Posts
In the aftermath of the massacre of nine people inside the historic Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by hard-core white racist Dylann Storm Roof, South Carolina's reactionary Republican Governor Nikki Haley has called for the Confederate battle flag to be removed from the state Capitol's grounds (while simultaneously denying it symbolizes racism and slavery- how's that for having it both ways?)
.
Yet another small advance of "racial progress" in the U.S. that has had to be paid for in "black" blood.
On the other hand, the return for the approximately 4,000 lynching victims in the U.S. between around 1890 and 1940 was about zero.
"Blacks" have been paying in blood for centuries in the U.S. for struggling against oppression, or just to live. To sit on any seat on a bus, to register to vote, to eat in a restaurant- people were murdered just to do those things. (And almost all the murderers went completely unpunished, save for a couple imprisoned as old men.)
The reason I put "blacks" in quotes because I really feel unnatural referring to people as a color, and to group and separate them on that basis, as if they were jellybeans. Blacks, whites, browns, yellows, and reds. These colors are supposed to describe "races." But biologically, which is to say scientifically, which means objectively, homo sapiens is just one race, the (supposedly) human race.
Even saying "a white killed nine blacks" is to reinforce the artificial separation and dehumanization.
That is not at all to deny the virulent racism of the murderer. His ideology is clear and manifest, and cannot be ignored. It was his motive for his political crime, an act of terrorism with the political goal of sparking a race war, as Roof himself stated beforehand.
But of course, FBI secret police boss James Comey immediately denied the crime constituted "terrorism." How did he know, and so soon? Because it wasn't "political," he absurdly said.
On the other hand, the FBI considered the Occupy Movement "terrorist," and Keystone XL pipeline opponents "terrorists," and so on, notwithstanding the fact that these are non-violent and officially ostensibly legal people and activities. Once again "terrorism" in the mouths of the rulers is shown to be completely political and ideological in its usage with no meaning other than to demonize those they choose to demonize.
As for relocating the proud banner of white supremacy and the heritage of slavery, it is not clearly a done deal that the Confederate rag, the notorious, long-standing emblem of white supremacy and black enslavement, will be removed from the capitol grounds in Columbia, SC, and flown a bit farther away. When the reactionary scum lawmakers enacted that "compromise" in 2000 which removed the rag from the Capitol itself and moved it to another spot on state grounds, they made it a felony to lower the rag, and required that if any future legislature wanted to take it down, a two-thirds vote by the state legislature would be needed. So we shall see. (Although there is an argument that one legislature cannot bind future legislatures in this manner.)
Moves announced by a couple of politicians to remove the Confederate emblem, the so-called Stars and Bars, from the Mississippi state flag, and from the flag of Georgia, which added it to its state flag in 1956, are even more uphill.
On the other hand, sectors of Big Business have been induced to act. Walmart, the world's largest retailer, has announced it will stop peddling Confederate rag merchandise. (No word on whether they're pulling Swastika merchandise. Just kidding; presumably they don't sell those. Nor hammer and sickle flags and belt buckles and bumper stickers and knick-knacks, or Rising Sun emblems to commemorate Japanese imperialist "heritage.") Other large retailers are following suit.
There's two ways to look at this; glass half-empty, or glass half-full. One could say it's a small, symbolic step. But symbols matter. And the fact that at least some Republican politicians, the party of white racists (but not only white racists, hence the delicacy of the matter for Republican politicians) are stepping forward to call for a downgrade in the status of the Confederate emblem, does point to an evolution in general racial attitudes.
The desire to avoid alienating white racists is obvious in the mealy-mouthed evasions of the likes of Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, while the evangelical zealot Michael Huckabee has been positively loathsome, as usual.
At the same time, much guff that is standard apologia for the Confederacy has been trotted out over the past few days. That the Confederate flag doesn't stand for slavery (but in deference to the hurt feelings of blacks, we'll see about making it less prominent, some politicians like Haley are in effect saying). And that undying canard that the American Civil War wasn't about slavery, but about "states' rights."
Nonsense. Just read the secession statement of South Carolina, for example. It's an angry screed against northern states are aren't sufficiently vigorous (in the slaveholders' view) in capturing and returning escaped slaves to their so-called rightful owners. (Very few slaves managed to escape in actuality, as a percentage of the millions of enslaved humans.) Far from states' rights being the motive for secession, it is hostility to the rights of northern states to decline to enforce slavery on their territory that prompted the eleven Confederate states to call it quits from the U.S. and start a war by besieging Fort Sumter with cannon fire. (As a mark of U.S. depravity, legally the slaveholders had the better argument. They could cite both the U.S. Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Act as trumping the rights of individual states to be lakadaisical about seizing and returning "fugitive" slaves. But some states were quite enthusiastic about enforcing slavery- such as New York. Even free blacks were seized, deemed "escaped slaves," and handed into the clutches of the redneck barbarians.) Far from being forced out of the Union, the Federal government and administration of Abraham Lincoln bent over backwards to coax the southern states to first remain part of the U.S., and then to rejoin it. The abolition of slavery was never the goal of the north, as Lincoln himself stated. It was only under the exigencies of war that Lincoln declared slaves to be free in the rebel states, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation two years into the war, in January 1863.
Here's another thing. Americans are indoctrinated to think of the rebel army of the Confederate States of America as "gallant" and "noble." No more gallant and noble than the Waffen-SS. But about as fanatical and certainly as racist.
[I have two other essays in the works on this matter. One is on the questionable morality of "forgiving" an unrepentant evil-doer, as some relatives of the shooting victims have publicly done. Another will deal with the parallels between the killer Roof and the Norwegian racist mass murderer Anders Breivik. And when will we see a media investigation of Roof's family? I have a question about his middle name, "Storm." Is that a family name? If not, it's an unusual name to give someone. The word has significance in fascist and white supremacist circles. Stormfront is a prominent American white supremacist propaganda outfit. And "storm" is a moniker and concept popular with fascists. Hitler's army of street thugs, the Brownshirts, were called StormTroopers. The word "storm" crops up time and again in Nazism and its military. Storm conjures up fury and power. It represents sudden, violent, all-encompassing change in the environment. It is easy to grasp the emotional resonance the term has with violent, fanatical racists and fascists with a burning desire to remake the world in their own anti-human design.]
No comments:
Post a Comment