After the shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, my fiancée bought us the Stronger Than Hate t-shirts:
The t-shirt makers, in partnership with the Pittsburgh Steelers football team, send the proceeds to the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh’s Fund for Victims of Terror, benefiting the synagogue in this case. In support of the victims of the shooting, the Steelers allowed their modified logo to be displayed broadly, including clothing, signs, and stickers.
This show of solidarity throughout the city boosted our morale, and my fiancée thought to also pack the shirts for our trip to Israel where we would be spreading the message of unity with the Jewish community there. However, when my aunt saw our shirts, she was stunned.
She explained that to wear the symbol of the Star of David in Jerusalem would represent nationalism against Palestinian Moslems and anyone else not Jewish. Well, that’s not the message we wanted to send!
In the United States, where Jewish Americans are the minority, the symbol represents support.
In Israel, where the Jewish community is a majority, the symbol reverses itself as supremacist.
This 4th of July, Nike planned to release a shoe sporting the Betsy Ross flag design:
The company quickly cancelled the shoes when former football quarterback Colin Kaepernick pointed out its racist symbolism. Originally a symbol of pride for US independence from England—representing the 13 colonies—the design is now being waved by White Supremacists. Different groups of US nationalists are using various symbols prominent during the time of slavery in order to intimidate minorities in the country.
And US Americans are pitted against one another as they argue for and against Nike’s decision.
This controversy over the Betsy Ross symbolism makes me think of Frederick Douglass when abolitionists thought to honor him by asking him to speak at a 4th of July celebration. The date was 1852. Furthermore, the Fugitive Slave Law had been passed two years prior, which extended the danger of slavery into the free states. Douglass titled his speech: What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?:
Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY.
I think about the conversations we need to have as a country about the wrongs of our past in order to heal together, and certainly the diverse effects of these symbols give us a place to start.
Germany had this conversation within her borders and with Israel and the Jewish community worldwide. South Africans have done this during Mandela’s presidency (1994-1999). Indeed, Maya Angelou writes in her poem for Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993: History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
Here is my new ritual: To listen to Dr. Angelou every 4th of July: