12/31/2022 0 Comments All black flag meaningThough state police officers identified nine men who led the lynch mob, a local grand jury declined to indict any of them. That Popel had employed the flag in order to address lynching was more offensive than the lynching itself. In 1936, the Board of Education for Washington, D.C., recommended that The Crisis be banned from public schools, and specifically cited "Flag Salute" as one of the reasons that the magazine was inappropriate. The poem, which was published in the NAACP's magazine The Crisis, drew an unsurprisingly controversial reception. "ALL" applies only to white people, "justice" includes extrajudicial executions, and the cause that makes America "indivisible" is that of white supremacy. But Popel goes even further, pointing out that the apparent contradiction between what America is and what it claims to be is easily reconciled - once you define the terms. "Flag Salute" points out that the flag that represents the America of our perfected ideals also symbolizes the America of our imperfect reality. The last stanza describes Armwood's teeth being put on gold necklace chains, bookending this description with "For ALL!" In doing so, Popel hangs Armwood's death around the necks of all of white America, pronouncing them complicit. One passage reading "(Three thousand strong, they were!)/ 'One Nation, Indivisible'-," presents the vision of a unified country as the lynch mob and those who had gathered to watch. This juxtaposition reframes the pledge, sardonically demonstrating how its high-minded rhetoric was actually being practiced in America. In response to the lynching, Esther Popel, a black poet associated with the Harlem Renaissance, wrote a poem entitled " Flag Salute." The poem alternates the lines of the Pledge of Allegiance with an account of the brutal murder of Armwood. Then they brought his corpse back into town, strung it up on a telephone pole in front of the courthouse, and burned it, in front of a crowd that had swelled to 5,000. They wrapped a noose around Armwood's neck and dragged him away behind a truck, then beat, stabbed, and hung him. Two days later, a crowd of one thousand people laid siege to the jail, used battering rams to knock down its doors, then forced one of the deputies to give them the keys to the cells. The police first found and beat Armwood, then arrested and jailed him. On October 16 1933, in Maryland, an elderly white woman reported an assault and an attempted rape, identifying her assailant as George Armwood, a black laborer who lived nearby. Kaepernick isn't just a part of the long line of black athletes who have used their platforms to speak out about political issues he (unintentionally) inserted himself into the rich tradition of black artists who have invoked the American flag in political protest. His protest was a piece of performance art, and in staging it he blurred the line between art and protest. It relied on a symbolic act, one with enough room for interpretation that Kaepernick needed to spell out its meaning. In fact, it was so unobtrusive that it wasn't even noticed the first time he did it. Kaepernick's decision to sit for the anthem did not rely on disruption. (Some public artworks also incorporate disruption, of course, but it's no coincidence that these are often explicitly political.) One device that sometimes distinguishes protest from "pure" art is the way protest relies on disruption and taking up space - occupying ground, blocking a road, interrupting a ceremony. Almost all protests have an element of symbolic performance. The border separating protest and art is porous. The flag is more than a piece of fabric - and that is precisely what gives meaning and significance to his refusal to venerate it. I’m thinking in particular of those rallying to Kaepernick’s side on the grounds that the national anthem is simply a song, and the flag is just cloth - people who are offended by the protest are attaching unwarranted significance to both.īut to strip the flag of the symbolism it carries is also to sap the power of Kaepernick's protest. Many of these attacks are easily swatted away: the right to free expression is right there in the Constitution, growing up with white adoptive parents doesn't magic away one’s blackness, sports and politics are already inextricably mixed, etc.īut the arguments employed by some of Kaepernick’s defenders are themselves deeply flawed. Unless you've hurled your phone and your laptop into the ocean in a recent fit of frustration and rage (who could blame you? Not us), you've probably heard many of the attacks directed at San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, and his decision to sit during the raising of the American flag and singing of the national anthem.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |