Bloomberg View(Opinion)
By Francis Wilkinson
June 24, 2015
History is being made almost willy-nilly this week. The effect is dizzying -- and profound.
Between the time I
write this and the time it is published, another prominent Southern
political leader may well take a symbolic step away from the
Confederacy. Already, the Republican leadership of South
Carolina has committed to taking down the Confederate battle flag
outside the state capitol. (Strom Thurmond's son, a state senator,
endorsed the move.) The governor of Alabama had four Confederate flags
unceremoniously removed from his state capitol grounds
this morning. Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker echoed his state's
Speaker of the House in calling for Mississippi's flag, which
prominently features a Confederate flag, to be retired. Some leading
Kentucky politicians endorsed moving a statue of Jefferson
Davis from the state capitol.
A friend asked
whether any sensible person wouldn't prefer, say, better education
policies and less regressive taxation in Mississippi instead of a new
flag. It's a valid question. But it may be that better
policies are impossible without a new political context, one in which
the flag -- and all the bloody, dishonest, subterranean vice it
represents -- is laid to rest. Symbols matter: That's why we cherish
them, wave them, flaunt them. Public symbols matter more.
No conservative
politician in the South can afford to fully acknowledge what is going on
this week; the political constituency for what Sally Jenkins called
the"self-lying sentimental tide" of the Lost Cause
is still too potent a source of votes and activism to be directly
confronted. But across the South, the political context is changing
before our eyes.
In the 1960s, the
federal government forced Southern whites to grant blacks the right to
vote, to serve in office, to participate in public life. But Southern
whites never surrendered their symbols of domination.
In the most charitable explanation, the Confederate battle flag enjoys
its exalted place because white Southerners wish to honor the sacrifice
of their ancestors.
The sacrifice of
Confederate soldiers was indeed immense. Confederate armies wasted their
lives by the tens of thousands, along with hundreds of thousands of
innocent Union soldiers, in a singular quest:
to keep blacks forever enslaved and subject to torture, rape and
murder. That certainly speaks of commitment.
But commitment to
barbarism is difficult to defend, even after decades of practice in the
art of obfuscation. You cannot venerate the Confederate soldier's
sacrifice without degrading the ideal of universal
human dignity. You can only excuse and understand the Confederate
soldier's defense of savagery as a product of his own peculiar political
and cultural context.
This week, Southern
politicians have been discarding the fraudulent pretenses of
neo-Confederacy, and American businesses, such as Amazon, have been
tacitly or explicitly refuting them. Whether they are bowing
to a new moral consciousness brought on by the slaughter in Charleston
or to the political realities of the nation's changing demographics is
ultimately not important. It's the seismic shift in our political and
cultural context that matters.
Racism isn't dead.
Its roots stretch too deeply into American history and life to be so
easily eradicated. (And if history is any guide, a backlash to this
week's actions is already brewing.) But racism is
in the process of losing a prominent purchase on American life. That's
big.
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