When Donald Trump went on a racist Twitter tirade against four congresswomen of color last week, his administration immediately went into damage-control mode (which, by my calculations, they've been in for roughly seventy-five percent of his time in office, but who's counting?). To try and distract from the fact that the president's Tweets were veering out of dog whistle territory and into racism that's apparent even to people who are very hesitant to call things racist, the administration decided to frame the debate as being about patriotism. 'The president didn't target the "Squad" because of race,' their argument went, 'it's because they're America-hating socialists who want to see our country burn to the ground.'
It's a charge that would have been seen as below the bar in American politics a decade ago but now appears almost tame. It's also completely untrue, of course. There hasn't been a single instance in which any of the four slandered congresswomen professed their hatred of America. Even the most controversial of the bunch - Ilhan Omar, who has run into her fair share of controversy over Tweets that played into anti-Semitic tropes, hasn't said anything close to condemning the United States. What the "Squad" has denounced, however, is Trump. For the president to insinuate that personal criticism is akin to insulting the nation as a whole is troubling and despotic.
But even if these four women had critiqued the country, that doesn't mean they hate it. What makes America so great is its promise of freedom and equality, but no one could argue that it's always held up to that standard. Our nation was founded with lofty goals, goals that we don't always meet, goals that our founding fathers didn't even meet. Confronting the issues that plague everyday people - from bigotry to unemployment to health care costs and beyond - is physically impossible while simultaneously being blindly uncritical of America. Letting your belief in American Exceptionalism keep you from improving the nation to make it more exceptional is hardly what I'd call patriotic or a great political strategy.
But, at the same time, it's important to note that it's not that no one is allowed to point out America's faults. The current president's own campaign slogan was "Make America Great Again," a phrase that has come to represent everything Trump-related while also kind of ruining red hats for everyone else. And yet isn't the slogan itself an implicit criticism? If America must be returned to greatness, brought back to some vague and storied era in which people prospered and everything was wonderful, then logic would say that it's not great now. That's . . . pretty critical of America.
So the president is allowed criticize this country, and so is his MAGA-hat adorned base. But four congresswomen of color supposedly doing so is apparently reason enough to delegitimize their very status as Americans. Let's not pretend that the Trump administration's "patriotism" tactic isn't racist in and of itself. The anger at the "Squad" is propagated on the racist notion that people of color should be grateful simply to be allowed in America. For the Trump Administration to push this view is for them to say that people of color are somehow less American, perpetually on thin ice, that their American-ness is conditional. It's the very same sentiment behind the "go back" Tweets, only carefully shrouded in the dog whistle language that gives the president some semblance of deniability.
When it comes to criticisms of America, I'm going to have to agree with what Geraldo Rivera said on Fox and Friends recently: "Gratitude is not a requirement of citizenship." I would also add that 'gratitude' is not synonymous with refusing to accept the fact that America has flaws. We should be encouraging dialogue on the areas on which we as a nation come up short - not trying to shut up the people most affected by them.
