“We Must Examine Our Own Prejudices”: Removing The Confederate Flag Is Easy; Fixing Racism Is Hard
When the Republican National Committee chose Tampa as the site for the party’s 2012 national convention, it seemed quite fitting—Florida being a red state and all, and one in which evangelical fervor mixed freely with the brand of Tea Party vindictiveness epitomized by Governor Rick Scott.
As I traveled to the city limits, destined for a motel reserved for any C-list, left-wing journalists covering the confab, the taxi I occupied exited the highway on a ramp dominated by perhaps the largest thing of its kind I had ever seen. Hoisted on a 139-foot pole, this Confederate battle flag measures 30 feet high and 60 feet long. That’s a lot of cloth, and the day I viewed it, it whipped violently against the winds stirred up by Hurricane Isaac, who mercifully defied predictions by remaining offshore.
I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sight of the immense flag; whoever had placed it there clearly meant to make a statement, and not one of peace, love, or understanding. When I recaptured my ability to speak, I stammered to the cab driver, who was black, “What on earth is that?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “They put it up a few years ago,” he said. He drove past it pretty much every day, he said.
It was 2008 when the flag first ascended the pole at the junction of I-75 and Interstate 4 on June 3, the birthday of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the short-lived Confederate States of America, a day observed in many Florida localities as a holiday. In what may or may not have been a coincidence, Barack Obama was closing in on the Democratic presidential nomination. (Hillary Clinton would suspend her campaign four days later.)
The land on which the flag stands was owned at the time by Marion Lambert, a proud member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and who since donated the parcel to the group. According to a June 21 report in the Tampa Bay Times, Lambert called the flag “a catalyst for a mental movement.”
“The reason we put that flag up is to start people thinking,” he told the Times.
He said this as white people across America began debating whether the white murderer Dylann Roof, who gunned down nine black people in a church rooted in the rebellion of enslaved people, is a simple racist or a mentally ill one. In Lambert’s “mental movement,” Roof is, at the very least, an army of one.
Roof’s actions, combined with photographs of him bearing the treasonous battle standard, have touched off a furious cry to rid the land of the symbol of one of America’s original sins (the other being the genocide of the land’s indigenous people). While it would be lovely to never gaze upon such a disgraceful emblem again, the rush to do so is fast becoming a diversion useful to those who seek to continue the nation’s long denial of its own bloody history of race-based oppression, which will do nothing to forestall the growth of racism in its lesser-seen forms.
Yes, it is a big deal when even Republican governors and luminaries—including the party’s last presidential nominee—call for the removal of the flag from state capitols and public buildings, a phenomenon unthinkable a decade ago. But party leaders also know it’s what needs to happen in order for the party to survive, since millennials are not terribly keen on displays of racial hatred.
But allowing the removal of the flag to stand as the sole answer to the Charleston massacre would let the North entirely off the hook for its own brand of racism, often every bit as brutal, if occasionally more subtle, as that displayed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans—or an almost entirely white Republican Party entertaining speech after speech at its Tampa national convention peppered with the Jacksonian language of “makers” and “takers,” and throwing the old welfare-queen card in the face of a black president.
But the white people of the North have plenty to account for, too, in the construction and maintenance of a racist society. I grew up in a New Jersey town that no black person dared to drive through. It was a nearly all-white town; we had one Chinese family, and two or three Latino families. No real estate agent who valued his or her job would show an African American buyer a house there. The cops in the Township of Clark were notorious for pulling over African American drivers seeking to enter the Garden State Parkway from the on-ramp that put our town on the map. And Clark was hardly an outlier among the burgs of the Northeast; it was just crassly obvious in its redlined bigotry.
You can take down all the Confederate flags in the country, and you won’t change a thing in Clark, or the thousands of towns just like it above the Mason-Dixon Line.
Nor should the progressive movement be let off the hook, despite its vociferous and righteous cry against the racist evil channeled by Dylann Roof the day he went on his murderous spree. In organizations not specifically focused on matters of race, it’s rare to see a black person in leadership, just as it’s rare to see women lead progressive organizations that are not specifically feminist. Until that changes, the underpinnings of a racist society remain intact. Until that changes, the false and evil narrative that claims those of African descent to be a lesser race lives on in the recesses of our minds, shaping the nation to its confines.
