Is Being ‘Unapologetic’ the New Patriotic — or a Form of Resistance?
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Version 0 of 1. We’re living in sorry times, people. And by ‘‘sorry,’’ I mean ‘‘not sorry.’’ Right now, the far-right website Breitbart News is selling T-shirts emblazoned with the words ‘‘Unapologetically American.’’ The shirt’s label is printed with the Breitbart logo, ‘‘Made in USA’’ and ‘‘#WAR.’’ This is a shirt that wants to be starting something. Jamming ‘‘unapologetically’’ in front of ‘‘American’’ like that, with all those aggro fixin’s, implies that anybody wearing a different shirt doesn’t love America. The shirt’s sentiment is so pervasive throughout government at the moment that it’s tempting to ask some elected officials what their size is. Jeff Sieting, the village president of Kalkaska, Mich., might be one such official. In the last year, he posted rants on Facebook calling for the United States to kill ‘‘every last Muslim’’ and declaring Islam ‘‘a flesh-eating bacteria.’’ Asked at a village meeting in June whether he would apologize for the posts, Sieting told the room, ‘‘I owe nobody an apology for exercising my First Amendment rights.’’ His stance could cost him his job, but he doesn’t appear to be sorry about that either. According to the Traverse City Record-Eagle, Sieting suspects that the antipathy toward him is coming from nonresidents’ disdain for the president. The current allergy to apology meets up with exasperation over so-called political correctness, exasperation that became a selling point of Donald Trump’s candidacy. He won. So, then, did the offenses, insults and assaults he and his campaign not only refused to apologize for but also, in the case of, say, the former campaign staffer and journalist-mauler Corey Lewandowski, swore never happened. Witnesses and contradictory video footage be damned. ‘‘Unapologetic’’ is how The Los Angeles Times characterized Donald Trump Jr.’s defense of his having met with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton last summer, during the presidential campaign. You could see just how un-sorry he was when he tweeted out his damning pre-meeting emails moments before The New York Times published them. In the Trump era, ‘‘unapologetic’’ constitutes a state of mind: There is no shame in flouting norms, exiting accords, jeopardizing international relationships, lying. If you see things that way, you’re also likely to be of the mind that all Barack Obama did as president was apologize for America. Mitt Romney’s book, from 2010, was called ‘‘No Apology: The Case for American Greatness’’ and sprang from the premise that, in 2009, Obama toured the world asking other governments for forgiveness. According to Romney, ‘‘He has apologized for what he deems to be American arrogance, dismissiveness and derision; for dictating solutions, for acting unilaterally and for acting without regard for others.’’ That’s not untrue. In reality, though, Obama spent some of his overseas visits ruminating on the United States’ strengths and weaknesses. ‘‘America, like every other nation, has made mistakes and has its flaws,’’ he said to students in Istanbul. ‘‘But for more than two centuries, we have strived at great cost and sacrifice to form a more perfect union.’’ Obama spoke directly to Muslim leaders and their people about the importance of the bond between the Islamic world and the West, rebuking, at least in spirit, the George W. Bush administration’s bellicosity. In Obama’s view, apologies were sometimes warranted and should be offered without shame. But among nationalists and certain conservatives, his humility secured him a reputation as weak. Trump succeeded where Romney failed, in part because he could run against a caricature of Obama instead of the man himself. The concoction of a chronically contrite Obama made the anti-apologetic Trump seem more masculine, more American. During Obama’s overseas trip to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Germany and France in early June 2009, he cheered America’s diversity, but earlier that year, in Turkey, he spoke about our country’s ‘‘darker periods.’’ He was referring to the torture of Iraqis but also to America’s enslavement of Africans and its decimation of American Indians. Maybe this is what really stuck in certain people’s craw: He was airing our dirty laundry in front of foreign hosts, talking about ugly flash points in the creation of the United States that we haven’t settled. The offspring of that violence still await a substantial apology. At this point, they know not to hold their breath. The current practitioners of the pugilistic nonapology have licensed themselves not to care about the present, let alone the past, and instead to boastfully deny responsibility for everything. But there’s a different, equally powerful concept of unapology that cares deeply. That unapology holds dear all that ‘‘unapologetically American’’ mocks and ignores. We’re talking about heritage but also about butts and skin and hair. We’re talking, among other things, about Beyoncé. She closes her most recent album, ‘‘Lemonade,’’ with ‘‘Formation,’’ in which she extols her Southern roots, then proclaims a preference for how her family looks: She’s not merely proud of natural hair and wide nostrils. She’s expanding the beauty parameters. She’s being what has come to be known as unapologetically black. ‘‘Unapologetically black’’ is a cousin of ‘‘black power,’’ ‘‘I’m black and I’m proud’’ and ‘‘It’s a black thing.’’ Unapologetic blackness doesn’t indulge fantasies. It deals in facts, and Jackson Five nostrils are facts. If you can’t handle that: Sorry, but not sorry. Typically, the world gets a song that worships black bodaciousness — ‘‘Brick House’’ or ‘‘Da Butt’’ or ‘‘Baby Got Back,’’ songs that express black men’s preference for a black woman built a certain way. On ‘‘Formation,’’ Beyoncé states her preference for a big schnoz in a world in which a smaller, button nose remains the standard for all races. Loving big black noses isn’t a thing. Beyoncé’s saying it should be ranks as peak unapologetic blackness. ‘‘Unapologetically black’’ is a Twitter hashtag whose users make inspirational and self-celebratory posts. It names Facebook accounts and Tumblr pages that feature people with natural, unstraightened hair, brazenly eating food — like watermelon — negatively associated with black people that, like most human beings, black people also enjoy. Unapologetic blackness may have crested during the Obama era. The wishful hope for a postracial America couldn’t withstand recurring eruptions of institutional racism, provoking a revival in black-protest culture. The country couldn’t escape the conservative white paranoia that the future occupants of the White House would turn out to be black-radical terrorists, fist-bumping us into oblivion. Some black people were nervous, too, that the president and the first lady would feel forced to sidestep or suppress their blackness. That worry was assuaged in spontaneous moments: Obama’s breaking into Al Green’s ‘‘Let’s Stay Together’’ at a campaign stop or ‘‘Amazing Grace’’ at a funeral for victims of the A.M.E. Church massacre in South Carolina in 2015. He addressed the controversial deaths of black men at the hands of the police with pragmatism and empathy, despite his awareness that certain white people would — and did — jeer. He kept going, praising rappers, ribbing basketball players, hosting a ‘‘women of soul’’ evening at the White House. In quiet but significant ways, Obama learned how to be unapologetically black, too. The Obamas’ engagement with their blackness mirrored the culture’s engagement with the variety of blackness teeming within it. In the course of three years, the sitcoms ‘‘Black-ish,’’ ‘‘Insecure’’ and ‘‘Atlanta’’; the Marvel Comics drama ‘‘Luke Cage’’ and the Southern soap opera ‘‘Queen Sugar’’ all turned up on television. And albums arrived by Solange (‘‘A Seat at the Table’’), Kendrick Lamar (‘‘To Pimp a Butterfly,’’ ‘‘Damn.’’) and even Childish Gambino (‘‘Awaken, My Love!’’) that wrestled with the state of being refulgently black. At some point, along with ‘‘Lemonade,’’ they’ve all been deemed unapologetic in their blackness. There’s something celebratory in the phrase, but it’s also defensive and defiant. Nearly all of this work has white patronage. So a great deal of the astonishment over the proud detail of its blackness comes with an awareness of a white gaze. Blackness was never forced to owe black people an apology for anything. Practitioners of unapologetic blackness know their culture is being watched and shared, and the pride isn’t so much in the blackness itself but in its encryption, in what the 1990s fashion company (and Solange) called Fubu — For us, by us. They were originally just talking about jeans and sweats. But the Fubu spirit continues to insist that, in a country that for so long has refused to see our full selves, we can see one another. Why should anybody have to apologize for that? |