No matter who you are in America, there is something you absolutely must agree with, which is that the United States of America is the greatest country in the entire world. This idea permeates every level of our culture. We force children to pledge allegiance to the land with "freedom and justice for all," we play the national anthem before every sports game and our politicians on both sides of the aisle gush endlessly about how great America is.

Of course, it is complete fiction. America is not and never was, great. American history is rife with examples of oppression on the basis of race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation and physical ability. As activist Shaun King points out, there is simply no period in American history where something morally repugnant was not happening.

America's history of oppression has continued into the present day. The U.S. has one of the most violent and racist police forces in the world, is one of the most unequal countries in the Global North,and has one of the highest concentrations of prisoners in the world, many of whom are nonviolent offenders. Back in 2015, the U.S. was even subjected to a blistering review from the U.N. on its human rights record.

The oppression inherent in the so-called "land of the free" became incredibly explicit last week. Yet another video of an unarmed black man being murdered by police surfaced, this time in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Terence Crutcher, the man in the video, was determined to be unarmed and is shown in the video to have his hands up. None of this stopped the police from killing him. I don't know how anyone can watch that video or the multiple videos like it and truthfully believe this country is great.

Yet this fiction endures. American exceptionalism is so deeply ingrained in our national psyche, that we think that calling someone unpatriotic is a valid political critique. This is not only absurd, but it is often used to derail conversations about actual injustice in the U.S.

Colin Kaepernick, quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, recently made headlines for refusing to stand for the national anthem. His reasoning was that he did not want to support a country that oppressed people of color. Kaepernick's protest triggered outrage because he was not being "patriotic." What I don't understand about this critique is why patriotism is inherently good. I see no reason why Kaepernick, or any marginalized person, should be compelled to show pride in a country that oppresses them.

And as many others have pointed out, people focused so much on Kaepernick's apparent lack of patriotism, they totally ignored the issue he was protesting about. Interestingly enough, almost all of the people outraged over Kaepernick's protest were silent when Terence Crutcher was murdered.

Kaepernick is not the only person whose criticism of the U.S. has been derailed by the notion of patriotism. Whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning have been persecuted to intense extremes because they dared to oppose the U.S. There is no doubt that the activities both of them revealed were illegal and unethical, yet their apparent "betrayal" of the U.S. is considered more important than what they actually exposed.

This is particularly salient in Chelsea Manning's case. She revealed evidence of the U.S. covering up civilian casualties, putting diplomatic pressure on other countries to ignore illegal renditions carried out by the C.I.A., ignoring reports of prisoner abuse, supporting repressive Middle East regimes, and American soldiers laughing as they killed civilians. There is also very little evidence that what she revealed caused physical harm to anyone. Despite this, she became the only whistleblower in U.S. history to be sentenced to decades of imprisonment, was kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day for nearly a year, and was denied treatment for gender dysphoria. Recently, she was sentenced to 14 days in solitary confinement for attempting suicide. Interestingly enough, none of the perpetrators of the war crimes she exposed were punished at all.

What's interesting about all of this is that American exceptionalism is often justified by the argument that the U.S. fights against injustice all around the world. But our treatment of those who speak out against injustice perpetrated on America's behalf shows how flimsy this justification is. The U.S. is truly not a "global force for good" if it silences those who speak out against it.

When someone says America is the greatest country on Earth they are not only denying reality, but they are allowing the country to continue to silence the voices of the oppressed. If we truly were a great country, we would applaud people like Colin Kaepernick and Chelsea Manning, instead of hounding them for their lack of "patriotism." In order for America to be great, we need to part with the notion that it is inherantly good to be patriotic.