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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTo Borrow From Ronald Reagan, "Tear Down This Flag!"
Take Down the Confederate FlagNow
TA-NEHISI COATES
JUN 18, 2015
Last night, Dylann Roof walked into a Charleston church, sat for an hour, and then killed nine people. Roofs crime cannot be divorced from the ideology of white supremacy which long animated his state nor from its potent symbolthe Confederate flag. Visitors to Charleston have long been treated to South Carolinas attempt to clean its history and depict its secession as something other than a war to guarantee the enslavement of the majority of its residents. This notion is belied by any serious interrogation of the Civil War and the primary documents of its instigators. Yet the Confederate battle flagthe flag of Dylann Roofstill flies on the Capitol grounds in Columbia.
The Confederate flags defenders often claim it represents heritage not hate. I agreethe heritage of White Supremacy was not so much birthed by hate as by the impulse toward plunder. Dylann Roof plundered nine different bodies last night, plundered nine different families of an original member, plundered nine different communities of a singular member. An entire people are poorer for his action. The flag that Roof embraced, which many South Carolinians embrace, does not stand in opposition to this actit endorses it. That the Confederate flag is the symbol of of white supremacists is evidenced by the very words of those who birthed it:
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth...
This moral truththat the negro is not equal to the white manis exactly what animated Dylann Roof. More than any individual actor, in recent history, Roof honored his flag in exactly the manner it always demandedwith human sacrifice.
read more: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/take-down-the-confederate-flag-now/396290/
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To Borrow From Ronald Reagan, "Tear Down This Flag!" (Original Post)
napkinz
Jun 2015
OP
the problem is the people to whom we have to present those watertight arguments ...
napkinz
Jun 2015
#12
Angry Dragon
(36,693 posts)1. r&k
napkinz
(17,199 posts)2. thanks Angry Dragon
Angry Dragon
(36,693 posts)3. just trying to help
napkinz
(17,199 posts)5. let's hope enough speak up ... we're contending with this --->
Angry Dragon
(36,693 posts)6. She makes enough sense for the GOP
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)8. True, but that is a bar a snake could leap.
Angry Dragon
(36,693 posts)9. One does not want to set it too high
napkinz
(17,199 posts)11. yep, guns in bars!
struggle4progress
(118,319 posts)4. The Confederate Flag
... Nearly 100 years after the beginning of the Civil War, in the late 1950s, the South Carolina Senate put the Confederate Battle Flag in its chamber, and the legislature created a Confederate War Centennial Commission ... But as part of the celebration, the legislature passed a resolution to fly the flag on the dome of the State House in 1962. As one former legislator noted years later, We did it to celebrate, not to divide the state. But as another remarked, it was a different day. White politicians only had to please white people, and the majority was plainly behind the system of segregation ... In the late 1970s and early 1980s, some legislators floated a series of unsuccessful proposals to take down the flag ... By late 1993 politicians and business leaders were searching for an acceptable compromise on the flag question. The flag was bringing the state unwanted negative attention and publicity from around the nation ... A 1994 survey found that about half of South Carolina voters favored keeping the flag flying over the State House ... In 1997 the legislature passed a law giving themselves the sole power to move the flag ... On July 1, 2000, at a ceremony in front of the State House, two Citadel cadets lowered the flag from the dome ... Immediately afterwards, Civil War re-enactors raised a slightly different, square battle flag on a 30-foot pole that stood behind the Confederate Soldier Monument in front of the State House ...
http://www.usca.edu/aasc/Flag.htm
http://www.usca.edu/aasc/Flag.htm
napkinz
(17,199 posts)10. "Civil War re-enactors raised a slightly different ... flag"
so would these racist thugs riot if they finally took it down?
oh, my bad (I shouldn't be calling white people thugs; plus, white people don't riot.)
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)7. Agreed.
And the Coates piece is terrific. He is an unusually talented writer and thinker who combines crystal clarity with watertight arguments.
napkinz
(17,199 posts)12. the problem is the people to whom we have to present those watertight arguments ...
napkinz
(17,199 posts)13. kick
calimary
(81,383 posts)14. What a quote. I heard it referenced on TV today.
MAN -
"This moral truth'that the negro is not equal to the white man'is exactly what animated Dylann Roof. More than any individual actor, in recent history, Roof honored his flag in exactly the manner it always demandedwith human sacrifice."
No words.
napkinz
(17,199 posts)15. "what animated Dylann Roof" more into the mind of this monster ...
he had a manifesto
see http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026871153 (posted by MohRokTah)