“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
“Safe, Sheltered And Protected”: In America, There Is No Sanctuary
The main hall of a church is called a sanctuary.
It is where you go to worship, to seek fellowship and solace, and commune with your maker. The dictionary definition of the word adds an additional layer of resonance. A sanctuary is where you are sheltered and protected. A sanctuary is where you are safe.
Wednesday night, Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, was a church without a sanctuary. Wednesday night, Emanuel AME was a killing ground.
Authorities say a 21-year-old white man named Dylann Storm Roof entered the African-American church Wednesday during Bible study, sat with the black congregants for an hour, and then started shooting. Nine people died in the attack, including the church’s pastor, Clementa C. Pinckney, who was also a state senator.
“I have to do it,” Roof is quoted as saying. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
If there is reason to believe Rev. Pinckney or any of his congregants guilty of raping anyone or plotting to overthrow the government, it has not yet come to light.
But of course, when Roof said “you,” he did not mean “you,” singular. Rather he meant, “you,” plural. “You” people. “You” all. Individuality is, after all, the first casualty of racism. And indeed, an image circulated after the shooting shows Roof scowling at a camera while wearing a jacket with patches depicting the flags of two famously racist regimes: Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe) and apartheid-era South Africa. Roof was apprehended the following day not far from Charlotte, North Carolina.
It was to seek sanctuary from people like him and beliefs like his that the church Roof shot up was founded in the first place. Emanuel AME, affectionately called “Mother AME,” was one of the earliest churches of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, which was started in the late 18th century by black worshipers fed up with the discrimination they faced in the white church. In 1821, one of its members, Denmark Vesey, organized a slave revolt that failed when an informant leaked word of the plot. Nevertheless, the people traders of the South were galvanized by the audacity of the plan. The church was burned as a result.
It was rebuilt. In 1834, black churches were outlawed in South Carolina. Emanuel went underground until the law was changed. An earthquake destroyed the building in 1886. The church was rebuilt yet again.
Now, there is this.
Roof’s alleged attack is being called many things. It is being called appalling and tragic, and it is. It is being called a hate crime and it is. It is being called an act of white extremist terrorism and it is that, too. But one thing, let no one dare to call it, and that is, “surprising.” This attack can be regarded as surprising only by the very innocent, the very ignorant, and those who have not been paying attention.
In the first place, a nation whose gun love amounts to nothing less than fetishism has no right — ever — to describe a mass shooting as a surprise. Indeed, at this point, one is more surprised when the country passes a day without one.
But if the means of the attack is unsurprising, the motive is, too.
There is a myth in this country, a fable some people cherish because it makes them feel good and demands no moral or intellectual heavy lifting. That myth holds that we are done with race and have been for a very long time; that we overcame, learned our lesson, reached the Promised Land, and built luxury condos there.
Bill O’Reilly believes that myth. Sean Hannity believes it. Rush Limbaugh swears by it. Indeed, for most of the people who are pleased to call themselves “conservative,” that myth is nothing less than an article of faith.
Let them go to Charleston. Let them visit a church with no sanctuary
For that matter, let them go to Baltimore, let them go to Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, St. Louis, Miami. Let them go to any of a hundred cities and talk to black people who are sick of hearing how America overcame, learned its lesson, reached the Promised Land, yet somehow, sister can’t get a loan, dad can’t find a job, brother has to factor stop-and-frisk encounters into his travel time to and from school and Walter Scott gets shot in the back while running away. All for rapes they never committed and government takeovers they never planned.
If what happened in Charleston was extraordinary, and it was, this is the ordinary, the everyday of existing while black that grinds your faith down to a nub and works your very last nerve. Especially when the background music is provided by a bunch of people who don’t know, don’t know that they don’t know, and don’t care that they don’t know, singing operatic praise to a faded myth.
Solange Knowles, sister of Beyoncé, put it as follows Thursday in a tweet: “Was already weary. Was already heavy hearted. Was already tired. Where can we be safe? Where can we be free? Where can we be black?”
Where, in other words, can we find just a moment to breathe free of this constant onus? Where can we find sanctuary?
