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About The skanner. (Portland, Or.) 1975-2014 | View Entire Issue (July 8, 2015)
Opinion Has the “Lost Cause” Finally Lost? “Challenging People to Shape a Better Future Now” B ernie F oster Founder/Publisher B oBBie D ore F oster Executive Editor J erry F oster Advertising Manager C hristen M C C urDy News Editor P atriCia i rvin Graphic Designer a rashi y oung D onovan M. s Mith Reporters M oniCa J. F oster Seattle Office Coordinator J ulie K eeFe s usan F rieD Photographers 2015 MERIT AWARDS WINNER The Skanner has received 20 NNPA awards since 1998 The Skanner Newspaper, es- tablished in October 1975, is a weekly publication, published each Wednesday by IMM Publications Inc. 415 N. Killingsworth St. P.O. Box 5455 Portland, OR 97228 Telephone (503) 285-5555 Fax: (503) 285-2900 E-mail: info@theskanner.com www.TheSkanner.com The Skanner is a member of the National Newspaper Pub lishers Association and West Coast Black Pub lishers Association. All photos submitted become the property of The Skanner. We are not re spon sible for lost or damaged photos either solicited or unsolicit- ed. © 2015 The Skanner. ALL RIGHTS RE- SERVED. REPRODUCTION IN WHOLE OR IN PART WITHOUT PERMISSION PROHIBITED. To view The Skanner website on your mobile device, scan this QR code • Local news • Opinions • Jobs, Bids • Sports • Entertainment • Music reviews • Bulletin board • RSS feeds as the pernicious fiction that there was something honorable about the Con- federate rebellion – treason in the defense of slavery, as one observ- er so trenchantly put it recently – finally been irredeemably shred- ded? History is being made now. Not just “ordinary” history, but mo- mentous history. The kind of his- tory that will even more deeply mark this moment in time – the Obama presidency – as a “land- mark” of America’s march toward a more complete democracy. That was underscored in strik- ing fashion last month in three decisions handed up by the U.S. Supreme Court: one affirming in full the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare); the second affirm- ing the right of same-sex couples to marry; and the third affirming the central provision of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that housing policies and practices with dis- criminatory outcomes can be chal- lenged, even if there was no intent to discriminate. Simultaneously, the hard- shelled resistance to acknowledg- ing the falsehoods of the Confed- eracy and its most potent symbol, the Confederate flag, has cracked. It cracked, on the one hand, under the combined weight of the trag- ic racial reality made apparent by social-media technology and the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, and, on the other, by Dylann Roof’s mur- derous rampage. The reaction of an outraged pub- lic has forced some leading South- ern politicians and some leading consumer companies to cut their ties to that stark symbol of Amer- ica’s original sin, the Confederate flag, which Roof pledged alle- giance to. As one would expect, some con- servatives have sneered that the outcry is just meaningless political H Lee A. Daniels NNPA Columnist theater. And, also as one would expect, for entirely different reasons, even some advocates of progressive change have called the focus on the flag a waste of time and energy phant -- by law in the South, and by custom that carried the force of law in the North for most of the following century. That’s the reason “removing” the Confederate flag from the pub- lic sphere and eradicating what it symbolizes has cost so much in lives lost and human talent wasted all these years. Further, to claim the “mass movement” against the Confeder- ate flag is mere catharsis is to miss the powerful – and obvious – con- nection between the symbolic and the substantive. To claim the ‘mass movement’ against the Confederate flag is mere catharsis is to miss the powerful — and obvious — connection between the symbolic and the substantative and said that taking it down won’t solve, or even address the numer- ous serious problems that fester along America’s color line. That position was succinctly stated by the headline in The American Prospect: “Removing the Confed- erate Flag is Easy. Fixing Racism is Hard.” That claim, and the thinking behind it, has always been made about particular actions of Black freedom struggle. But it’s com- pletely wrong. Indeed, there’s no little irony in asserting that the present focus on the Confederate flag is empty symbolism given what the flag itself symbolizes. The flag is an enduring symbol of the fact that, although the Confederacy lost the military phase of its race war, white supremacy reigned trium- After all, there are voluminous symbolic reasons Americans de- mand that any flag bearing the Stars and Stripes – whether it flies over the Capitol in Washington or the neighborhood park down the street —be treated not as an ordi- nary piece of cloth but as a sacred object. And the now-successful move- ment urging that same-sex couples have the right to marry and have those marriages recognized by law everywhere in the United States was overwhelmingly driven by the symbolism of what marriage itself means both to