A Chicago-area school board member equated the American flag with “toilet paper”—and now, she’s doubling down on her comments.
In a post on her personal Facebook page, School District U46 board member Traci O’Neal Ellis praised NFL players for kneeling during the National Anthem, claiming that the American flag “means nothing more than toilet paper to [her.]”
“And I promise you, I would take #TakeAKnee at school board meetings if my doing so would not be disruptive to kids and a distraction to the work we need to do for them,” she added.
Ellis’s rant went viral after another school board member, Jeanette Ward, screenshotted the post—calling Ellis’s comments “despicable and disgusting.”
“I was taken aback that she would say that, even though it is consistent with things she’s said in the past,” Ward told the Chicago Tribune. “To say it’s nothing more than toilet paper, I’m appalled.”
Despite the backlash—and Ellis’s claims that, since her post went viral, she’s received “hateful, mean-spirited, scary” messages—Ellis has no plans to apologize.
“The flag and the anthem are symbols in this country of freedom and ‘justice and liberty’ for all. Yet that is a blatant lie for black folks,” Ellis wrote, in a response on her official school board Facebook page, rather than her page. “You may not agree that our protest is righteous. That is YOUR RIGHT. But FREE SPEECH is not only reserved for conservative white people.”
“I will not allow you to attempt to strip my free speech rights and the right to speak authentically to my lived experiences in this country,” she added. “And don’t bother trying to tell me to leave if I don’t like it. MY PEOPLE BUILT this country and died and suffered doing so. I’m not going anywhere.”
“The freedoms you enjoy and the flag you profess to love so much do not extend to me as a black woman,” she continued. “They are not my birthright. Yet I demand them anyway, and that demand includes the right to not feel any patriotism towards a piece of cloth and a pledge of allegiance to a country that does not love me back. Forced allegiance is not patriotism. It is fascism. And I will not bow to that.”
AAN Staff
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