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries other than as government-sponsored genocide. A full accounting of American history names that, and then can rightly claim those actions in American history that led to progress, and advanced the common good.
A progressive patriotism honors as heroes those who fought, and those who supported, America’s revolution against the British monarchy. It amplifies our appreciation for those who risked or gave their lives to terminate the Confederate dream of slavery forever. And it praises in gratitude, those, who in the 1940s, saved the world from a horrific nightmare. Without their heroic deeds, we may have had a globe dominated by a German fuehrer, an Italian dictator, and a Japanese emperor.
Progressive patriotism also honors women’s liberationists, both early-20th-century suffragists, and later-century feminists. It gives reverence to Dr. King, whose life was taken at age 39 as he fought for racial and socioeconomic justice. And we remember John Lewis, for the head-bashing he endured as a civil rights marcher, and for decades of tireless work promoting voting rights for Black Americans.
Progressives fully affirm the inspiring and beautiful aspirational words in our Declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
May we as progressives carry the torch to illuminate our past, cast light on the realities of our present, and shine a bright light as we journey toward a more racially just future. This is how we as Americans truly honor the Declaration of Independence this Fourth of July.