Opinion
Has the “Lost Cause” Finally Lost?
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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.