A sense of national dread loomed over my early life. The books I read, the news I watched, the conversations that happened around me deepened that wariness into distrust, forming a permanent disconnect between me and America. I was 23 when Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman. I was 24 when George Zimmerman was acquitted. I was 25 when Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson, and I turned 26 days before the state decided that he would not be indicted. As the deaths of Martin and Brown followed me into young adulthood, my new rage broke apart any notion of a cohesive national identity.
The patriot identity limits our ability as citizens to collectively revolutionize the American infrastructure. It is a national identity that observes the flaws of the system and, instead of considering abolition to address the root of the problems, aims simply to reshape or reform.
The distance between me and the country made it difficult to figure out how to ground myself. I would clearly never be a patriot. It took years for me to understand that Blackness is a thing that self-defines. I would need to learn to define myself.
For two years, I indicted the United States on the page and in weekly critiques during my M.F.A. program at Pratt Institute. In one critique, my professor suggested that for all my rage and desire for institutional destruction, she suspected that I cared about this country quite a lot. I was incredulous. Caring would make me a patriot, and no word felt emptier or more distant. If I didn’t care, what was this feeling, this desire to find an answer for what I was in this country?
Months later I made a map, partnered with a cinematographer, and drove the question around to Black communities in Mississippi, Georgia, and North Carolina to film a documentary about Blackness’s relationship to patriotism. I feared coming off as a bitter Black woman whose motivation for interrogating her placement in and relationship to this country was to prove how unspectacular it is. Spending any amount of time identifying the country’s innumerable wrongs, failures, and contradictions, I worried, would be perceived as immature.
Still, I had to know who else had circled this question, and what name it had led them to. “Have you named yourself a patriot?” I would ask. “What has it cost you? What has it won you?” And while the responses varied, what mattered was the option of naming. My Blackness within the arbitrarily drawn lines of a stolen country liberated me to name and resist being named.