Proud of What, Exactly?

America is a country I love, albeit with a history I can’t accept. The enigma lies in finding balance between the two.

Being an American comes with certain factory settings. It’s apparent in our school system. Before you begin a single lesson, you’re standing at attention with your hand over your chest reciting a loyalty oath in unison with classmates whom I’d bet don’t even fully understand the content of what they’re recounting. By the time you’re old enough to ask your underpaid teacher what a republic even is, this blind devotion has already been hardwired into your psyche.

It begins in elementary school, and only compounds from there. It might be the playing of the national anthem before a JV basketball game that nobody watches, or a military flyover at the Super Bowl, mattress sales draped in stars and stripes every July, or even cars and trucks sold to the public on the strength of the word “freedom.” The idea that we live in “the greatest country in the history of the world” is constantly deployed as an applause line, delivered less like an academic claim and more like a war cry. Somewhere in all of this, patriotism and national pride have become indistinguishable from one another. It’s pre-loaded with one’s citizenship and topped up at every commercial break.

For so long, I haven’t questioned that union much. I struggle to identify when exactly it stopped working for me, but I know for certain that the frustration showed up well before I had an argument to justify it. The pride was never offered, it was just assumed. “Aren’t you proud to be an American?” never actually arrived as a question, but as a box I was expected to check.

My honest answer: Proud of what, exactly? That’s the part few seem to adequately fill in. The word gets handed to you whole and object-free, as if what it referred to were so obvious that asking would be embarrassing for everyone involved.

I love this country. I’m not proud of it.

For most people I know, there’s a certain weight that hangs over that second sentence. It’s not just the social cost of uttering it at a summer barbecue, but also the assumption that it’s the opening move in some larger renunciation. Truth is, it isn’t. Love doesn’t require you to audit anything. You can love a place the way you love a family member who’s done real damage. Pride is a different animal. Pride is a claim about the total. It says you’ve looked at all of it, the whole 250-year sprawl, and come out on the plus side. I’ve looked at all of it, and I’m simply just not there.

I want to be clear, because it’s the first thing that evaporates when one dares to communicate that they aren’t proud to be an American.

I love that I can say that and nobody knocks on my door. I love that I can stand in the street and protest the government and still go to work on Monday. The First Amendment is not a small thing — not because free expression is something exclusive to the U.S., but because the version we have here is uniquely absolute. I love that I have the ability to vote, even if our election system is flawed. I don’t walk around feeling especially answered to, but it’s real, it’s counted, and it’s more than many have ever been handed. While all this may sound like a hedge, it’s actually the whole problem: the good is real enough that it makes the rest impossible to file away.

The version of American history I got in school treated topics like slavery, the removal of Native nations, and Jim Crow as chapters — bad ones, regrettable ones, but ultimately bounded and bracketed off from the real story of liberty and progress. Those weren’t just chapters. They were the spine the rest of the book of America was built on: the labor, the land, and the money that paid for everything afterwards. You don’t get to just call something a footnote when it’s actually load-bearing.

Rebuttals like “slavery ended in 1865” only tell half the story. It didn’t end so much as it changed its name and its paperwork. Reconstruction ran about a decade before the Black Codes and then Jim Crow rebuilt the caste system in statute, where it sat, federally tolerated, until the mid-1960s. In the meantime, the NAACP counted 4,743 lynchings between 1882 and 1968 — mob killings, no trial, roughly 72 percent of the victims Black, staged in daylight and frequently photographed.

Native nations got the same machine run at a different speed. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced roughly 60,000 people off their land in what we have generously agreed to call the Trail of Tears. In 1890, the United States Army disarmed and then killed somewhere around 250 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee. And beginning in the 19th century, more than 526 federally funded boarding schools took Native children from their parents as a matter of policy, beat them for speaking their own languages, and — for a documented share of those kids — never sent them home. Not a war, not a mob, not one bad governor. A funded program with a budget line and a mission statement.

There’s a word for a campaign to erase a people’s culture through their children, and it isn’t “assimilation.”

Here’s where the usual defense reaches for distance: it was a long time ago, different era, different country, you can’t judge them by our standards. Fair enough as a reflex. Let’s stay inside living memory, then, and see if it holds.

