{"id":19633,"date":"2021-06-29T18:00:57","date_gmt":"2021-06-29T18:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theoklahomaeagle.net\/?p=19633"},"modified":"2021-06-29T18:00:57","modified_gmt":"2021-06-29T18:00:57","slug":"dan-crenshaw-wants-gwen-berry-kicked-off-the-olympic-team-how-un-american","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.willoughbyavenue.com\/eagle\/2021\/06\/29\/dan-crenshaw-wants-gwen-berry-kicked-off-the-olympic-team-how-un-american\/","title":{"rendered":"Dan Crenshaw Wants Gwen Berry Kicked Off The Olympic Team. How Un-American."},"content":{"rendered":"

www.washingtonpost.com<\/a>
\nBy Sally Jenkins<\/a>
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There goes the dangerous Black athlete, betraying America again. Every time one of them stages a protest, some White politician has the sudden authoritarian urge to call for their banishment. Gwen Berry is no one\u2019s internal enemy \u2014 especially not by today\u2019s flagpole-stabbing, Capitol-sacking standards \u2014 but Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.) is so threatened by her that he has demanded her removal from the U.S. Olympic team.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n

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For what, exactly? For turning a skeptical shoulder to an American banner<\/a>. Now that\u2019s an eggshell brand of patriotism, if it can\u2019t withstand Berry\u2019s biceps.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s the tired-outness of Crenshaw\u2019s rhetoric that is so discouraging. He either doesn\u2019t recognize, or doesn\u2019t want to recognize, what a baneful old tradition he is following when he suggests a Black protester must be sanctioned for anti-Americanism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe bare minimum requirement\u201d of competing in the Olympics should be \u201cthat you believe in the country you\u2019re representing,\u201d Crenshaw told Fox. The unctuous Ted Cruz chimed in on Twitter, \u201cWhy does the Left hate America?\u201d As if Berry, a 32-year-old native of Ferguson, Mo., the daughter of an Iraq War veteran, and a college graduate with a minor in criminal justice, must be some kind of liberty-loathing infiltrator.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\nSign up for our Tokyo Olympics newsletter to get a daily viewing guide and highlights from the Games<\/a><\/span>\n<\/div>\n
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As opposed to a hard-working woman who hasn\u2019t so much as broken a rule. Who has done nothing but self-start, achieve and support herself by working multiple part-time jobs while winning medals in the hammer throw. Who simply tried to read and think after Michael Brown was shot six times by police in the streets of her hometown in 2014, because she was frightened for her son, a 15-year-old Black male with a potential bull\u2019s eye on him. And who is simply trying to provoke some thought over the fact that the anthem was written in 1814, when Blacks were enslaved and regarded as just three-fifths of a person, and basic racial justice still hasn\u2019t been achieved.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI never said I hated this country!\u201d she tweeted. \u201cPeople try to put words in my mouth, but they can\u2019t. That\u2019s why I speak out.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Crenshaw has been busy campaigning against \u201cwokeism\u201d and what he calls the \u201canti-racism industry that is incentivizing victimhood.\u201d He might have had an interesting conversation with Berry about that. But that won\u2019t happen as long as Crenshaw insists on tapping into one of the nastiest veins of discourse in American history, the cyclical suggestion of disloyalty whenever prominent Black figures speak out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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We heard it in 1968, in George Wallace\u2019s mush-mouthed decrying of \u201cminority group rebellions\u201d causing \u201cdomestic disorders\u201d with their insistence on what he called \u201cinnergration.\u201d We heard it in 1972 in Richard Nixon\u2019s \u201claw and order\u201d campaign to protect suburban housewives from \u201cthose damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.\u201d We heard it in Donald Trump\u2019s suggestion that any \u201cson of a bitch\u201d who didn\u2019t stand for the national anthem should be kicked off an NFL roster.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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That\u2019s the broader context into which Crenshaw\u2019s edict about Berry lands.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe don\u2019t need any more activist athletes,\u201d Crenshaw said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The question becomes exactly who is <\/i>allowed to speak up in protest on racial issues?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\nU.S. Olympic track and field trials: World records, future stars and Tokyo anticipation<\/a><\/span>\n<\/div>\n
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Dan T. Carter, author of a definitive biography of Wallace, \u201cThe Politics of Rage,\u201d and emeritus professor at the University of South Carolina, observed that throughout civil rights history, Black activists have suffered the accusation of disloyalty simply for pointing out our national failure.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThere is certainly a harsh, hard rhetoric that attempts to demonize them and cast them out of American society,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Carter is at work on a book about Wallace\u2019s notoriously vicious white supremacist speechwriter Asa Carter, who once charged that the NAACP was run \u201cby the same gang who financed the Russian Communist Revolution with millions out of New York City.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In this venomous tradition, no one is an appropriate campaigner for racial justice \u2014 only traitorous fomenters of agitation and disunion. Ministers such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy were supposed to be \u201cmen of God and should not be delving into political issues,\u201d the professor observed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Entertainers were especially dangerous in the view of Asa Carter, who ordered up a KKK beating of Nat King Cole when he appeared in Birmingham in 1956 to sing to a White audience, though Cole was fairly apolitical. And of course, Tommie Smith and John Carlos were vilified as subversives and received death threats after lifting their black-gloved fists on the medal podium at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Who, then?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Compulsory patriotism is not at all an American value; it is its own form of treachery. In fact, it\u2019s hard to identify a braver American impulse than the one to speak freely from a platform in the face of pressure.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s our sacrifice. It\u2019s our podium. It\u2019s our moment,\u201d Berry said after the trials. Which the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee rightly recognized when it loosened its rules on social justice protests and rescinded a sanction against Berry for raising a fist at the Pan American Games in 2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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As Berry remarked before the Olympic trials, it has bothered her that she wore the bold letters USA on her chest while being unable to express her convictions, thanks to the ludicrous ban on political statements imposed by the International Olympic Committee. \u201cI\u2019m glad to be able to say that without being punished,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But if Crenshaw and Cruz had their way, she would be. Maybe one day, the compulsory-patriotism crowd will wake up and peel themselves away from the language and intimidations of George Wallace. If that day ever arrives, Black American athletes would have one less reason to take a knee or turn away from the flag.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n