I’m Pledging Allegiance to the Promise of America
A MiddleWeb Blog
Many years ago – I’m tempted to say almost twenty – I was standing in the front office of my middle school when the Pledge of Allegiance rolled onto the PA, as it did each day. The secretaries and myself all faced the flag, put our hands over our hearts, and recited.
One of the Phys. Ed teachers was in the office too: a young Black woman I had always admired for her energy and dedication. As we finished, I heard her say, not loudly but distinctly: “One nation/under God/Indivisible/With liberty and justice for some.”
I had never heard anything like that before and was a little shocked. If you read Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli on the regular in your seventh grade curriculum, you know that characters who mess around with the Pledge are roundly punished by their peers. A few minutes later in the hall, privately, I had to ask what her motivation was.
She responded, calmly and candidly, that in her teaching she always kept in mind the legacy of Black people in the United States, both as K-12 students and as adults. She felt it was important to acknowledge the disparities between our country’s sense of justice for White people, and for people of color, in a tangible way. Modifying the Pledge was her way of doing so.
I have never forgotten that.
I haven’t forgotten it as the perennial war on legislating or not legislating the Pledge has raged. I brought it to mind again when Colin Kaepernick knelt on the field. I am thinking again of it now, as masked agents threaten our immigrant families; as my state is forced to join a collective to guarantee our students their right to physical health; as our proud tradition of national free speech, one taught and supported in our schools, is trampled upon.
You might be surprised, then, to come into any classroom or hallway I am in on a given workday and find me reciting the Pledge as it was written. I focus on each word with awareness and attention. I actively lead students in reciting it with passion. This isn’t because I disagree with my Black colleague’s form of protest. I don’t. Rather, it’s because she helped me understand that for me, the Pledge is not a real-time reflection of the status of our country.
It is instead a state of being towards which we strive. One of the most vital things we do as teachers is to help young people understand the difficult work that needs to be done to have a nation that is truly indivisible, one that metes out liberty and justice to all its inhabitants. Our schools, as microcosms of our society, are arguably the first and most important place this work begins.
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For me, the Pledge is not a statement of accuracy. It is a statement of aspiration. Most of all, it is a pledge: a commitment. A promise that school professionals physically make and renew each day.
And so I’m going to end this column with a challenge for school professionals. When you recite the Pledge these days, ask yourself: to what are you pledging yourself? Do your day-to-day actions or non-actions actually contribute to that pledge?
Towards what kind of nation do we, as schools, actually strive? Is it a nation where liberty and justice are meted out to some?
Or all?
Image credit: Dennis MacDonald / Shutterstock.com
Yes Dina, it’s so true that we are striving. Not so long ago, my relatives suffered discrimination because they were German immigrants. They couldn’t find work because their last name was Koch. No one would hire them, rent apartments to them, or even allow them into the hospital if they were injured. All this in Chicago. Union membership was closed to people like my great uncle even though he was born in the US…and his parents a maid and houseman had been servants in an affluent household that fled Europe. Eventually the only way to survive was to change his name and move away from the neighborhood where his family lived and try and pose as a non-German. It succeeded and he was able to gain a job as an apprentice in the machinist union for the City of Chicago right after World War I. It’s strange that despite all this history, he still believed in the land of opportunity because the alternative for his family was far worse. The contrast was what made him see America in a positive light because his family would have been dead had they stayed in Germany, and eventually he prevailed in the US.
So your point is well taken, It’s a statement of aspiration because, after all, we are a nation of people.