So, yes, remove the Confederate flag—that standard of dehumanization, treason, and murder—from our sight. But proof of our intention demands great change in the way in which we lead, the way in which we live, the way in which we think; we must be willing to truly open the riches of progressive society and culture to all. To do that, we must—each and every one of us—examine our own prejudice, and be determined to transcend it. Then the real work of a just society can begin.
By: Adele M. Stan, The American Prospect, June 24, 2015
“The Southern Strategy Is Dead”: Does The Republican Party Have An Alternative?
On Monday afternoon, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) announced that she now supports removing the Confederate flag from the grounds of the statehouse in Columbia. While the reaction of the Republican presidential candidates to the terrorist attack last week in Charleston and the subsequent debate about the flag has been cowardly at best, this is nevertheless a significant moment, with broad implications for the place of race in American politics. To put it simply, the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” is all but dead.
As political strategies go, it had a good run — nearly half a century. In 1968, Richard Nixon campaigned on behalf of the “silent majority” who wanted nothing of civil rights protests and uppity young people; he told them he’d deliver the “law and order” they craved, and there was little question who they were afraid of. It was called the Southern Strategy because while the South had been firmly Democratic since the Civil War, Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act initiated an exodus of Southern whites to the Republican Party, enabling them to build an electoral college majority with the South as its foundation. They would win five of the next six presidential elections with that strategy.
A key component was to make the GOP the default party of white people, by running against what they associated with black people — not just civil rights, but things like poverty programs and crime. It required ongoing reminders of who was on who’s side. So in 1980, Ronald Reagan announced his campaign for president in the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were murdered in 1964. He was not there to promote racial healing. Four years earlier, Reagan had told audiences how appalled he was at the idea of a “strapping young buck” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps, and he spent a good deal of the 1980 campaign railing against welfare queens. The race of the (largely fictional) offenders was lost on no one.
And as Stanley Greenberg, then a political scientist and now a leading Democratic pollster, found in his classic 1985 study of Macomb County, Michigan, the entire phenomenon of “Reagan Democrats” was built on racial resentment. “These white Democratic defectors express a profound distaste for blacks, a sentiment that pervades almost everything they think about government and politics,” he wrote. “Blacks constitute the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives; not being black is what constitutes being middle class; not living with blacks is what makes a neighborhood a decent place to live.”
So when Reagan’s vice president ran to succeed him, it was little surprise that he would employ an inflammatory racial attack against his opponent, repeating over and over again the story of escaped convict Willie Horton. If Michael Dukakis were elected, George Bush’s campaign convinced people, hordes of menacing black felons would rampage through the land, raping white women and emasculating their husbands. They didn’t say it in quite those words, but they didn’t have to; Horton’s mug shot (aired endlessly on the news) and the story of his crimes was more than enough. While Bush is now treated as a noble and kind elder statesman, we shouldn’t forget that he ran one of the most racist presidential campaigns of modern times. “By the time we’re finished,” Bush’s strategist Lee Atwater said, “they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.”
Today a Republican presidential candidate wouldn’t feature Willie Horton as prominently as Bush did, but it isn’t because they’ve seen the moral error of their ways. It’s because it doesn’t work anymore. While nearly nine in 10 voters in 1980 were white, their proportion has been dropping for decades, and it will probably be around seven in 10 in next year’s election. Mitt Romney won all the Deep South in 2012, and won white voters by more than 20 points — but still lost to Barack Obama by 126 electoral votes.
That doesn’t mean the GOP’s center of gravity doesn’t still lie beneath the Mason-Dixon line. Republicans control nearly all the state governments in the South, which provides them laboratories for their latest innovations in governing, and their hold on the House of Representatives is built on their strength in the South. But as a strategy to win the White House, counting on white people — and the white people who respond when their racial hot buttons are pushed — won’t ever succeed again.
The party’s candidates are still coming to grips with this reality. They’ve pandered to racists for so long that not upsetting them is still their default setting; when the issue of the Confederate flag came up, the first response almost all of presidential candidates had was just to say that the people of South Carolina will decide, which is procedurally accurate and substantively irrelevant. But if South Carolina’s governor can come out against the flag, it really is a signal that times have changed.
