The Flags We Wave and Won’t Wave

Why Americans Support Ukraine, But Not Palestine, Kashmir, and Kindred Struggles

This past Tuesday, I took an afternoon walk in between work meetings. The stroll down Nona Street, one of the many picturesque thoroughfares in Dearborn, Michigan’s Historic District, sits in between the city’s thriving Muslim American communities and its disparate white populations. It was a beautiful spring day, where the slight chill of winter was giving way to the warmth of the new season.

            During the walk, I could not help but notice the number of Ukrainian flags draped from the homes of neighbors. Some neighbors I knew in passing, while others I never met. During the twenty minute trek, I counted twelve Ukrainian flags. I realized, shortly before reaching my home, that the number of blue and yellow flags outnumbered its American counterpart, despite strolling then standing in one of the most blue-collar American cities in the land. A city that gave rise to the automobile, and only a handful of miles away, the Motown sound. 

            It was heartening, on one hand, that Americans with no immediate stake in a foreign war could get behind an accosted people. And do so, so swiftly. The flags that waved in support of Ukraine, in my neighborhood, stood as lurid emblems of the global movement of solidarity for the Europeans struggling for self-determination. What happens at home, in the heart of neighborhood, was part of a global phenomenon of compassion.

            However, as an Arab and Muslim and American, with each standing as indelible cogs of an identity that political arms systematically took apart, the juxtapositions moved in front of me liked a wild wind. I, myself, was a refugee of war. And after twenty-one year, a survivor of a “War on Terror” that marked by faith, and my skin, as presumptive of terrorism.

            Dearborn, Michigan is home to the most concentrated Muslim population in the United States. It is a meeting point of distinct Muslim peoples and cultures. Where Yemenis and Lebanese, Iraqis and Palestinians blend together to form an eclectic community that is like no other in the country, and perhaps, the world.

            It is a place where Muslims from these nations, and other ones beyond and in between, found safe haven from war. More specifically, wars fought in the name of indigeneity and anti-imperialism, independence and self-determination. The very principles that the Ukrainian people are embodying on the frontlines right now, in real time, against a Russian regime bent on revitalizing its authoritarian past. These are the principles, I presume, that moved millions of Americans to get behind the Ukrainian people.  These are the values, I believe, that inspired my neighbors to showcase the Ukrainian flag in front of their homes.

            Principles and values are what define a people. They are, more than color or creed, faith or confession, the salient threads that bring and bind human beings together.  A nation unified by a core set of tenets will not only stand against the most formidable of threats. But even more so, take to battle and surrender their lives for them.

            The War in Ukraine provides live and lucid illustration. A compelling case study of how the ideals of freedom and liberty are so indelibly galvanizing, so powerfully pulling, that they will inspire the weakest within a society to take arms and the richest among them to surrender fortune for the front lines.

            The United States finds itself on the other side of the divide.  American society is banally politicized and polarized, divided along lines of race and religion, ideology and their deeply preyed upon intersections.  Instead of rallying around principles and values, American society has manufactured new tribes of dogma. New title like “anti-vaxxers” and “intersectional feminists,” among a litany of others labels, are worn like ideological flags to set individuals apart and affiliate themselves with specific camps. 

These labels are so overpowering today that they eclipse other forms of identification, and even more ominously, supplant and stand in place of the very principles that undergird American society. As a Critical Race Theorist and Constitutional Law professor, I can honestly submit to you that the latter has been more disfigured in the popular discourse than the former. Most Americans, including those peddling political dogmas and fanning the flags of polarization, know little about American Constitutional principles, and even less about the spirit of their mission.

The search for unity, ironically enough, begins with a reading of the Constitution. And in fact, the very First Amendment, which includes language that scoffs at the racial, religious and ideological tribalism unfolding in the United States.  Standing alongside freedoms of speech, assembly and media, the “religion clauses” of the First Amendment gives flesh and bone to what being an “American” truly is.  It reads, simply yet sublimely, that, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” 

In short, neither federal or state law can establish one religion as the faith of the land, not prohibit or encumber a person’s right to profess her or his faith.  This is more than merely a mandate for religious freedom, but a mission to celebrate the rich panoply of religions that make up the American polity.  It is a principle worth fighting for, placing flags in front of your homes and businesses, and pinning emblems on lapels and laptops, for. It is a tenet that provides foundational preface to an array of other ideals, to due process and privacy, to equality and dignity, that richly color the content of the Constitution. 

 It does not surprise me that my neighbors, who are majority white, would never wave the flags of the Arab and Muslim residents of their very town.  These people, like Ukrainians, have fought righteous wars, and endured the trials of loss, refuge, and building anew.  The romantic in me wished they would.  I wished that a Palestinian or Kashmiri flag would wave alongside the Ukrainian blue and white, or the American red, white and blue, signifying a solidarity that crossed racial, religious and national divides. 

I am hopeful that those images would become reality, and perhaps even, routine one day.  I look forward to these future walks, which must begin with the first step of defining ourselves in line with the ideals and values instead of dogmas and tribes. If we are able to move beyond the polarizing walls of ego and individuality, then the flags of principle will wave – and shorten the distances between our walks of life.

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Khaled Ali Beydoun is a law professor at the Wayne State School of Law, and a Scholar in Residence at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society’s Initiative for a Representative First Amendment.  He is the author of the critically acclaimed book, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear.