“OUR AMERICA”

Last night I saw an image of a man standing in the middle of the U.S. Capitol with a Confederate flag.

I cried.

An image so disgustingly powerful is etched in my mind. Coming from a town in South East Louisiana, one Exit over from Mississippi, I’ve seen a lot of waving Confederate flags in my life, but never has it every taken the form of a knife and cut so deep. I’ve (fairly recently) started to embrace my identity as a Black woman that I used to fully reject, at worst, or hardly tolerate, at best. I learned like every single person growing up in the United States of America, and yes, I do mean EVERYONE, that my brown skin made me unworthy, unloveable, and flat out bad. The good in me was my European ancestry, and one can’t necessarily “see” that part. The part my white peers would use to justify allowing me in their circles, though I had no interest in being “in” anywhere in that place, dreaming of my future life that I promised on the Bible would be in California where no one would see my skin as less than worthy. That was untrue of the coast, but was something I believed, or convinced myself of, as my experience of California summers were lived in the safe walls of my aunt’s house with my sisters and 10 (give or take) cousins.

Seeing those flags wave high in the sky, especially down one specific service road, where one man’s home had probably 15 of them, in case 1 was not clear enough, always left me slightly uneasy, but it didn’t click like it is right now. Even in my racial turmoil and identity crises, still, I never questioned whether or not I was welcomed in this country. I chalked it up to the fact that I was not everyone’s cup of tea, or coffee, if you will. There were some people whose homes I was not welcomed into, and those were not places I ever desired to enter anyway. If anything, I felt sorry for these people, that their hearts and minds had to be full of such hate. “If only they knew” I would think to myself as I shot smiles at anyone who looked at me as less than human, refusing to hang my head in shame like younger me.

But something about that image hit differently. A white man. Proudly waving a Confederate flag and all it stands for. In the middle of the US Capitol. That is what these people are fighting so hard to protect. The complicity from officials, from those who pledge justice for ALL, really gets me. They watched as a group of domestic terrorists ambushed the Capitol for not getting their way in a democratic election in which there is, and always has been, and always will be a winner and a loser. “This is our America!” was the repetitive declaration of these people. An America that glorifies Whiteness over equality. That values destruction over diplomacy. That elevates racism and hatred. One that celebrates otherness and rejects oneness. If that is “Our America,” you can have it. The rest of us will be elsewhere, doing the actual hard work of creating justice, equality, compromise, empathy, and love, amidst all of our beautiful uniqueness in “Our America.”