'It's OK to be an American now'

(Derrick Z. Jackson/Globe Staff)

IN CALLING President-elect Barack Obama a "house Negro," Al Qaeda missed the memo from Grant Park. Before Obama's victory speech in Chicago, the crowd of 125,000 people said the Pledge of Allegiance. In my 53 years I have never heard such a multicultural throng recite the pledge with such determined enunciation, expelling it from the heart in a treble soaring to the skies and a bass drumming through the soil to vibrate my feet. The treble and bass met in my spine, where "liberty and justice for all" evoked neither clank of chains nor cackle of cruelty, but a warm tickle of Jeffersonian slave-owning irony: Justice cannot sleep forever.

Spontaneous street bursts of the pledge and the national anthem came from notoriously liberal Madison, Wis., and the People's Republic of Cambridge. The day after the election, children claimed they said the pledge in school like they never said it before, in places like majority-black Washington, which still does not have a vote in Congress, and Memphis, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Eleven days after the election, University of Washington political scientist Christopher Parker stood for the national anthem and the unfurling of the American flag before the Washington-UCLA football game in Seattle. Parker, an African-American, served in the Navy for 10 years.

"In the Navy we were conditioned to revere the flag, but knowing what it often stood for, it was a tortured feeling," Parker said over the telephone. "I've often had a hard time saying the words. But as I watched the flag being unfurled, time kind of slowed down. I thought of the race speech (by Obama), the Democratic National Convention, and the crowd in Denver. I thought about him at Grant Park. I felt free to be proud, free not to be angry. I can actually say the words. I'm thinking, 'Oh, I guess it's OK to be an American now.' "

This was more than personal. Earlier this fall, Parker researched African-American attitudes in Washington state on patriotism. Normally, he said, the percentage of African-Americans who feel patriotic runs about half. Just before the election, it rose to 60 percent. After the election, it was 72 percent. This was a long way from 1887 when Frederick Douglass said, "I have no patriotism" for a nation that does "not recognize me as a man."

Researchers Jim Sidanius of Harvard University and Michael Dawson and Tom W. Smith of the University of Chicago have long measured perceptions of racial progress or patriotism, from blind flag-waving to challenging the nation to live up to its ideals. African-Americans have too often had to exercise the latter, at the cost of being considered less patriotic by white Americans. If it had been up to African-Americans, we would not have invaded Iraq under false pretenses in 2003, costing the lives of 4,200 American soldiers of all colors. That opposition was in the spirit of author James Baldwin, who said in 1955, "I love America more than any other country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually."

Suddenly, the optimism unleashed by Obama's election is a chance for common ground, as sure as when I wear my Scout uniform, with the flag on my shoulder, conversations with politically conservative adults often end in agreement over values for youth. That is where Al Qaeda missed the memo in its propaganda video.

The video was meant to sow distrust among Muslims about Obama, saying he betrays the railing militancy of Malcolm X. But Malcolm grew from, as he said, "condemning everybody walking" to supporting Southern voter registration drives. Just before his 1965 assassination, he said, "You and I will not get anywhere by standing on the sidelines . . . let's get involved all the way."

The multicultural throng showed what happened when you get involved all the way. Malcolm once said, "You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality." On election night, an America confronted with very serious realities took the blinders off patriotism. May it not go back to sleep.

Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.