A good question by Peter Weber. I had a conservative friend who disliked the poet Langston Hughes -- who did some of his growing up in the town where I live -- because he wasn't very patriotic. Her attitude stunned me as a failure of empathy and moral imagination. Black people have been patriotic throughout America's history, even if America hasn't always reciprocated the love. But why on earth would you expect a Black man who was living in Jim Crow America to be patriotic?
Here's an excerpt from a story I wrote in 2003, about Hughes' testimony before Congress during the McCarthy era:
In Lawrence, Hughes said, he attended a “nickelodeon” movie theater every afternoon.
One day, Hughes said, “the woman pushed my nickel back and pointed to a sign beside the box office, and the sign said something, in effect, ‘Colored not admitted.’
“My playmates who were white and lived next door to me could go to that motion picture and I could not,” he told the senators. “I could never see a film in Lawrence again, and I lived there until I was 12 years old.”
Not for nothing, one of the chief interrogators of Hughes that day was Roy Cohn -- Donald Trump's future consigliere.
For so much of our history, Black Americans were treated as property. Then they were treated as second-class citizens, if that. Even now, the way Black people are policed, and the way they suffer disproportionately from society's ills, suggests America hasn't fully embraced them. Expecting people to love when they haven't been loved isn't laudable. It's abusive.
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