Anybody who has visited Virginia is not surprised by the recent announcement from Governor McDonnell of Confederate History Month. Not even his omission of slavery -- at least I'm not. Governor McDonnell is a Virginian and too many Virginians take excessive pride in their state's contribution to the American Civil War.
In 2007, I visited the capital of the Confederacy to attend my friend's wedding. A former actress, she and her fiancee had moved back to Virginia Beach from Los Angeles for cheaper real estate and a simpler life. I attended the wedding with a posse of LA city dwellers, transplants from Cambridge and Canada, and one who is another native Virginian.
I had never visited Virginia before. My mother spent some time there growing up on her uncle's farm and as a teenager in Ohio many of my Caucasian friends spent Spring Break at Virginia Beach. I had heard a tale or two about the place but nothing to indicate just how proud of the American Rebellion Virginians were. Driving from the airport for the wedding weekend, I spied a Confederate bumper sticker on what seemed like every other truck on the road.
As an African American who grew up in the Midwest and has spent most of her adulthood in America's great cities, it's hard to explain how unsettling it is to come face to face with the Rebel flag. The Confederate flag is iconic, it's used in art work by rock bands like Guns 'N Roses, Kid Rock and Poison. In the early 80's the Dukes of Hazard drove all over prime time television in a car with the Confederate flag painted on the side door. So, it's not like I've never seen the Dixie flag before and even to a certain extent become desensitized to it. But standing in the room of my friend's 10 year old nephew staring at the giant Confederate flag he was using as a wall hanging, I was jarred back into a reality that superceded fashion.
Perhaps it was because we were on a farm in Virginia where black people could have easily once been enslaved. Perhaps it was because I was the only person of color in the full house or perhaps it was the Southern twang that filled the air but in an instant my humanity rose up and I saw this boy's mother and my friend's family in a whole new, rather unflattering, light.
I tried to talk with my friend about it when we were back in Los Angeles and all I ever heard was that the Rebel Flag did not mean to her family what it meant in history and my understanding based upon that history. It wasn't a symbol of Southern tyranny and treason to her family. It was a symbol of Southern pride. Not surprisingly, Pat Buchanan uses the same justification on MSNBC. The message of which to black people is clear -- quite simply, get over it.
There is a lot of injustice in this country that black people are expected to get over. We were once expected to get over rape, violence and dehumanization by our wealthy white slave owners and their white employees. We are now expected to accept racial inequality that pervades over the justice system and employment opportunity. We are also expected to accept a society where everybody thinks they are better and better off than us no matter what dystopia they or their grandparents immigrated from. And now we are expected to accept the glorification of the Confederate's fight for the preservation of slavery, and pretend that the end to black human bondage wasn't the essential piece of legislation that led the South to secede.
It would seem no other people in America are expected to go through life with such amnesia like black people. I mean, Hitler fixed the roads and industrialized Germany, which put many Germans back to work. Yet you'd be hard-pressed to find the Nazi flag as a bumper sticker in Berlin, let alone a ubiquitous symbol of that country's pride. And if I were Jewish and that flag hanging on my friend's nephew's wall was the Nazi flag, I doubt I would have been invited into the house, let alone the boy's room, because nobody pretends that the swastika stands for anything other than what it stands for -- white supremacy and the genocide of 11 Million human beings. Who cares that it was initially the flag of a legitimate political party or that it is taken from the sanskrit symbol for good fortune?
Driving back to the hotel that day after the polite conversation and Yankee jokes, I felt sorry for the black folks in Virginia. What a slap in the face to live amongst people whose pride is worth more than your humanity, who day after day fly a flag in celebration of a history that not only excludes you but sought to destroy you. How it must break black folks' hearts to live in a State which once had the highest population of African Americans and has so many family trees, which shaken hard enough will send a black ancestor falling out, yet continues to deny its collective history. That day, I really felt sorry for black people in Virginia and the only person who seemed to take notice and feel sympathy for me was, of course, my friend from Cambridge.
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It is a flag. It is a piece of cloth. Its meaning was dissolved long ago. Its value is determined by those who oppose it. If you take that away, the folks behind it have no other justification to use it.
I went to college in Virginia about 20 miles from Appomattox Court House and am sad to see a state that I love vilified as it has been recently. I completely understand your sentiment and am disappointed that there are people out there who still use the Rebel Flag as a symbol of defiance.
My Grandmother's baptismal certificate is printed in German and her church conducted services in German until WWI. Not only did they not fly the German flag, they didn't speak the language in public thereafter nor teach their children the language after US entry into the war. Sometimes symbols represent a choice of loyalties, not just history or cultural origins. People have a free speech right to fly the Stars and Bars, and I have freedom of thought to see it as representing where their loyalties lie.
So, strike 'stars and bars' and insert "Confederate Battle Flag" above. Care to offer your opinion on the first question in the first paragraph? The rest I think we can dismiss as rhetorical questions.
New England and the Midwest continue to be the most segregated regions of the country, lagging far behind the South in integration. And current demographic trends show the nation is now in a “New Great Migration”, where blacks are moving out of the Northeast and Midwest and to the South. Racial tolerance in the South surpasses that found in those regions of the country, despite the conclusions you drew on your brief trip observing bumper stickers.
Personally I like the idea of a Confederate History Month, it forces dialogue and debate, and encourages education and enlightenment. You editorial is an example of this. You say you “feel sorry for the blacks in Virginia”, but did you ask if they feel sorry for themselves? Likewise I could say I feel sorry for the minorities in California by Prop 8, or the recent acts of racism on California college campuses. But I try to develop a deeper understanding of the region before I jump to criticize. I suggest you do the same.
One last tidbit for you. According to an essay published by Sylvea Hollis, of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, "The first African Americans came to the Otsego Lake region of upstate New York while serving as soldiers in the French and Indian War. A few decades later William Cooper, the founder of Cooperstown, brought slaves to work in his new village." Seems like the South was not the only player in the game.
Why would you bother to try to justify, nitpick, etc. the role of the South in the slave trade in relation to this article? The role of a slave in the South (or in the North, or in London etc.) was no fun. Period. The Confederate flag is emblematic of the acceptance of this shamefulness in our nations history. Period. Why not leave the Confederate flag and such overt racism, as embarrassingly nurtured in the comment above, behind?
To Mr. Godbout, to whom I am replying now. Your points about " What's worse, being enslaved your whole life, watching your children be enslaved their whole lives, being wrenched away from your homeland to be enslaved, having your wife, husband or children be sold away from you for the rest of your life - or dying a slow painful death? A difficult series of questions to answer I think.", were well said and well reasoned, however your remark, " Why not stay on topic people??", is somewhat off the mark. I was exactly on topic. The article Ms. Carmichael wrote is something I took umbrage with, and I merely wanted clarification from the reader who made what I interpreted to be remarks supporting her position (kellygreen). As to your final remark, "Why not leave the Confederate flag and such overt racism, as embarrassingly nurtured in the comment above, behind?
I would suggest, Sir, that the current American flag would have to be treated equally if you were firm in your objections. After all, that flag and it's variations have flown over a country that has decimated the Native American population, and fostered racism and slavery in both the North and South for almost it's entire history.
YOUR ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!
Thankyou
I'm a proud supporter of anti-racist white Americans (Tim Wise)
As an African American I thankyou and keep up the good work, you guys are the key to the future
It is also astounding that while African Americans are being asked to "get over it," the people who fly the Confederate battle flag have not themselves "gotten over it." After all, they lost.
It is pretty hypocritical to insist that someone else "get over" their wounds and resentments...when the person demanding it clearly hasn't done the same.