A few days before Christmas, I was in a mall parking lot just before closing. The store lights were dimming, and the parking lot was emptying. After a long day of haggling, customer complaints, and exchanges of cash, credit cards, and promises to pay, the employees were scattering. As I waited for my party to get off work, a rusted-out white and green late-model van pulled in, facing me in a space about ten feet ahead. Out stepped a young white male dressed in camouflage shorts that he, obviously, cut off himself, a down jacket, ankle-high boots, and a tattered baseball-style cap. He first caught my attention because it was at night in Ohio, although warmer than usual, it was still too cold for shorts. I sort of giggled, thinking that maybe he had a little too much liquid Christmas spirit.
Then I began to feel a little uncomfortable because he paced back and forth, with a furtive look on his face. He walked around his van several times, stopped and reached into the back, and unfurled an American flag. Typically, this may have been a Saturday Evening Post cover, circa 1950, and considered charming. He placed it in a pole mounting bracket at the rear of his van, shading a bumper sticker; he saluted and drove off after about five minutes.
I was no longer charmed or amused, and no feelings of patriotism crossed my mind. What made me sad was that I was more alarmed by the vision of the flag than I was by the stranger’s disheveled appearance. Conservatives have allowed the flag’s debasement by tacitly condoning its conflation with white supremacy and the Confederate Battle flag. Republican legislators like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, and others like them embarrass Old Glory. Moreover, it has become an ominous symbol for black men like myself. Invariably, when gangs of white nationalists, militias, or insurrectionists appear, they are seen disgracing the American flag—waving it like a toreador in front of a bull, less for pride and more for instigation.
Misguided or not, flags have been a source of national pride for every nation. No American, or hardly any, is not filled with pride by seeing the monument to Iwo Jima or the tiny flags that fly at Arlington National Cemetery every Memorial day. I spent many years learning to love the flag. I learned to set aside its promise of freedoms not always afforded to women and people of color in the United States. I remember standing and having a funny feeling in my stomach with my hand over my heart repeating the words ‘liberty and justice for all’ in elementary school. My great uncles came home from World War II, having donned the uniform and being made to swallow their pride. My father, uncle, sister, and son all wore the uniform with that flag patch on the sleeve. I respected them, so I appreciated their duty to the country and the flag. I would have bet against seeing a black man as Commander-in-chief, but it came to fruition.
Now, I have no idea what the intentions were of the man in the parking lot. He may have had a moment of overwhelming patriotism or too much-spiked eggnog. Still, I do know the American flag deserved a better fate than hanging limply in a dark parking lot affixed to the back of a van shading a Confederate bumper sticker.
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