Kendrick Lamar’s Star-Spangled Mind
“Every American Flag is a warning sign.” ~ Demian Dinéyazhi’
During the Super Bowl halftime show, Kendrick Lamar chose to simulate an American Flag with black dancers’ bodies. This powerful image seems appropriate since Black and Brown bodies built and ’are the fabric of’ America, and because, according to the US Flag Code, “the flag is itself a living thing.” Lamar makes literal what was before only symbolic.
Why is the US (Uncle Sam) flag so significant? Frankly, since Old Glory is as global as Mickey Mouse–it’s on the Moon and Mars for Christ’s sake!– it is a potent symbol for empire. It might also be the most emotional, and glaringly supernatural, colored fabric in the world. Nowhere else is a national flag more deployed/employed/exploited than in the US, whose national anthem is in fact a hymn in praise of the flag. According to Harold Bloom, US Americans blend together the crucifix, flag, and Christ-child. Marc Leepson, author of “Flag: An American Biography,” likewise talks about how US people don’t have a monarch or a state religion, and so “in some ways, the flag is a substitute.” Carolyn Marvin, co-author of “Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (1999) argues the flag should be considered a proper “totem,” using Derkhiem and Freud’s definition of it as an emblem of a group’s agreement to be a group. Marvin: “Patriotic rituals revere it as the embodiment of a bloodthirsty totem god who organizes killing energy.”
US school children learn to “pledge allegiance to the flag,” and sports fans turn and salute the flag before every game. There is a strange marriage between flags, nationalism, and sports, and it’s all “deeply American.” Historian Peter Sloterdjik thinks the U.S. nationalist flag cult/ure today may derive from the ancient Egyptian ritual of parading Pharaoh’s mummified placenta ahead of the ruler in parades.
An interesting bit of U.S. history that can enrich our interpretation of Lamar’s flag is that during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Lakota decorated their sacred objects with US flag designs. These were objects, like cradleboards, tobacco bags, vests, belts, not meant to be sold. One reason they did this was to “own” the colonial symbol ironically. They also used it as code–one hidden to settlers but known to them–for recalling and celebrating victorious military actions against the U.S. government. The presence of stars and stripes indicated that the owner of the jacket, bag, or horse mask fought against and killed U.S. soldiers. In some cases, each beaded flag represented a human body.