“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, your hands can’t hit what your eyes can’t see.” The one and only Muhammad Ali, AKA the G.O.A.T.

On Sunday June 4, 1967, the Cleveland Summit or the Muhammad Ali Summit, as it became to be known, was held followed by a press conference in support of the champ’s refusal to enter the Viet Nam draft. The group of 11 prominent athletes including Jim Brown, Bill Russell, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes gathered in unity to support their brothers’ position as a conscientious objector to the war.  

America has hosted many heroes in the midst of its chaos, hostility, and blatant hypocrisy. Yet, such is the nature of a fallen world and man’s inhumanity to man. It is in that capacity that heroes rise to the surface and stand out as a light in the darkest of night.

Muhammad Ali is one of those figures. A champion in and out of the ring, Ali blazed a trail which few have traveled in their life’s journey. While the sports world was cheated out of his best years in the boxing arena, he never limited himself to just one stage but became even bigger than the limitations of sports elitism.

America is a combination of the good, the bad, and the ugly, but we are largely conditioned into associating and defining patriotism by focusing all of our attention on the good while ignoring and even denying, justifying, and rationalizing the bad and the ugly. We have popularized and normalized the accompanying slogan, “America, love it or leave it.” And what is meant is, don’t criticize “the best country on the planet.” But how do we know that it’s “the best” if we have never visited them all? Aren’t we left to merely assume and speculate?

However, what we can do is seek to make it the best, and by doing so hold it accountable to its promises as stated in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, which reads: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The harsh reality is that America was not built on the notion of equality for ALL men and women. There has been an institutionalized understanding of a racial hierarchy where those deemed “white” were given privileges reserved only for them, all others were ranked beneath them with Blacks at the bottom of the proverbial totem pole. 

We’ve become familiar with the old saying, “If you’re white you’re alright, if you’re yellow you’re mellow, if you’re brown stick around, and if you’re Black stay back.” All in stark contrast to the self-evident truths found in our Declaration of Independence.

As Frederick Douglass so brilliantly inquires in his famous speech, “What to the slave is your 4^th of July?” It was a speech challenging America’s shameless hypocrisy and expectation that it should be accepted by all of its citizens without question.

No, it can’t become its best if it refuses constructive criticism. It cannot become its best if it refuses to look inside of itself and seek to be all that IT can be by recognizing ALL of the contributions of its citizens and earnestly accept their accomplishments and support them in becoming all that THEY can be. It cannot be at its best if it continues to maintain a foundation of racial superiority of the homogenous population and forces all others to assimilate and deny their God given individualities and uniqueness.         

Ali was one who without flinching had the courage to stand his ground and call out America for such contradictions. “You my opposer when I want freedom. You my opposer when I want justice. You my opposer when I want equality. Want me to go somewhere and fight for you? You won’t even stand up for me right here in America, for my rights and my religious beliefs. You won’t even stand up for my rights here at home.” 

What loving parent allows their child to get away with all manner of bad behavior without correction. Ignoring bad behavior does not make for a fully evolved healthy human being and neither does it make for a fully evolved healthy nation. True patriotism involves one’s ability to see not only the good but also those areas where we are falling short and have room for growth and improvement and can be acknowledged and held accountable to higher standards.

African Americans have played an invaluable role in what America has become. America owes its wealth, power, and standing in the global marketplace to those it enslaved without any hint of recompense and reparations. It has committed the ultimate “dine and dash” by running out on its due bill to Black America and refuses to return and settle up.   

While Black Americans continue their contributions from intellectual resources to political strategies and engineering, to entertainment and sports, to the sciences and medical advancements, to a plethora of inventions and beyond. We have yet to truly achieve that promise of collective equality, and the stats and data prove it. Instead, there is the constant pushback against sharing our contributions in our educational curriculum, and gains of equal qualified standing via DEI and Affirmative Action in various arenas. Our books are being banned and ignorance of our historical presence continues to be aggressively promoted.

So, our fight against injustice and inequality must continue relentlessly, and like the greatest of all time, Muhammad Ali, we must learn to exercise courage, and strategically float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, because their hands can’t hit what their eyes can’t see.