Smart people in the GOP know that if the party is going to win the White House again, they can’t do it with the Southern Strategy that served them so well for so long. The question now is whether they can come up with an alternative.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributing Writer, The Week, June 23, 2015
“Whatever Did It, It’s Done”: I Wouldn’t Go To Sleep On The South Carolina Legislature Until The Change Is Consummated
So today SC Gov. Nikki Haley and both Republican U.S. Senators finally changed positions and called for the removal of the Confederate Battle Flag that flies on the Statehouse grounds at a Confederate memorial. This is not some sort of profile in courage. Similar steps have been taken in other southern states (Mississippi joins South Carolina as the remaining states subject to a NCAA post-season boycott the NAACP requested). The “compromise” in 2000 that moved the Battle Flag from the top of the State Capital to the Statehouse grounds, making it the first thing many visitors saw when in the vicinity, wasn’t remotely enough.
It’s nicely ironic that Dylann Roof’s hopes of inciting a race war with his terrorist attack on Emanuel AME Church instead led to this symbolic but significant act. I suspect the prime mover in this development aside from simple shame was the agony of the national GOP, whose presidential candidates were being forced to deal with an issue that divided “the base” in an early primary state from the rest of the country.
My own basic feeling as a long-time opponent of Confederate insignia as a profanation of my native Southland (I was actually born not far from the flag in question in Columbia) is reminiscent of the reaction of the cartoonist Thomas Nast to Grover Cleveland’s breakthrough presidential victory in 1884 (the first Democratic win since 1856). Nast cited a lot of explanations of “what did it,” and then concluded: “Whatever did it, it’s done.” Or so it seems, at least; I wouldn’t go to sleep on the South Carolina legislature until the change is consummated.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 22, 2015
“Let That Hateful Flag Fly”: From George W. Bush To Lindsey Graham, A History Of Republican Support For The Confederate Flag
South Carolina, a state that’s nearly 30% African-American, celebrates”Confederate Memorial Day” and proudly displays the flag of the Southern Confederacy at its statehouse in Columbia — a longstanding practice that’s under increasing fire following this week’s Charleston massacre, in which a white supremacist gunman is suspected of murdering nine black churchgoers.
In 2000, state lawmakers reached a “comprise” on the controversial symbol, voting to move the flag from the top of the dome to smack-dab in front of the statehouse on the front lawn. In the first state to secede from the Union in 1861, this was what passed for progress.
By now we are all familiar with the defensive refrain from supporters of the Confederate Flag: it’s heritage, not hate.
But that’s a load of crock. It’s been noted that after the Civil War, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens wrote a revisionist account entitled A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, which helped push the myth that the war was really about states’ rights.
According to a 2011 Pew Research poll, just nine percent of Americans had a positive reaction to the Confederate flag. But while the ranks of stars-and-bars fans may be thin nationally, much of the modern Republican Party, defined as it is by white Southern support, cannot bring itself to condemn the symbol of racial apartheid.
Republican South Carolina Senator and presidential candidate Lindsey Graham said following the massacre that although the flag “been used in a racist way” in the past, it remained ”part of who we are,” shrugging off the symbolism in favor of “what’s in people’s heart.” Defending his state’s supposed “comprise,” Graham said “It works here, that’s what the Statehouse agreed to do.”
And remember: Graham is supposed to be one of the “sane” Republicans.
Republican politicians have stumbled over themselves to pander to GOP South Carolina primary voters at the expense of the truth, their fellow Americans and potential voters (granted, the 2012 primary garnered a pathetic 1% turnout from African-American voters) for entirely too long.
During a 2000 Republican primary debate in South Carolina, moderator Brian Williams asked, “does the flag offend you personally,” to which George W. Bush defensively retorted, ”What you are trying to get me to do is express the will of the people of South Carolina. Brian, I believe the people of South Carolina can figure what to do with this flag issue. It’s the people of South Carolina’s decision. I don’t believe it’s the role of someone from outside South Carolina and someone running for president to come into South Carolina.
Lost on Bush was the irony of citing states’ rights — long the doctrine of choice for segregationists and Confederate nostalgists — to defend South Carolina’s right to fly the stars and bars. His response was met with raucous support from the GOP crowd.
For his part, brother Jeb ordered the Confederate battle flag be taken down from Florida’s capitol building back in 2001, arguing that “the symbols of Florida’s past should not be displayed in a manner that may divide Floridians today.”
