has not pledged allegiance to you,” he said. “It comes as a great shock around the age of 5 or 6 or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance. For all of their contributions to the United States, African Americans existed on society’s margins. When the writer and activist James Baldwin took part in a Cambridge University debate about America’s race problem in 1965, he invoked the trope of the Western film to argue that the American dream had indeed come at black people’s expense.