What happened Wednesday night at a storied church in Charleston is a painful reminder that in America, no such place exists.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, June 21, 2015
“After Charleston Massacre, Uneasiness For Black Churchgoers”: This Sunday, I’ll Be Keeping An Eye On The Front Door
The Black Church is one of the most welcoming places on Earth. The Black Church will take you in when others turn their backs, doors are locked in your face, and no one else seems to want you around.
So when a white person enters a Black house of worship and quietly takes a seat, that person is immediately accepted as someone seeking God or, at least, as a person curious about what’s going on inside that particular church.
Either way, African-American worshipers are expected to make room, and provide a seat in the pews, or at the table, or wherever the gathering is taking place.
That’s the way it is and it has always been.
What’s more, and it’s not said aloud, we are glad when a white person decides to join us in fellowship to worship the same God since, on so many other occasions they find reasons to keep us at a distance.
But as a result of the slaughter at Mother Emanuel A.M.E Church in Charleston, at this coming Sunday’s worship services, things may be a little different.
Oh, the choir will give voice in song, and the preacher will teach and preach from the Gospel. The ushers will pass the plates, and the doors of the church will be opened to all who have not entered and joined as members before.
But this weekend, something else will enter the minds of even the most loving, forgiving, all-embracing congregants.
That white face that we have never seen before, that man who nods but doesn’t seem to warm up to the people around him? This question will enter the mind: Could that individual be a Charleston copy cat? Could he be a visitor with the same white-hot, anti-black fury burning within him as that within Dylann Roof, who, with his gun, ended the God-given life of nine souls?
I am a member of a predominately African American church-St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Foggy Bottom here in Washington. It’s one of the oldest black churches in our nation’s capital.
This weekend, I will join my rector and fellow congregants in prayer for the nation, for the people of Charleston, and my family and fellow worshipers.
But this Sunday, as God is my witness, I’ll be keeping an eye on the front door.
By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 19, 2015
“Usually Seen As Isolated Psychopaths”: The Most Common Type Of American Terrorist Is A White Man With A Weapon And A Grudge
Yesterday, an outspoken white atheist murdered three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We don’t yet know for sure whether this was a hate crime or whether the killer, Craig Stephen Hicks, had some other motivation; police have said the crime may have grown out of a dispute over parking. We do know that had Hicks been a Muslim and his victims atheists, few would be waiting for all the facts to come in before declaring him a terrorist. We know that there would be the usual calls for other Muslims to condemn the killings, coupled with the usual failure to take note of the many Muslims who did. And we know that demands for Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins to distance themselves from Hicks are largely facetious, because no one really blames them. Violence perpetrated by Muslims is almost always seen as part of a global conspiracy, whereas white men like Hicks are usually seen as isolated psychopaths.
There is, of course, some truth there. An organized jihadist movement exists; an organized cadre of terroristic atheists does not. Yet in the United States, Islamophobia has been a consistent motivator of violence. Hicks’s killing of Yusor Mohammad, her husband, Deah Shaddy Barakat, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, should not be treated like a man-bites-dog story, a reversal of the usual pattern of terrorism. After all, Muslims in the United States are more often the victims of ideological violence than the perpetrators of it.
According to the latest FBI statistics, there were more than 160 anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2013. Mosques and Islamic centers have been firebombed and vandalized; seven mosques were attacked during Ramadan alone in 2012. Several Muslims, or people thought to be Muslim, have been murdered or viciously attacked. In 2010, a white college student and self-described patriot tried to slash the throat of Bangladeshi cab driver Ahmed Sharif. The white supremacist who slaughtered six people in a Sikh temple in 2012 may have thought he was targeting Muslims. So, apparently, did Erika Menendez, the homeless New Yorker who pushed a man named Sunando Sen in front of a subway train that same year.
In most cases, the perpetrators have been disaffected, disaffiliated losers rather than part of any movement, but they’ve picked up broader currents of hatred and conspiracy theorizing. (The same can be said of some lone-wolf Muslim terrorists like Man Haron Monis, the fraudster and criminal who took hostages in Sydney last year, or the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston marathon in 2013.) We don’t yet know if Hicks was driven by lonely fanaticism, but if he was, he’s not as much of an anomaly as he might at first appear. Explicitly atheist violence is unusual, but Hicks still fits the profile of the most common type of American terrorist: a white man with a weapon and a grudge.
