I was in Section 23 at the Big House, waiting for Michigan to play Penn State, loving college football. The band. The tradition. Two programs with enough history between them that a game feels connected to games played before the current players were born. I love the rivalry and the respect inside it. I love that something can matter this much to people who disagree about almost everything else.
There is a particular pleasure in belonging to a crowd that large. Your attention becomes part of something you can actually see. All these people have arranged their lives to be here, and here we are. We know where to look. For a few hours, the thing we care about is in the same place.
Then that pleasure starts asking difficult questions.
We can do this. We can gather, repeatedly, for football. We can give it time, money, loyalty and an extraordinary amount of organized attention. Meanwhile, people nearby are hungry, unsafe in their own homes, subject to abuse, denied opportunities and protections that other people barely have to think about. I think about Gaza and Ukraine, and about how far away a war can feel when I am free to decide how much of it to watch. The suffering becomes harder to hold in mind without turning human beings into a procession of terrible headlines.
The game begins to feel obscene beside it. I am enjoying myself, and I am disgusted. Both feelings are real. The enjoyment does not politely leave when the disgust arrives.
Nobody cares, I think.
But I cannot know that about the people around me. I do not know what they have survived, whom they care for, what work they do when they leave. Some may be carrying the very things I am imagining as happening somewhere else. A stadium ticket is not a certificate of an uncomplicated life.
And I am in the stadium too. If my explanation requires everybody else to be shallow while I stand there having the important thoughts, it needs work.
Still, the question survives my bad first answer. Why is our capacity to gather so visible here, while our capacity to protect one another can feel so uncertain? Enjoying a game is not the failure. Accepting that safety and dignity remain optional for some people is. I want to be able to love this thing without using that love to stop looking at everything around it.
That is where the flag gets complicated.
When I was younger, standing for the national anthem came easily. Hat off, hand over my heart, singing with real pride. I sang it well. I liked singing it. There was emotion in it that did not need to be negotiated first.
Over roughly the last decade, that feeling became harder to reach. The flag accumulated meanings I could not sing past: racism, exploitation, political lies, the use of fear to make people accept cruelty. I became disgusted with the ease of declaring ourselves good while allowing people to be treated as disposable. A flag could be displayed as an answer to a question nobody intended to hear.
I remembered feeling more hopeful during the Obama years. That was my feeling, not evidence that the country had briefly solved itself. The people experiencing injustice did not get a holiday because I felt proud. Even my estrangement contained something worth questioning: how much of the country I missed had been a country I could afford to misunderstand?
Raoul Peck's Exterminate All the Brutes disturbed that understanding further. His series examines colonial violence and the ways history is made and concealed.[S08] Watching it, I kept running into the distance between the story of civilization advancing and the people crushed by that advance. I could no longer comfortably place the violence off to the side, as if the main story remained clean.
One example is the history of treaties between the United States and Native Nations. The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian describes agreements between sovereign nations that were often broken and sometimes coerced.[S10] An agreement is supposed to mean something. It is difficult to celebrate the country's word without asking what that word has been worth to the people required to trust it.
The sickening part was not simply learning that terrible things happened. It was questioning the arrangement of what I already thought I knew. Who gets to be the central character? Whose resistance becomes an interruption? Who is expected to move on so everybody else can enjoy the story?
Then Cornel West's account of Black love began working on a different part of me.
In his MasterClass lesson, West places Black love in family, community, art, culture, dignity and the struggle for freedom.[S02] There is joy in that account. There are people making and sustaining lives, caring for one another, creating things worth keeping. Oppression does not get to occupy every room. The love is larger than the harm it confronts.
I needed to hear that without immediately turning it into something useful for my own feelings about America. Black love does not exist to help me feel better about the flag. People do not owe me their endurance as evidence that I should cheer up. What challenged me was the possibility of fierce love that sees clearly, demands more and keeps making a life.
I kept thinking about an image of a protester draped in an American flag. In my memory, it had become bound up with what I was learning about Black freedom and belonging. What stayed with me was the contradiction I felt looking at it: I had come to see that flag as something to reject, and here was an image that made me consider a claim on it.
I cannot speak for the person in the picture. I can say what it opened in me. I saw the possibility of insisting that the country belongs to the people it has failed, too. The demand to be protected, represented and included could occupy the flag instead of being pushed outside it. A country's failure to honor its ideals does not give the people responsible exclusive ownership of those ideals.
That thought brought me back to football, and to Colin Kaepernick.
In August 2016, Kaepernick sat during the anthem. Explaining himself, he spoke about injustice and the failure to extend freedom and justice to everyone.[S04] He later knelt with Eric Reid. Reid explained that the change in posture was intended to be more respectful while continuing to raise awareness. In those September remarks, Kaepernick said, “I love America. I love people.” He wanted to help make it better.[S05]
His explanation is available in his own words. We do not have to invent hatred to account for the gesture. He was asking the country to confront something, and he used the moment when the country was publicly declaring what it stood for.
That is a serious place to put a question.
I also keep thinking about the kind of recognition football makes available. We can marvel at a player's body while paying much less attention to his judgment. A 2019 study of more than a thousand football broadcasts found a pattern: nonwhite players were more often praised for physical ability, white players for personality and intelligence. The researchers also identified limits in their data and methods, including differences across positions and eras.[S06] It cannot tell us what every announcer means. It does give reason to listen more carefully to where we locate a player's greatness.
If we celebrate a person for what he can do on the field, then become furious when he brings his understanding of the world onto it, how much of the person have we agreed to recognize? The game asks us to admire intelligence constantly: decisions, anticipation, discipline, knowledge. It should not become unimaginable that a player has thought carefully about something beyond the game.
Kaepernick's kneeling and my standing are different acts, made from different lives. I do not need to borrow his risk or pretend that singing an anthem carries it. His stated purpose helped me understand that a demand for the country to become better can belong inside a person's relationship with it. Dissent does not have to surrender the place from which it speaks.
By the time I stood in Section 23, the flag had already gained a new meaning for me. A better one. A less fake one. It could hold my anger without requiring me to stop loving the things I loved. I could take the promise seriously enough to be furious about who is excluded from it.
That did not restore the easy pride I had when I was young. I do not think that is available to me anymore, and I am less sure I want it. Too much had to stay out of view for the feeling to remain easy. I wanted a relationship with the country that could survive looking at it.
A place to work from. That was the phrase that fit.
So I stood. I removed my hat. I sang the anthem and cried a little, watching the flag ride the wind in the Big House.