The Pledge, “Critical Race Theory,” and Performative Patriotism
How the Pledge of Allegiance got into our schools — and what it tells us about “patriotic education”
If you had a childhood like mine, you had to stand up every morning before school started, put your hand over your heart, turn to the American flag (which hung, for some reason, in your math classroom), and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which went like this:
I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
I didn’t think about it much as a kid, but the older I get, the weirder that little ritual has come to seem. Forcing schoolchildren to salute the flag and recite a loyalty oath feels like it would be more at home in the Soviet Union than our land of proud individualism.
I’ve been thinking about the pledge this summer, as it seems like we are about to have a really dumb summer of arguing about “critical race theory” and “patriotic education” (I’m putting both of these in quotation marks because they seem to stand for many different things in the Discourse right now) Conservatives, whether they are genuinely afraid for the soul of the nation or simply seizing upon what…