By: Michelle Goldberg, The Nation, February 11, 2015
Muslims, Marriage And Bigotry”: Our Capacity To “Otherize” People Of A Different Faith, Race, Nationality Or Sexuality
In North Carolina, three young Muslims who were active in charity work were murdered, allegedly by a man who identified as atheist and expressed hostility to Islam and other faiths. Police are exploring whether it was a hate crime, and it spurred a #MuslimLivesMatter campaign on Twitter.
And, in Alabama, we see judges refusing to approve marriages of any kind because then they would also have to approve same-sex marriages. In one poll conducted last year, some 59 percent of people in Alabama opposed gay marriage. Somehow a loving God is cited to bar loving couples from committing to each other.
These are very different news stories. But I wonder if a common lesson from both may be the importance of resisting bigotry, of combating the intolerance that can infect people of any faith — or of no faith.
I don’t think Muslims should feel obliged to apologize for the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks. Nor do I think atheists need apologize for the killing of the three Muslims.
But it does seem useful for everyone to reflect on our capacity to “otherize” people of a different faith, race, nationality or sexuality — and to turn that other-ness into a threat. That’s what the Islamic State does to us. And sometimes that’s what we do, too.
O.K. I’m sure some of you are protesting: That’s a false equivalency. True, there is a huge difference between burning someone alive and not granting a couple a marriage license. But, then again, it’s not much of a slogan to say, “We’re better than ISIS!”
There has been a pugnacious defensiveness among conservative Christians to any parallels between Christian overreach and Islamic overreach, as seen in the outraged reaction to President Obama’s acknowledgment at the National Prayer Breakfast this month that the West has plenty to regret as well. But Obama was exactly right: How can we ask Islamic leaders to confront extremism in their faith if we don’t acknowledge Christian extremism, from the Crusades to Srebrenica?
More broadly, one message of the New Testament is the value of focusing on one’s own mistakes rather than those of others. “You hypocrite,” Jesus says in Matthew 7:5. “First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
We could do with a little more of that spirit these days, at a time when everybody wants to practice ophthalmology on everyone else.
When I posted on my Facebook page about the North Carolina murders, one follower, Frank, wrote dismissively: “Muslims are slaughtering people around the globe (including their own) but let’s highlight this story — seems legit.”
I’ve previously urged Muslims to reflect on intolerance in their camp, and this is an occasion when Christians, atheists and others can do the same. Did the furor in North Carolina that led to the cancellation of the Muslim call to prayer from Duke University’s chapel tower inflame sentiments?
The Alabama legal drama, with Chief Justice Roy S. Moore of the State Supreme Court defying federal authorities, is, of course, different. But it also is redolent of faith as I-am-holier-than-thou chest-thumping, a reminder of the need for humility.
Do Judge Moore and other conservative Christians think that when God made gays and lesbians fall achingly in love with each other, He screwed up?
It seems odd to me that so many conservative Christians are obsessed with homosexuality, which Jesus never mentions, yet seem unworried about issues Jesus did emphasize like poverty and suffering. Jesus explicitly advised a wealthy man, “Go, sell your possessions and give to the poor” (Matthew 19:21), so maybe that’s the Scripture that Judge Moore should follow to demonstrate his piety.
Then there’s Jesus’s praise for those who make themselves eunuchs (Matthew 19:12); but I’d settle for a little “love thy neighbor as thyself.”
I’ve written often about committed and self-effacing Christians doing outstanding work combating injustice around the world, and it’s frustrating that they don’t get attention. The problem is that their heroism is often overshadowed by sanctimonious blowhards.
Among Americans aged 18 to 24, a 2012 survey found that half or more describe present-day Christianity as “hypocritical,” “judgmental” and “anti-gay.” And more regarded it as immoral to view pornography than to have sex with a person of the same gender. Alabama is, once again, on the wrong side of history.
Pope Francis has been a breath of fresh air to Catholics and non-Catholics alike because he seems less moralizing and more moral, less about pointing a finger and more about offering a helping hand. After the tragedy in North Carolina and the legal chaos in Alabama, maybe that’s a good instinct for all of us.
By: Nicholas Kristof, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, February 13, 2015
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