Patriotism, lately, for me and (I think) others like me, feels wrong and embarrassing, because I associate it with the worst kinds of racists and reactionaries. I could not—or at least did not bother to—imagine earnestly being a patriot, when the people who most loudly identified as patriots were people whose behavior I found abhorrent. But Booker’s speech raised an unspoken question: What else are we letting be stolen by people who are by admission of their own side “demagogic?” By its end, I was reconsidering a recent idea I’d had to put a Black Lives Matter sign up in my apartment window in the small, politically purple, rural town where I live. I am now thinking I might also put up an American flag.

I do not feel what I would consider a flag-waving kind of patriotism. Yet I do care for this country, and I am a citizen of this country. I helped start an antiracism project at my local library, and I meet with my neighbors to read books about community and against tyranny, because of something not wholly unrelated to patriotism that is absolutely rooted in love of country. What if refusing to allow the American flag to be a hate symbol is part of the active citizenship, the critical patriotism, that I am compelled by? What if it could represent not something angry and antiquated and obsessed with an old way of power, but an active, living thing that we tend and grow?

All three of us were crying, and the two staffers behind Booker, as he stared at Jackson and told her, “You have earned this spot. You are worthy. You are a great American.”

Source: Patriotism Felt Wrong and Embarrassing Until I Refused to Let It