By Peniel E. Joseph
The removal of the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds, as Republican Governor Nikki Haley called for on Monday, would be a major victory for racial justice. Though it required the blood of nine black innocents — martyrs whose senseless murder at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church has galvanized the nation.
Surrounded by an interracial group of legislators, most notably Representative James Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Senators Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Haley announced the bipartisan decision on Monday afternoon. “That flag, while an integral part of our past,” said Haley, “does not represent the future of our great state.”
These words were culled from the mass carnage allegedly committed by Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist whose online posting of blood-soaked fantasies of race war have spurred a week of national mourning, political outrage and community organizing.
The Confederate battle flag is, at its core, a symbol of white supremacy rooted in antebellum slavery. The Civil War, which began at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in 1861 and concluded at Appomattox, Virginia, in 1865, was fought over the continuation of racial slavery and the very meaning of American democracy.
The Union won the war but lost the peace. It betrayed black citizenship through an immoral and illegal “compromise” that allowed white Southerners political rule, denied blacks voting rights and handed the presidency to a bankrupt Republican Party.
Jim Crow — backed by guns and lies — ruled American society, North as well as South, over the next century. The guns took the form of both legal violence (from law enforcement) and racial terror (from the Klu Klux Klan, vigilantes and white supremacist groups) that enacted a regime of terror on African-Americans. They burned down black towns and neighborhoods, assaulted women and children and set up a system of racial etiquette that punished African-Americans who violated its rigid application.
The lies took shape through a mythology, popularized in books, plays and movies, that lauded the antebellum South as a beautiful pastoral land of dignified Southern gentleman, lovely belles and happy darkies whose bucolic life was shattered by the war of “Northern aggression.”
From this warped and historically skewed perspective, the Confederacy represented a heroic defense of longstanding Southern traditions. The “lost cause” had been, in this retelling, a supremely honorable one.
It was the modern civil rights movement, particularly its heroic years of 1954-1965, that sparked a resurgence of popularity for the Confederate flag. In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating schools, many Southern states, including South Carolina, began displaying the flag as a symbol of vehement resistance and defiance against the idea of black equality and racial justice.
White supremacists and hate groups in the post-civil rights era, like Roof, have long rightfully connected the flag with its historic pro-slavery and pro-segregation origins.
So if the flag ultimately comes down, it would represent an unmistakably victory — one forged in the blood of martyrs and the impressive political organizing that’s taken place since the massacre in Charleston. The flag’s powerful symbolism looms over public policy and political culture in South Carolina and beyond.
How could any state or country that proudly displays such a flag treat African-Americans — or any of its citizens, for that matter — justly?
The flag’s removal from the South Carolina statehouse grounds would only be a beginning, however, on the long road we must travel in pursuit of racial justice.
Racial segregation still flourishes in South Carolina and nationally, which diminishes the life chances of black babies, children, teens, adults and the elderly. It affects far more people, however. As the Charleston massacre showed, institutional racism distorts the very fabric of U.S. democracy, limits the way Americans use their human capital and economic resources and clouds the public’s collective moral imagination.
President Barack Obama, during a recent podcast interview, unleashed the kind of searing racial candor that many supporters have been waiting to hear from him for years. “Racism,” Obama said, “we are not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public.”
This is a critical and long overdue admission. One that, when coupled with the South Carolina governor’s call to take down the Confederate flag, inspires optimism that the United States may finally be turning away from the politics of racial denial that have haunted discussions of race for far too long.
The next, and most crucial step, will be in the arena of policy. Obama can start by issuing an executive order reviewing the Justice Department’s Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program. He could re-direct the billions of dollars now used in incarcerating black and brown men and women, instead using it for rehabilitation and to support black communities as if they’re as precious as whites.
Haley should follow up her symbolic call for removing the Confederate flag from statehouse grounds with substantive policy reforms that would help end racial and economic inequality.
The United States again finds itself at a racial crossroads. The advent of the “Fifth Estate” — social media — now precludes Americans from keeping their heads in the sand and ignoring those at the bottom of society, who comprise such a tragically large portion of nation. These marginalized corners of society, who Americans continue to ignore at the nation’s political and moral peril, contain the seeds not only of South Carolina’s transformation toward racial equality but of America’s as well.
