Pledging allegiance

I stand up behind the podium. I am addressing a meeting of the Rotary Club of Wake Forest, North Carolina, in the back room of a local cafeteria. The people in front of me are mostly white. They sit along the sides of long rectangular tables placed in cramped rows, their faces washed out by the fluorescent lighting.

A—, the woman who invited me to speak, tells me that the Black members of the Rotary Club are unable to be here. “They are all at a Juneteenth planning meeting,” she explains. I find myself wondering why she decided to schedule my talk when they could not attend. After all, I am telling a story that many of them remember.

The only Black person in the room is my husband William. He and I met more than fifty years ago during the desegregation of Wake Forest High School in the fall of 1969. When I began writing a book in 2021 about what happened when my brother and I invited both Black and white friends to a party in our home, William and I reconnected. We fell in love, both of us on the verge of turning 70, and were married soon after. 

He is part of my story, both then and now. 

A— informs me that she was unable to access my online slides—slides that I spent hours carefully preparing to accompany and illustrate my story.

The meeting begins. Everyone stands up as if on cue and begins reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

I am caught off-guard. I can’t remember the last time I was anywhere where the pledge was part of the program—maybe in high school?

What should I do? I am telling my story in the context of some hard truths about whiteness and racism that will most likely anger some, and maybe all, of these folks. Should I run the risk of offending them before I’ve even begun to speak? or should I go along to get along?

In the last few years, I have been examining the history of the United States. It is an infamous story of genocide, the forced resettlement of Indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of kidnapped African people; civil war, a failed attempt at Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, and the celebration and mourning—even now—of those who still subscribe to the myth of “the Lost Cause.” Why would I wish to salute a flag that drapes itself so beguilingly over the white supremacy that built this nation and the systemic racism that is the foundation of both law and custom?

But I have never taken the time to think it through to a conclusion. Now, the moment of decision catches me flat-footed.

Belatedly, I struggle to my feet, place my hand over my heart, and stumble through the pledge. I mumble so that no one will realize that I don’t remember the words.

William remains resolutely seated. His questioning look, a combination of disbelief and horror, sears me. While the pledge is still being recited, he stands up and leaves the room. I don’t know if he plans to return.

Great. A room full of white people. No slides, no William. While A— introduces me—misrepresenting what I’m about to say—I take a breath to create a small space between me and my turbulent feelings.

As I launch into the story of racial violence that targeted my family and friends in the late 1960s in Wake Forest, I cannot read the faces in front of me. There are two brown faces, I see now, among the white ones, businessmen who appear to be from India and only mildly interested in what I am saying, which doesn’t surprise me. One white man, blonde, sits in front and looks me in the eye the whole time I’m talking. His face is fixed in a frozen smile that never changes. Several young women sit together in the middle of the room, wearing expressions that are vaguely friendly, but noncommittal. A man in the back frowns, deep furrows between his brows, and scribbles things down into a small notebook. 

Midway through my talk, the door to the hallway opens. William crosses in front of me to his seat. I know there will be a confrontation later.

Only one person asks a question at the end, something about whether or not I’ve been able to reconcile with those who wronged us. I answer, simply, “No.” Then I soften my blunt reply by explaining that no one has responded to my emails. But the question angers me—I can’t stand it when white people want to jump to reconciliation before even acknowledging the need for reparations. 

The man with the frozen smile says nothing, still smiling. Another man breaks the uncomfortable silence by sharing a story that indicates that he’s one of the “good white people.” The frowning man, still frowning, is the only one besides A— who shakes my hand and thanks me. 

The experience is singularly unsatisfying—not like the convocation with high school students a few weeks earlier.

I walk away with a blue coffee mug, Rotary Club logo on the side.

William and I drive home in silence.

No sooner have we crossed the threshold than William starts in. 

“You saluted a piece of cloth—”

Before he can go on, I blurt out, “They caught me off guard. I’m not usually in places where people pledge allegiance to the flag. I wasn’t prepared.”

“You saluted a piece of cloth,” he says again. “A piece of cloth! Which means—what? What the fuck does it mean!”

“I didn’t want to do something to offend them from the get-go. I knew I was going to say some hard things—”

“Oh, so you’d break solidarity with your Black husband rather than offend white people you don’t even know!”

I am grasping at straws. “I’m pledging allegiance to what the flag is supposed to mean—” Even as I say it, I feel how flimsy my argument is.

He shakes his head. “Last time I checked, that flag was flying while Black people were still enslaved. Or maybe strung up on the limbs of trees, while the white folks had a picnic.”

“But I’m pledging allegiance to what the flag is supposed to stand for, the ideals of liberty and justice—”

He explodes. “‘Liberty and justice for all’? —Sure, if you’re white. Not if you’re Black.” His long legs carry him quickly across the room. “You’re talking about 1776— But it was 1865 before Black people were free.”

I weave between making excuses and defending my decision.

He cuts me off. “You’re equivocating.”

The air in the house is stifling, it closes in on me. I am angry, not least of all because I haven’t really thought through anything that is pouring out of my mouth. What am I defending? I’m not even sure.

Then a motor inside me grinds to a halt. Something has just occurred to me.

“You know what?” I say. “I don’t even believe what I’m saying.”

He starts, then breaks out with a sharp laugh. The room opens up again. The argument ain’t over, for sure—but the thick fury dissipates. We move into the bedroom, removing our shoes and sitting on the bed.

William takes a breath. “Let’s be clear. We live in a fucking country where that piece of cloth is more important to white people than my Black life.”

He’s right, and I know it. That piece of cloth was used to stake a claim on lands that were the ancestral homes of the original people on this continent. That piece of cloth flew from the masts of slaving ships. That flag is still used to justify invasion and conquest, bloodshed and genocide.

And from the beginning, “liberty and justice for all” was only ever meant to apply to white men.

The pledge itself, Gen-Z historian Kahlil Greene writes, “was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a man who openly despised the ‘incoming waves of immigrants’ from southern and eastern Europe. Bellamy believed these newcomers were ‘pouring over our country’ from ‘races which we cannot assimilate without a lowering of our racial standard.’ The pledge was designed as an instrument of forced assimilation, a way to drill Anglo-Saxon Protestant values into the children of people Bellamy considered barely human.” (https://historycanthide.substack.com, “Young White Supremacists Build a ‘Whites-Only’ Town…,” December 18, 2025) (emphasis mine)

My marriage to William is a crash course—graduate level—in the ways that white supremacy and racism still nest unquestioned in corners of my psyche. I can’t always see them. Thankfully, I am married to a man who loves me enough to call me out and not to retreat or throw me overboard in the face of my knee-jerk resistance. Otherwise I might never come to examine attitudes and beliefs that hold me hostage to a world view that limits me in ways I never realized before.

I’m coming, too, to recognize that making excuses and becoming defensive are common reactions from white folks when we’re pinned.

What will I do if I find myself in the same situation in the future? I’ve decided to remain seated, whether William is there or not. Maybe bow my head and pray—but before I do that, I need to think through what it is I’m praying for. Otherwise, it’s just for show. 

The most important question I have to answer for myself is this: What is it that commands my allegiance? 

I know damn well it isn’t a piece of cloth draped over centuries of unacknowledged wrong, while white people call for reconciliation without reparations.

What, then?

I need to get busy figuring that out.