In 1942, Executive Order 9066 put between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese descent into camps without trial — most of them American citizens — on the theory that ancestry constitutes evidence. A decade later, with no war to hide behind, the U.S. Public Health Service enrolled 600 Black men in Alabama in a syphilis study, never told several hundred of them what they actually had, and went on withholding penicillin for twenty-five years after it became the standard cure. Not out of ignorance, out of study design. A cured patient would have ruined the data.

That’s just the domestic side. Abroad, the pattern accelerates.

A coup in Iran in 1953 because a democratically elected government had the nerve to nationalize its own oil. A coup in Guatemala the next year on behalf of a fruit company, which helped set off a civil war that killed something like 200,000 people over the decades that followed. Augusto Pinochet was installed in Chile while the elected president died inside the palace. In 1968, American soldiers walked into the village of Sơn Mỹ and killed somewhere between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians (mostly women, children, and the elderly) and the Army spent the next year trying to bury the story along with them. A war in Iraq built on weapons that were never there.

None of this is hidden. It’s declassified, footnoted, tallied by researchers at 64 covert and 6 overt regime-change attempts across the Cold War, plus 81 separate interventions in other countries’ elections between 1946 and 2000. It’s sitting in the open, indexed and waiting. It’s just not the part anybody sings about on July 4th.

Some might say that every country has blood on its hands, but this is the counterargument that deserves a straight answer rather than a sneer: every nation on earth has atrocities in its past, so why single this one out?

Because I’m not a citizen of every country. I’m a citizen of this one. This is the history carrying my name on it, funded by my taxes, defended under my flag, conducted in some diluted but real sense on my behalf. “Everybody’s done bad things” is completely true and explains exactly nothing about whether I personally owe pride to this particular set of them. It isn’t an argument so much as a subject change with good posture.

Not one positive item on America’s record arrived as a gift from a grateful government. Abolition took a war. The vote for women took seventy-two years of organizing after Seneca Falls. The Civil Rights Act took Birmingham and Selma and a generation of people who got beaten for asking politely first. Stonewall was a riot, not a petition. Every one of those was pried loose slowly, at cost, by people the country was actively working against at the time.

So the pattern isn’t “America gave us freedom.” The pattern is that America had to be forced, over and over, by its own citizens, to do the things it had already written down. That’s not a government to be proud of. That’s a country whose best moments were won off it.

Question any of this out loud and somebody tells you to move to Canada, as though disillusionment and disloyalty are somehow the same gesture. Dissent isn’t the opposite of patriotism, it’s the tradition underneath it. Our nation’s founders were dissenters (wealthy, slave-owning aristocrats as well, but dissenters nonetheless). The abolitionists were the radicals of their moment. Frederick Douglass didn’t get invited to speak on the Fourth in 1852 because he was comfortable; he got invited, stood up, and told the crowd to their faces that the holiday was a fraud to every enslaved person watching it from the outside. That speech is more patriotic than any fireworks show, because it took the country seriously enough to hold it to its own paperwork.

The government has always understood exactly how dangerous that tradition is, which is why it spent fifteen years trying to kill it. From 1956 until it was exposed in 1971, the FBI ran COINTELPRO, a program built to surveil, infiltrate, and “neutralize” civil rights organizers, Black nationalist groups, and anyone else the Bureau decided was dissenting a little too effectively.

So when someone tells me criticism is unpatriotic, my answer is that the state itself never believed that for a second. It treated criticism as a threat worth wiretapping. You don’t build a surveillance apparatus around speech you think is harmless.

Make no mistake, I love America. It isn’t even disappointment, which would imply I’d expected something else. I don’t love our nation for what it is, but rather for what it could be.

Pride is supposed to be the payout for having lived up to something. What I’ve got instead is closer to responsibility. It’s an attachment to a place whose stated ideals I believe in completely, whose record keeps failing to earn them, and whatever obligation that gap puts on me to narrow it rather than hum along over it. That’s not a lesser feeling, it’s a heavier one, and it asks more of me than any flag decal or Pledge of Allegiance ever will. So, I argue with it. I hold it to the things it already wrote down. I love it without lying about it.

Pride is for what’s finished. I’d rather keep building.