Let’s Talk About the Flag
Today is Flag Day, which you probably didn’t realize since it’s barely a real holiday—you don’t even get the day off. But it’s a good excuse to talk about something: protests that specifically target the American flag.
Last month, in the aftermath of the shooting at Robb Elementary School that left 19 children and two teachers dead, Gabe Kapler, manager of the San Francisco Giants, announced he would no longer be standing for the national anthem. In a blog post explaining his decision, he announced, “we weren’t given bravery, and we aren’t free.”
Kapler’s explanation, like Steve Kerr’s comments on the same shooting, is pretty compelling. He talks about the unequal way freedom and security are distributed in this country, and the moral hypocrisy of political leaders. But I’m not sure what any of this has to do with the flag…
To be clear, I’m absolutely not saying that the flag should never be a target of protest. Some of the most important and effective protests in history have been aimed at US flag, or the flags of other nations.
What bothers me about this type of protest, though, is that it seems to be a distinctly liberal way of protesting, in that it emphasizes performative displays of individual grievance instead of collective action or demands for power. Kapler is not acting alongside anyone else, or on behalf of any organization. Nor did he make any concrete demands or clarify what it would take to mollify him. He even said that he doesn’t expect his protest to have any effect or “move the needle” in any way: “I just don’t plan on coming out for the anthem… until I feel better about the direction of this country.” In other words, it is literally just about feelings, not policy or material conditions.
When Kapler’s decision was reported, a lot of people, myself included, made the obvious connection with Colin Kaepernick: Even though the issue motivating Kapler—gun violence—is different than the issue motivating Kaepernick—police killings of Black people—they both chose the ornate pageantry around the flag as the setting for their protest. The logic goes that the flag represents the country, and so if there is something wrong with the country, then protesting the flag is the best way to make that known. As Kapler wrote, “When you’re dissatisfied with your country, you let it be known through protest.”
But registering dissatisfaction is just one small part of protest—the real hope is to effect change. And while raising awareness is certainly a step in that process, protests against the flag don’t even do a good job of that, because they inevitably become ABOUT the flag, devolving into debates about what the flag symbolizes to different people. Way back in 2017, Eric Reid, Kaepernick’s teammate, who joined him in his protests, wrote in the New York Times: “It baffles me that our protest is still being misconstrued as disrespectful to the country, flag and military personnel.” In his blog post, Kapler expressed the same worry, that people would misconstrue it as a protest of the military, or otherwise inappropriate. And, indeed, some people immediately criticized him on exactly those grounds!
If protests keep being misinterpreted and mischaracterized in the same way, over and over, then maybe you ought to consider that when forming your protest. Reid and Kaepernick could be forgiven for being surprised about this back in 2017, but Kapler has no such excuse in 2022.
Frankly, I find it incredibly disingenuous that anyone was ever surprised these protests were taken out of context. OF COURSE people perceive protests during the national anthem as criticisms of the military—the whole stupid spectacle around the flag and the national anthem that has become part of the pregame tradition in American sports exists primarily to bolster the image of the American military. The tradition literally started as a way to drum up support for American involvement in World War I, and has ramped up with every American military intervention since: WWII, the Cold War, the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, etc. Indeed, Kapler himself acknowledged this reality when he suspended his protest for Memorial Day. He would not have done that if he didn’t recognize a basic truth: The flag is certainly a military symbol, and its veneration is obviously part of the American imperial project.
This doesn’t make protests targeting the flag inappropriate—in fact, when the issue motivating the protest involves the military, or American global hegemony, then the flag is a totally appropriate target. But treating the flag as some kind of metonymic complaint department, where you can bring up any issue you might have with your country, is a weirdly individualistic form of protest. Kapler’s protest is primarily about registering his own displeasure. It is not connected to any kind of collective action, and is thus doomed to fail.
(This is really the boycott problem all over again…)
It’s not just that the flag symbolizes different things to different people. It’s that, at the end of the day, it is still just a symbol. It cannot grant your demands. Indeed, the concept of “demands” or change seems almost irrelevant to a protest like Kapler’s. It’s about registering your anger at a problem, not implementing any solution.
Of course, that anger is understandable. And I certainly don’t want to police how people protest. Public displays of anger are important, and can be galvanizing moments in a movement. When Kaepernick and Reid first decided to kneel, it was a watershed moment for Black Lives Matter activism, and it inspired a real movement for change. But nearly six years later, I think it’s worth reflecting on why the problem Kaepernick was targeting—police violence in the US—is worse than ever. And one reason is surely that simply registering a problem is not enough.
This doesn’t make his protest any less brave, or morally correct, and a full inquiry into why those protests failed to yield material results is a massive subject that I’m not going to solve in this newsletter. Certainly, it’s not the fault of Kaepernick, Reid, and Company. But I worry that a lesson people learned from those protests is that the entire point of a protest is to Get Noticed, and that the best way to Get Noticed is to protest the flag, since that will be Controversial.
But a protest should be more than just a PR stunt. It ought to be part of a larger strategy to effect change. And yet Kapler’s protest reflects a distinctly liberal kind of politics, where individual choices and actions are paramount, and the way to change things is to just loudly voice your feelings that there is a problem, and then wait for the people in charge to fix it.
It’s tempting to think this way, but as I wrote last week, it is fundamentally wrong. Fixing problems requires collective action, which generally requires class consciousness and solidarity. Things will not get better just because you announce that there is a problem. The flag doesn’t really care if you salute it.