When a black American protests the demoralizing practices of American government, there is always a white person eager to unfurl the welcome mat to Africa. This is where racism and patriotism tend to point: toward the exits. For some, we learn, being American is conditional on behaving like a grateful guest: You belong here because we tolerate your presence. We don’t yet appear to have settled the matter of citizenship — not even for our president, another black man backhandedly accused of harboring terrorist sympathies. We operate on the old logic that only members of the family are allowed to tell hard truths about the family’s flaws. And when black people speak about America, they’re informed that they do not actually have a seat at the grown-ups’ table and that they should be grateful to be around at all.

“Patriotism” is a cornerstone of football, America’s most popular and most lucrative sport. “I support our players when they want to see change in society,” Roger Goodell, the N.F.L. commissioner, told The Associated Press. “On the other hand, we believe very strongly in patriotism in the N.F.L.”

Of course we do. Football has long sought to conflate itself with the military, making it easy to confuse players with troops and political protest with treason. Last year, a report by Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake investigated the $6.8 million the Department of Defense had paid sports, mostly to pro football, for recruitment and promotional activities over a four-year period — including full-field displays of the American flag and surprise reunion events between service members and their families. The league announced that it would return $723,734, money spent not on recruitment but on what McCain and Flake called “paid patriotism.” Is it any wonder Kaepernick comes off more like a deserter than a concerned American?

“Patriot” has a niftily concise definition: “one who loves and loyally or zealously supports one’s own country.” Support can take the form of dissent just as readily as cheerleading — each is a way of suggesting what kind of nation America is to become, and patriots have lived and died on all sides of the argument. But during the 20th century, patriotism began to treat the question as one we’ve settled. The marketable, propagandistic imagery of World War II gave way to the paranoid suspicion of the Cold War era, and patriotism, more and more, morphed into a matter of optics — of theater. Love of country turned performative. We can know patriotism only when we see it — and so you’ve really got to show it.