Even though President Donald Trump has tweeted that National Football League players taking a knee instead of standing during the National Anthem “has nothing to do with race” but is “about respect for our country, flag and National Anthem,” Washington Post "Monkey Cage" blogger Michael Tesler has claimed the opposite: “To many Americans, being patriotic means being white.”
Tesler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California at Irvine, went so far as to assert that “American patriotism has always been racialized” and stated that there is “more new evidence that whiteness and American patriotism are deeply linked.”
In his Post article published on Friday, October 13, Tesler also quoted Vice President Mike Pence, who tweeted after leaving an NFL game in which several players kneeled that “I stand with Trump, I stand with our soldiers, and I will always stand for our flag and our National Anthem.”
That message led the columnist to ask: “Are the protests about race or patriotism -- or both?”
He then asserted:
In a survey conducted earlier this month, 66 percent said that NFL players choosing to kneel during the playing of the national anthem is “a matter of race” compared with 34 percent who thought it was “a matter of patriotism.”
But this debate about whether the NFL’s #TakeAKnee protests have more to do with race or patriotism misses a more important point: American patriotism has always been racialized.
After making that bizarre claim, Tesler noted: “Within the social science literature on intergroup relations, Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto’s influential theory of social dominance” states that “nationality and ethnicity are complementary because their power has enabled whites to successfully define the prototypical American in their own image.”
He then claimed that “whites who feel a sense of solidarity with other whites have historically felt more strongly attached to such symbols of patriotism as the National Anthem and the American flag.”
“Nearly 90 percent of whites who have strong attachments to their racial group said that seeing the flag made them feel ‘extremely good,’ compared with only about a quarter those who score low in white racial solidarity,” Tesler stated.
Consistent with that contention, the columnist noted, social psychology research finds that for many, “to be American is implicitly synonymous with being white.”
Completely ignoring the fact that whites make up the majority of people in the nation, he then quoted an NBC poll conducted back in June of 1995 that indicated “the public’s image of the prototypical American ‘patriot’ is far more likely to be white than black.”
Tesler then quoted a survey conducted in February of 2012, which resulted in the claim that “only 28 percent of white respondents thought that the word ‘patriotic’ described most blacks very or extremely well, compared to 51 percent who thought most whites are patriots.”
“This view that African Americans are insufficiently patriotic fits well with modern theories of prejudice,” he continued, which argue that “contemporary white racial resentment is characterized by ‘a moral feeling that blacks violate … traditional American values.’”
Tesler then dragged President Trump into the topic as a scapegoat for a number of racist controversies:
Racial resentment is also characterized by beliefs that African Americans are insufficiently industrious, obedient and deserving -- prevalent themes that Trump and his supporters tap into when they describe black players protesting racial injustices in America as disrespectful, spoiled and ungrateful.
It’s certainly no surprise, then, that whites who held racially resentful beliefs were especially likely to be against NFL players taking a knee during the National Anthem, well before Trump started commenting about the issue last month.
“Nor is it surprising that white racial resentment was strongly linked to groundless speculation about whether President Barack Obama was really born in the United States,” the columnist claimed, “the same ‘birther’ beliefs that helped make Trump popular with Republicans in the first place.”
“Trump and his supporters claimed that his birther crusade against the first black president had nothing to do with race,” Tesler continued, “just as they are now claiming that their opposition to NFL protesters is about patriotism rather than race.”
“But both birtherism and Trump’s attacks on athletes kneeling to protest police violence against blacks easily evoke widespread racialized ideas of American patriotism,” the columnist concluded, “conceptions of citizenship that often equate being American with being white.”
Dragging the old “birther” controversy into the discussion and relying on a study from 1995 showed how much effort Tesler had to expend while finding “facts” that agreed with his point of view. So much for academic “research.”
