Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

White is the New Black

Yo, white people. We need to talk. Pull up a chair, pour yourself a glass of Pinot Grigio or sweet tea or whatever. We’ve got a problem and it’s going to take a while to get to the bottom of it. I’m talking about racism in this country.

Not your personal racism, of course. Or mine. We’re cool. And not just in that hackneyed, “I have black friends” way. Though, of course, we do. And we’ve taught our kids not to hate, not to discriminate on the basis of race. They all have black friends, too. More than we do, actually. They’re cool. Good, open-minded kids. We’re not racists. It’s not really our problem.

Yes, it is.

It’s not enough to declare ourselves and our families non-racism zones. We need to look at what’s going on outside our cocoons and take some responsibility for it. Too many black kids are still being born in situations where they have little to no chance of “pulling themselves up” by their bootstraps. They don’t even have boots. Their schools are substandard. Their food is junk. They’re trapped in a cycle of poverty and neglect and violence. It’s not because they’re lazy; it’s because they know nothing else.

Yeah, I know, you hear it said all the time: Blacks need to take responsibility for single-parent homes, “black-on-black” crime, poor schools, gangs. That’s self-defeating, divisive, and gets us no closer to solving the problem. The power to fix that situation lies with all middle- and upper-income folks, black, white, and brown — those who have escaped the ghetto and those who never had to worry about it. We need to work together to address the effects of institutional racism that still linger in the United States, and in the South, particularly.

And if we are going to insist black people take responsibility for “black problems,” we white people need to step up and take of our “white problems.” Problems like Dylann Storm Roof and the thousands of kids like him, and the thousands more adults who shape kids like Dylann. They’re out there — ignorant and angry, raised on a steady diet of racism and hatred, waving the Confederate battle flag like a cudgel, listening to wing-nut radio, devouring Nazi/racist web propaganda. We white people need to call that shit out. Now.

Getting rid of Confederate flags is a symbolic start, but more is needed. When we hear — or hear of — someone saying or writing such vile things, we need to pull off their hoods (real or cyber) and push them into the light. If your kids’ private school or your country club is not diverse, well, maybe it’s time to speak up and push for a change. If your kids don’t have interactions with other races, don’t be shocked when they’re caught on a cellphone video singing racist frat songs.

In a radio interview this week, President Obama said, “It is incontrovertible that race relations have improved significantly during my lifetime and yours, and that opportunities have opened up, and that attitudes have changed. … What is also true is the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives … casts a long shadow and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on. We’re not cured of it.”

No, we’re not, as events in Charleston last week made clear.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Take It Down

Wave goodbye the Confederate battle flag in South Carolina. And don’t use “heritage and history” as an excuse to keep it there. Just take it down.

Like every other human being who reads and watches the news and has a conscience, I’ve been grappling with the mass murder of nine people in a Bible study group at their church in Charleston, South Carolina, last week. Like millions of others, I have been trying to wrap what’s left of my brain around how a 21-year-old could have so much hate in his heart that he could sit in church with the parishioners for an hour before opening fire on them (sparing the life of one woman so she could explain to people what happened). Like millions of others, I have come to the conclusion that we’ll never quite understand it all. And like millions of others, I keep thinking about how we should progress from here and if there is any possible good that can come from this.

Daseaford | Dreamstime.com

Maybe it’s the fact that this heinous crime has furthered — catapulted, actually — the discussion about why South Carolina has no hate crime laws and whether it should stop flying a Confederate flag on its State House grounds. This controversy engendered an entire new language: Republican Beat Around the Bush Speak.

I just watched Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee try to state his opinion on the matter on one of the Sunday-morning political shows. It was like he was speaking a language that heretofore didn’t exist. He simply made no sense.

I hate to politicize a tragedy like this, but it’s already done. Whether to remove the flag is already a standard question for the presidential hopefuls, and so far the only one to demand its removal, as far as I know, is Mitt Romney, and good for him. The rest of them are hiding behind the tiresome and ancient notion of “states’ rights” and dodging the question.

Same with hate crime bills. I heard one pundit say, “Hate is not a crime.” Maybe it’s time we changed the laws and put hate groups out of business for good, so they don’t influence young people like Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old who confessed to the murders.

Am I missing something here? Does the rest of civilized society have to leave it to the people of one state to decide whether a symbol of hate and slavery should continue to be one of its calling cards?

I guess we could all boycott South Carolina, but that would be an affront to all of the good people who live there, and there are plenty of them. They are the norm. Not everyone in South Carolina is obsessed with the flag being about “heritage and history, not hate” — a repugnant ideology, given the fact that it was created as a symbol for white people to buy, sell, and trade African prisoners and brutalize them whenever the whim struck.