individuals and to the society as a whole. Black Americans’ freedom struggle has always relied on what could well be described as sym- bolic actions. For example, during the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott conser- vatives aplenty derided as frivo- lous Blacks’ demand for the right to sit wherever they chose on the city’s buses. But soon, the boy- cott was recognized as the first stepping stone of the nationwide mass-action movement that de- stroyed legalized racism. Pushing the Black freedom struggle forward has always re- quired dealing with the multiple, often complex ways bigotry af- fects the lives of Americans – and understanding, as President Obama said in praising the Su- preme Court’s same-sex marriage ruling, that progress in expanding the rights of Americans “often comes in small increments … pro- pelled by the persistent efforts of dedicated citizens.” What is important at this mo- ment is to redeem the martyrdom of those lost to the many mani- festations of racism in America, including the nine congregants of Emanuel AME Church; to, as the president also said, “bridge the meaning of [America’s] founding words with the realities of chang- ing times.” A first step of that effort from this point forward should be to, yes, take advantage of the trag- edy produced by Dylann Roof’s perverse allegiance to the banner of White Supremacy and destroy forever the notion that the “Lost Cause” is something to be proud of. Lee A. Daniels is a longtime journalist based in New York City. His essay, “Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Great Provocateur,” ap- pears in Africa’s Peacemakers: Nobel Peace Laureates of Afri- can Descent (2014), published by Zed Books. His new collection of columns, Race Forward: Facing America’s Racial Divide in 2014, is available at www.amazon.com. Confederate Flag Never ‘Misappropriated’ T he other night I listened to a South Carolina state legislator announce his support for pulling down the Confederate battle flag (of the Army of Northern Virginia) from the South Carolina statehouse. In the course of his quite interest- ing comments, he argued that the Confederate flag had been misap- propriated by hate groups. MSN- BC talk-show host Chris Hayes politely asked him how it was possible to misappropriate a sym- bol that was born in hate. The South Carolina legislator chose that moment to do a tap dance. There has been a good deal of discussion of the Confederate flag, discussion that has been reaching a badly needed crescendo. The public is getting a better un- derstanding of the history of the flag and some history of the Con- federate States of America. Yet there is one thing that has avoided any discussion: the Con- federate flag is the flag of traitors. The Confederate States of America was formed in open op- position to the Constitution of the United States. Page 2 July 8, 2015 The Portland and Seattle Skanner Bill Fletcher Jr. The Global African It was treason. Nevertheless, there are white people around the U.S. who seem to see no contradiction between flying both the flag of the U.S.A. and the C.S.A. How can we under- in the Democratic Party. The use of the flag spread in subsequent years as a symbol of open and audacious resistance to the Black freedom movement and the pressure that it brought on the U.S. government to enact legisla- tion against Jim Crow segregation and voter disenfranchisement. The second answer is that for many of these white people, the flag of the Confederate States of America is the flag of the essence of the United States of America. In other words, the CSA is seen as representing the core of what the so-called Founding Fathers One thing that has avoided any discussion: the Confederate flag is the flag of traitors stand this? It seems to me that there are two main answers. First, that the reemergence of the Confederate battle flags (it is, actually plural) starts in the 1940s with the rise of the Dixiecrat re- volt against a civil rights platform wanted in North America and, as such, it was not that the CSA left the USA, but the non-slave states departed from the core mission of the Republic. For this element of white America, the Confederate flag symbolizes the “America” of the slave-holding presidents; the “America” of the genocidal wars against Native Americans; the “America” of unlimited possibil- ities for whites. In other words, it represents what we, in Black America, un- derstand to be the underside of the so-called “American Dream.” Those who fly both flags do not see the flag of the CSA as a flag of treason but instead a flag of au- thenticity and essence. Thus, irrespective of the correct and well-intentioned comments about the Confederate flag being a flag of traitors or a flag of hate, the reality is that it is flown not to represent Southern pride but as a reaffirmation of the essence of white supremacy. It is, in other words, no different than the swastika. Let’s stop beating around the bushes. Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the host of The Global African on Tele- sur-English. He is a racial justice, labor and global justice activist and writer. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and at www.billfletcher- jr.com.
