Time will tell whether the flag issue is a convenient distraction and it will be business as usual once the dust clears. It feels like something important has shifted, and the school of minnows will never return to the same configuration. Thanks to a lone-wolf, white-racist terrorist. It helped that the terrorist Roof was radicalized by material on the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization with direct links to the toxic KKK-friendly Citizens Councils. The Council donated funds to many of the current Republican candidates for president; several of them had spoken before the group. This was not "coded" or "dog whistle" stuff; it was a goddamn burning cross! Suddenly, no one gave a damn about the Confederate Battle Flag. They were running for their political lives.
Frederick Douglass got it right in 1857 when he said, "This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both."
For me, it's a matter of whether, having lived with the outrages of slavery, Jim Crow, today's mass incarceration and other "measure(s) of injustice," African Americans are finally "allowed" to be angry over their plight in America's history. I have a theory that Barack Obama was electable as the first black president because he was technically not an African American with all the historic baggage and deep-seated anger that identity justifies.
Frederick Douglass, President U.S. Grant and a scene from The Birth of a Nation
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There are historic precedents for getting tough on white-racist terrorism. President Ulysses S. Grant "engineered" the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. According to historian H. W. Brands, "Grant's campaign put the fear of federal power into the Klan and shattered its sense of impunity. Not for decades would the nightriders exercise such influence again." By 1872, the Klan had been broken and blacks were expressing newfound voting rights. Grant signed the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
But, then, the election of 1876 was as rotten and confusing as the one we recall in 2000. It resulted in the Compromise of 1877 and President Rutherford B. Hayes. White supremacy began to creep back, and soon the Reconstruction era was over. Eventually, by 1915, Reconstruction came under assault itself, and American culture was indulging in things like D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, a racist, anti-Reconstruction silent epic that ridiculed blacks and propagated many of the stereotypes young Dylann Roof mouthed in 2015 as he gunned down nine black churchgoers.
I'd like to see this teachable moment raise questions like this: Is it possible for more white Americans to find the courage and empathy to understand why the lightning-rod Reverend Jeremiah Wright -- pilloried by the political right -- might close a fiery speech from his Christian pulpit with "Goddamn America!"
It's all about complexity and critical thinking. Bill O'Reilly likes to say he's "a simple man." He's right. So one would not expect him and others like him to understand the kind of complexity in which a man can be a decent American and, still, be outraged at things done in the name of "America." Maybe the Roof incident has really shifted things, and maybe O'Reilly's ratings have peaked and his type of thinking is headed for the dustbin of media history.
It's all about The Dream and keeping our eyes on the prize.
Frederick Douglass got it right in 1857 when he said, "This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both."
For me, it's a matter of whether, having lived with the outrages of slavery, Jim Crow, today's mass incarceration and other "measure(s) of injustice," African Americans are finally "allowed" to be angry over their plight in America's history. I have a theory that Barack Obama was electable as the first black president because he was technically not an African American with all the historic baggage and deep-seated anger that identity justifies.
Frederick Douglass, President U.S. Grant and a scene from The Birth of a Nation
(Image by unknown) Details DMCA
There are historic precedents for getting tough on white-racist terrorism. President Ulysses S. Grant "engineered" the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. According to historian H. W. Brands, "Grant's campaign put the fear of federal power into the Klan and shattered its sense of impunity. Not for decades would the nightriders exercise such influence again." By 1872, the Klan had been broken and blacks were expressing newfound voting rights. Grant signed the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
But, then, the election of 1876 was as rotten and confusing as the one we recall in 2000. It resulted in the Compromise of 1877 and President Rutherford B. Hayes. White supremacy began to creep back, and soon the Reconstruction era was over. Eventually, by 1915, Reconstruction came under assault itself, and American culture was indulging in things like D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, a racist, anti-Reconstruction silent epic that ridiculed blacks and propagated many of the stereotypes young Dylann Roof mouthed in 2015 as he gunned down nine black churchgoers.
I'd like to see this teachable moment raise questions like this: Is it possible for more white Americans to find the courage and empathy to understand why the lightning-rod Reverend Jeremiah Wright -- pilloried by the political right -- might close a fiery speech from his Christian pulpit with "Goddamn America!"
It's all about complexity and critical thinking. Bill O'Reilly likes to say he's "a simple man." He's right. So one would not expect him and others like him to understand the kind of complexity in which a man can be a decent American and, still, be outraged at things done in the name of "America." Maybe the Roof incident has really shifted things, and maybe O'Reilly's ratings have peaked and his type of thinking is headed for the dustbin of media history.
It's all about The Dream and keeping our eyes on the prize.
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