That White kid who massacred nine Black people in their historic African Methodist Episcopal Church last week is clearly insane (even if not legally so).
What I don’t get is why it took this for putatively sane South Carolinians to recognize the racist pride (for some Whites) and insult (to all Blacks) that flying the Confederate flag on the grounds of their state capitol represents.
For only this explains South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and the state’s bipartisan and multiracial congressional delegation making quite a show yesterday of calling on the state legislature to remove it.
But how insane is that?! Granted, there’s no telling what a guilty conscience over this massacre might compel even preternaturally pandering politicians to do….
But anyone who knows anything about U.S. history knows that the Confederate flag has always represented the misguided and racist intent of those who wanted to form their own confederacy, primarily to preserve their slave-holding way of life.
This is why flying the Confederate flag in any public place in America should be every bit as anathema and anachronistic as flying the Nazi swastika in any public place in Germany.
Still, it would be one thing if South Carolinians raised it in the 1860s to honor those who died for their ill-fated cause. But the historical record shows that, like others in the Deep South, they used the centennial anniversary of the civil war as a pretext to raise it in 1960s as a symbol of their antebellum-rooted opposition to the Civil Rights Movement (aka “a states’-rights rebuff to desegregation”).
The Confederate flag symbolizes more than the civil war and the slavery era…
The flag has been adopted knowingly and consciously by government officials seeking to assert their commitment to Black subordination.
(“This Is Why South Carolina Raised the Confederate Flag in the First Place, TIME, June 22, 2015)
No doubt this is why, within hours of Haley’s rallying cry, Mississippi state legislators announced plans to remove the Confederate battle saltire from their state flag; Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe banned it from all state-issued license plates; and Walmart, Amazon, and other major retailers discontinued all sales of confederate paraphernalia. So much for cherished history and Southern pride, eh?
But nothing betrays the rank hypocrisy afoot quite like no less a person than Governor Haley herself defending the flying of this flag just months ago as follows:
I spend a lot of my days on phones with CEOs and recruiting jobs to this state and I can honestly say I have not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag…
But we really kind of fixed all [perceptions of racism in South Carolina] when you elected [me] the first Indian-American female governor. When we appointed the first African-American U.S. senator, that sent a huge message.
(C-SPAN, October 14, 2014)
In other words, she was asserting that, as long as (White) businessmen don’t have a problem with her state’s Confederate flag, why should she care about the offense it causes Black people. What’s more, just imagine the outrage/ridicule if Obama were to assert that:
We really fixed all perceptions of racism in America when you elected [me] the first Black president of the United States. When we confirmed the first Black attorney general, that said to the world, racism in America is dead.
Meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln must be rolling over in his grave … wondering why any display of the Confederate flag on the grounds of any state capitol was not abolished 150 years ago, along with slavery and vanquished ideas about secession.
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Tuesday, at 4:39 pm