Who represents you, Gwen Berry or Tamyra Mensah-Stock?

This was not the reaction we heard in late June from Gwen Berry, a hammer thrower who expressed anything but patriotic pride after securing a place on the U.S. Olympic team. She stood on the medals podium, turned away from the American flag, and stared into the cameras with a sulky expression on her face. She brandished a T-shirt with a political protest logo on it, put it over her head, and generally made a sour spectacle of herself.

Later, she explained to Time magazine that she does not “respect something that doesn’t stand for all people” and went on to say “blacks … are not treated as human beings” by the “elite or the white supreme.” She rejected the idea that her action was the opposite of representing America because “stating my rights” is “extremely American.”

Was what she said true? In several ways, certainly not. The flag Berry sneered at, and Mensah-Stock gladly and proudly embraced, is the one carried into battle by soldiers, white, black, and other colors in between, who fought to end slavery. It was a symbol back then as it is today of freedom, not repression, and of unity, not division.

The flag, to which most ordinary Americans pledge allegiance, is the emblem of the nation as a whole. To disrespect it actively as Berry did and others do is thus to condemn the nation, not in all its parts but, again, as a whole. Such protests targeting the flag endorse the idea that America is systemically racist, a country most notable for its wrongs rather than for the ideals it proclaims and upholds, like every ideal espoused by any other people, without complete success.

America is not free of racists; no country is. A nation of 330 million people will inevitably include every type of person you can imagine, saintly or bigoted. (And the racists among us, like the Union soldiers who fought and died, are themselves white and black, and all skin colors in between.)

Despite the impossibility of eradicating all racism, race relations had been improving for decades in this country until the latest crop of race hucksters and malcontents arrived to jimmy open society’s ethnic fissures. Under the therapeutic guise of healers, they sow division and resentment, determined to keep grievances alive where reforms were until recently making real improvements and the passage of time was erasing the scars of the past. Berry is undeniably representative of this angry unpatriotic type, or of that substantial minority susceptible to divisive falsehoods propagated by the racial grievance industry.

And, as she noted, it was very American of her to claim her rights. Many people are quick to claim their rights aggressively (even when they don’t really know what they are) without much if any thought that corresponding duties may attach to them. Sadly, our culture has nurtured those who demand much from it but make no demands of themselves. “I earned my right on that podium, I earned my right on the team,” she told Time.

But representing America is not a right derived from athletic prowess. It is an opportunity granted by a people who, along with their national symbol, have a right to reciprocal respect. If you don’t like your country, you cannot legitimately claim as a right the privilege of being its champion.

An NFL football team is a private business that can be left alone to decide whether it wishes to employ a recalcitrant player. But the Olympic team represents us all, and the public has rights, too. One of them should be the right to expect that those it sends into competition against other national teams will be proud not just of their own sporting prowess but of the country that sent them.

The vast majority of Americans surely want to be represented by athletes such as Tamyra Mensah-Stock.