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Taking down the Confederate flag is not enough to erase racism


umbertino
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Removing the southern symbol from the public square will not tackle systemic racism such as voter suppression and police brutality

 

 

Michael Twitty

 

Sunday 28 June 2015 00.05 BST

 

 

 

About a week ago, a 150-year-old divide was healed. It was not the legacy of the American civil war, which can count among the victims of its divisions nine dead in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina. After a century and a half, I met a distant cousin with whom I share a direct ancestor. His great-grandfather was my great-great-great grandfather. We are both African American, our ancestor was not. He was Richard Henry Bellamy of Alabama, a captain in the army of the Confederate States of America.

 

I’ve been to the battlefield in Vicksburg where he nearly lost his life defending the homeland he felt was more important than the future of his enslaved children. It’s a place steeped in monuments to the Confederate dead. I don’t know how I am supposed to feel when I go to these places. I know this is a part of me. It’s not a part I can choose to abandon at will; the dichotomy of heritage and hate are foreign to me – they are as intertwined as my genetic structure and indelibly woven into my story.

 

Being black and of southern heritage, this is not uncommon. African American family trees are full of Confederate branches. Not only were some of our ancestors whites who served the Confederate cause but many of our black ancestors were forced to be body servants who accompanied their slaveholders on the warpath. Others were pressed into service building trenches and infrastructure for the Confederate cause. Some of means and power – a precious few – even lobbied to fight for the South.

 

Here we are in 2015, after a remarkable, senseless tragedy done in the name of America’s original sin – and we are debating a symbol of the Confederate cause – the “Battle Flag” or “Southern Cross”. Unlike Byron Thomas, an African American college student who has come to YouTube fame for embracing and celebrating the battle flag, I cannot embrace the public flying of the flag as a banner of civic pride, and yet at the same time I am against its complete obliteration in American cultural life. Despite my connections by heritage, this is not “my flag”, and I would dare say that it doesn’t belong to any other thinking, feeling African American. It is, however, without question the symbolic equivalent of a scar, and, like scars, it is difficult if not impossible to erase it from our collective skin – it is a reminder of where we cannot return.

 

I am floored by the overwhelming call to erase the flag, from poles, from licence plates, seals and stained glass windows. It’s heartening to see so many people motivated to condemn racial hatred and terrorism. However, I want them to always know, see and have that “scar”, to remind them that the challenge we face going forward is more than skin deep. I wish that the same people who are amassing so much fervour on social media were just as impassioned to take Nikki Haley to task for frequently supporting efforts in South Carolina to hamper the black vote, stating that voting is a “privilege not a right”.

 

South Carolina is not alone. The former Confederacy has been swept by an unprecedented wave of voter suppression partly meant as a punishment for the election of President Barack Obama. The Rev William Barber of North Carolina has famously called this time of racial flashpoints and aggressions “the third Reconstruction”. Why is it easier to rally people to the cause of erasing the scar but not dealing with the persistent infection? We are still getting it wrong; our emphasis needs to be curing the chronic social ill of racism and not merely spot-treating it. The Confederate battle flag should not fly over any state capital or be used in any official capacity – but its removal from the public square is not enough to deal with issues that affect racism in its insidious and systemic forms. If the flag comes down, who will stand up against voter suppression, police brutality, the oppression of those born without white privilege, educational disadvantages and unfair sentencing laws?

 

At the same time we should be aware that a wave of common sense and coalition building has swept the South in response to this third Reconstruction. To paint our Old Country, the South, with one broad brush and to condemn its people to labels that only speak to ignorance, hatred, bigotry and backwardness is not only incendiary but unhelpful. Southerners of all colours are family – we are a dysfunctional family – but we are still kinfolk to each other. We share names, genes, culture, a heritage – scars, beauty marks and all. We are still doing the hard work of healing the rifts. The South may not rise again, but if the terrorism based in systemic racism continues, then all southerners, white, black, red, yellow and brown with fall with it. We are one people glued together by this impossibly dense and complex history, and yes, marked by our scars. If the flag comes down, how will we empower and strengthen this work?

 

We can try to erase scars all we want, but we cannot hide that we are not whole. We can run from our past, but we cannot hide from its very real legacies and consequences. We must own the past, but we cannot do so with the mere annihilation of symbols. It is the systems that support the hate and pain and fuel the flashpoints that we must deconstruct as we furl the Southern Cross that my great-great-great grandfather was so impassioned to defend a century and a half ago.

 

 

Confederate-flag-controve-008.jpg
 
Confederate battle flag supporters rally at the State Capitol in Columbia, South Carolina. Photograph: Zuma/Rex Shutterstock

 

Michael W Twitty is a culinary historian and blogger at Afroculinaria. He lives in Tennessee

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/28/confederate-battle-flag-scar-we-cannot-erase

 
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***///

 

Well, we find it offensive that jayz & beyonce hang out in cuba,  That sean penn loves venezuelan commies.

 

Should THEY be told to get out, too...?

 

 

Can we rip the Che Guevara t-shirts right off the little commies and their Che posters off the walls, too?

 

How about we all go to Washington and take axes to the statute of LENIN they so reverently erected there?

 

BTW -- 2 of the greatest G-A-Y HATERS ever, so why revered by these little lefties...?

 

 

IGNORANCE -- that's why. <_<

 

 

 

Once again the liberal left FEW have commanded that the MAJORITY bow to their communist will.

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If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it really happen?

 

Therefore by the same logic....

 

If the Confederate flag falls and no one (in the future) knows of it's existence, did slavery ever happen?

 

Sometimes a painful reminder of the past may just what we need to keep history from repeating itself.

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. We are both African American

 

There you go, the SOB doesn't even know what he is, American, or African?

 

Cant be loyal to both.

 

By claiming both he is intentionally creating division.

 

 

E Pluribus Unum baby, From Many, One.

 

American.

That's it.

 

If you don't understand it, why are you posting this divisive crap by a freaking traitor?

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