In 2008, both John McCain and Mitt Romney ran into trouble when they refused to cave to Confederate Flag fetishizers who then took out ads in the early primary state attacking them for speaking out against the hateful symbol.
McCain, learning his lesson from the infamously racist 2000 primary during which he delivered a tortured but typical defense, said “some view it as a symbol of slavery; others view it as a symbol of heritage. Personally, I see the battle flag as a symbol of heritage,” went on to apologize for his inability to forcefully denounce the flag, calling it one of the “worst decisions” he’d ever made.
McCain revealed the truth in the GOP’s struggle to admonish the flying of the Confederate Flag, recounting his own flip-flop, “[I]t could come down to lying or losing. I chose lying.”
So much for the Straight Talk Express.
In 2012, former House Speaker and advocate of child labor Newt Gingrich made clear his opposition to national demands that the flag be taken off public property, “I have a very strong opinion,” Gingrich said. “It’s up to the people of South Carolina.”
Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee defiantly declared that “outsiders” were not allowed to debate the Confederate Flag.
But there seems to be some hope that the 2016 primary may change.
Rick Perry, who supported Texas’ rejection of Confederate-flag license plates that was upheld by the Supreme Court this week, called the issue a state’s matter today but added that “I agree that we need to be looking at these issues as ways to bring the country together….And if these are issues that are pushing us apart, then maybe there’s a good conversation that needs to be had about [it].”
Gov. Nikki Haley, the state’s Republican governor who had previously defended not demanding the flags removal because no business owners had complained to her, said today, ”I think the state will start talking about that again, and we’ll see where it goes.”
We shall see how 2016ers handle the GOP South Carolinan primary voters’ demands to proclaim state’s rights and let the Confederate Flag fly free.
By: Sophia Tesfaye, Salon, June 19, 2015
“No Longer May It Wave!”: If It Were Up To Me, This Emblem Of Treason And Racism Would Be Pulled Down, Permanently
So there’s a reason for the grotesque fact that even as the US and South Carolina flags were lowered to half-mast in recognition of the murderous terrorist attack on Emanuel AME Church, the Confederate Battle Flag in front of the Statehouse continued to fly at its full height (per Schuyler Kropf of the Charleston Post and Courier):
Officials said the reason why the flag has not been touched is that its status is outlined, by law, as being under the protected purview of the full S.C. Legislature, which controls if and when it comes down.
State law reads, in part, the state “shall ensure that the flags authorized above shall be placed at all times as directed in this section and shall replace the flags at appropriate intervals as may be necessary due to wear.”
The protection was added by supporters of the flag to keep it on display as an officially recognized memorial to South Carolinians who fought in the Civil War.
So it would take a full act of the legislature to bring the Confederate flag down.
I tell you what: If I were in charge of the Statehouse grounds, I’d be real tempted to bring down that flag to half-mast and defy anyone to do anything about it. But then if it were really up to me this emblem of treason and racism would be pulled all the way down, permanently, and consigned to a museum. We’ve just witnessed another deadly data point for burying the Lost Cause beneath a mountain of opprobrium so high and so heavy that it will be no more acceptable an emblem for gun-toting “loners” and “drifters” than a swastika.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is demanding that step as a small token of historical honesty in the service of long-delayed justice for African-Americans. I’m demanding it even more basically as a gesture of southern self-respect. No, we cannot ensure that people like Dylann Roof won’t find inspiration in the Confederacy for the evil in his heart. But we can deny him respectable company. That’s particularly important in South Carolina, where the disastrous moral and material failure of the Confederacy began.
UPDATE: WaPo’s Justin Moyer adds two details to the flag story: (1) the law protecting the Confederate Battle Flag stipulates that it can only be repealed by a two-thirds vote (!); and (2) the flag on the Statehouse grounds is not raised and lowered daily on pulleys, but is permanently affixed to the flag pole.
This doesn’t move me much. Just as the flag was attached to the pole at some point, it can be unattached, and if the whole rig doesn’t allow for half-mast displays, the people of South Carolina can do without a Confederate Battle Flag for a few days or weeks.
As for the law: again, who’s going to enforce it if Nikki Haley orders the flag down? There’s also something inherently screwy about legal protections for a symbol of rebellion and lawlessness.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 20, 2015
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