There is a house in my neighborhood that is flying a black-and-white American flag with a green stripe. Its makers say the flag, a variant of the “thin blue line” flag that started appearing in response to anti-police brutality protests in recent years, signals support of border patrol agents and the military — implicitly arguing that defense of the border is a prime value at the center of American life and culture.
The flag is part of a larger trend that started with police and now includes, in addition to border patrol and the military, firefighters, search-and-rescue, corrections officers, and that is part of an authoritarian tilt in American life.
These flags are modeled on the “thin blue line” flags that have proliferated over the last decade, since the violence inflicted on Black men and women by police have risen to national emergency status causing a rebirth of the civil rights movement. And their meaning is just as hazy, depending on who waves them and who sees them.
The “thin blue line” flag — black and white, with a blue stripe across the center — was designed as a response to the criticism by protesters, and a defense of police. It first appeared in 2014, according to Politico. It was designed by Andrew Jacob, a white college student who was “watching protests of police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice.” The flag, he said, was designed to “show support for law enforcement,” without politics and without any association with “racism, hatred, bigotry.”
Jacob may honestly believe this, but the instinct he describes — and the flag itself — drips with political intent by framing the protests as anti-police and by making the claim that police are in need of defense — though exactly who they need to be defended from is left unstated and can be best understood by consider the history of the phrase the flag illustrates.
I wrote about this in February. The blue line, as I was told by several people connected with law enforcement, symbolizes the line between civilization and anarchy, with the police as the blue line acting as bulwark, protecting society. The phrase sounds neutral, lacking any direct racial animus, but its use goes back at least to the early days of the last century, according to various sources, a time when society was defined in the United States and the rest of the West as white and Christian and when other groups — the black and brown, Muslims, Jews, even Roman Catholics — were cast to the margins, seen as threatening the fabric of the nation.
In this context, the merger of an American flag with various branches of law enforcement both sends a message about who is deserving of protection and who is not, while centering the policing function and rule enforcement within American culture, overriding what many of us see the flag as actually representing: free speech and free assembly, freedom of movement, the right to be secure in our home and person, an assumption of innocence in criminal matters — essentially, all of the rights enumerated in the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution.
I get that most people who see these flags and hear the phrase interpret them as simple statements of support. But symbols have different meanings for different groups depending on context, and the use of the flag and its new offshoots by the extreme political right — and the right more generally, in so far as it benefits from the activities of the worst elements of the conservative movement — make explicit what seems unstated. While Jacob and the company that produces the flags denounce any association with far-right groups, the flag was carried openly by protesters and rioters during the Jan. 6 insurrection, and by the neo-fascists and racists who marched through Charlottesville in 2017’s United the Right Rally. This is not a misappropriation of the symbol, as Jacob and flag supporters argue.
I am not arguing that the redesigned flags should be banned or that the repurposing of the original stars and stripes amounts to desecration. The stars and stripes and all of these reimagined flags are forms of speech, as are flags that replace the stars with a white peace sign or the “In Our Community” placard — which uses the American flag as a template to proclaim support for inclusion and equality — that I have on my front lawn.
Just because they are forms of protected speech, does not mean we cannot push back or call out the designers and those who wave these flags for explicit and implicit support of authoritarian impulses. And we should take note of their growing proliferation, because it may offer us a better sense of just how strong the authoritarian movement is in the United States and the danger it could post.
Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Facebook, facebook.com/ Hank.Kalet; Substack, hankkalet.Substack.com.
From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2021
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