When Patriotism Follows Skin Color

The suppression led by the police in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, since the death of Michael Brown contrasts with the treatment that rancher Cliven Bundy received last April when he and his supporters, armed with assault rifles, resisted the seizure of his livestock by federal agents. This seizure was justified by over $1 million in unpaid taxes by Bundy, while he enjoyed land that the federal government offered at a more than modest price to certain stockbreeders.

Given the threat, the federal agents backed off. The county sheriff eventually defused the situation after a dozen days of confrontation. Like his acolytes, Bundy got off scot-free. Despite the violence and their guilt, the conservative media, headed by Fox, supported Bundy’s cause, and seized upon his anti-governmental and libertarian rhetoric that they were resisting an illegitimate and oppressive government. At the height of his popularity, certain Republican politicians followed the media’s suit by branding Bundy a “patriot.” However, the rancher, direct and defiant, lost all of his sympathy, at least officially, when he demonstrated his racism a week later, stating that he wondered if young African-Americans were better off living under the regime of 19th century slavery than on the subsidies of the current government.

How is it that a heavily armed man who threatened federal agents and promoted the people’s revolt has been branded a “patriot,” while the unarmed protestors in Ferguson who questioned public authority have not?

In the United States, skin color influences not only the behavior of the police, but also the discourse used by actors, the media and politicians at public debates. Although nobody classes the people of Ferguson as “patriots,” it should be noted that the protestors do not claim to be such, as they do not match up with the current idea of an American patriot.

For the moment, the symbols that encompass this image (think back to the Minutemen who fought in the Revolution or even the cowboys who conquered the West, for example) are monopolized by right-wing white males, particularly in the tea party or the NRA, which largely explains why visible minorities show no interest in these movements.

In order to understand this phenomenon, we must go back to the fight for civil rights led by visible minorities, women and homosexuals in the 1960s, and especially the fallout in the 1970s. At that time, the right and its media outlets presented all of the profit obtained by these groups as a loss of privilege for another minority — white middle-class males.

Aside from this loss of privilege, the conservative discourse accuses the beneficiaries of the 1960s reforms of sponging off of the federal government, and therefore of being parasites living on the taxes paid by these same white men. With a view to rallying its electoral base, the right has seized upon all of the patriotic symbols by associating them to an idealized past, in which the white man ensured and organized social order and freedom for everyone. This is what Bundy was referring to when he talked about slavery.

For those who have obtained recognition of their rights since the 1960s, the traditional symbols of patriotism are tinted with paternalism at best and with domination and exploitation at worst, which explains why the protestors of Ferguson are not aligning themselves with Cliven Bundy’s patriotism.