Perhaps the most ironic thing about the Confederate flag waving proudly as a reminder of dear old Dixie is that, while the state lowered the state flag and the American flag to half-mast in recognition of the nine African-American worshippers who were gunned down in their own church by a self-proclaimed racist, a bizarre South Carolina law prevented the lowering of the Confederate flag!

I dearly love the South. I was born and raised here. I talk to Europeans and visitors from around the world every day about the virtues of the South: the food, the culture, the laid-back lifestyle, the friendly people, the music, and the feeling they experience when here. And while I think South Carolina ought to remove that flag immediately, I think we in Memphis ought to take a look at ourselves again and remove that monument on Union Avenue to the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest. And I think our school system should incorporate some sort of anti-discrimination curriculum starting in pre-K and going all the way through 12th grade as a way to start stopping all of this racism mess, because right now it seems this country is regressing rather than progressing on the issue.

A great place for South Carolina’s Confederate flag to rest would be in our own National Civil Rights Museum. It could be displayed next to the authentic and chilling Ku Klux Klan robe and hood that are already there. And photos of the remaining all-white country clubs in Memphis should also be in the display. Didn’t think we still had those? Think again. They hide their bigotry behind the guise of “private membership,” but they don’t allow black or Jewish members. Maybe we should ask the families of the nine people murdered in Charleston last week how they feel about that.

Categories
News News Feature

Committed to Lies

People in search of comfort may turn to scripture after last week’s massacre of nine black churchgoers by a lone white gunman in Charleston, South Carolina. I am drawn to John 8:32, in which Jesus tells his disciples: “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Emancipation by veracity is a beautiful, if elusive, concept. It puts freedom within anyone’s reach. But this nation is committed to lies, never more so than when it comes to racism.

Confessed killer Dylann Roof explained his racist motivations in an online manifesto. In it, he calls black people violent and inferior. He says the authors of slave narratives spoke highly of the institution. He writes that integration sent white people running to the suburbs in search of whiter schools and fewer minorities.

If racism is a continuum, Roof is at the far right end. America’s systems and institutions — all of them — are not as far to the left as we tell ourselves. Typing that — being honest — fills me with anxiety. To state unflinchingly, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. did, that America is racist is to open yourself up to attack.

The (direct or indirect) beneficiaries of racist systems have a powerful incentive to be dishonest. So they lie and insist that racism doesn’t exist. How do they lie? Let’s count just a few of the ways.

They lie when they refuse to unflinchingly describe what happened.

This was not an attack on Christianity. It was a calculated terrorist attack on black parishioners at Emanuel A.M.E. Church by a white racist young man. Do not blather about mental illness or speculate that the killer was on drugs. Do not paint him as an outlier. Do not disconnect this racism and this violence from the less graphic but still racist violence of segregated neighborhoods, hyper-policed communities, needless voting restrictions, and attacks on public-sector jobs.

But instead of candor, we get obfuscation, as offered by South Carolina’s Governor Nikki Haley during a press conference last week. “We’ve got some grieving too. And we’ve got some pain we have to go through,” she said, through tears.

Conveniently, the Republican did not elaborate. Is it the pain of grief? Or is it African Americans’ collective pain of political disenfranchisement, economic exclusion, and mass incarceration, all of which are rooted in racism?

They lie when they ignore the echoes.

According to a survivor, Roof said: “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”

Said Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul in April, when announcing his campaign: “We have come to take our country back.”

Slightly milder iterations of Roof’s racism are as close as the worst of conservative talk radio, where fears of a colored menace — or perhaps a rebellion like that planned in 1822 by Emanuel A.M.E. founder and former slave Denmark Vesey — loom large.

Similar rhetoric pours from the mouths of right-wing politicians. And it is parroted by too many conservative voters, many who would insist they are not racist because they don’t use the n-word and have a black friend.

Roof wrote in his manifesto: “The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens.” The Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group, is a sponsor of “Political Cesspool,” which airs on Memphis radio.

We lie when we say never again.

I am unmoved by interracial unity marches and vigils and the unsatisfying, fleeting displays of kumbaya that follow such tragedies. Arguments over removing the Confederate flag from its place of honor miss the point. The symbols hurt, but the spirit that upholds those symbols kills. And because there is no appetite for exorcism, the demon of racism remains.

The lies dishonor the dead.

They are Susie Jackson, 87; Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45; Rev. DePayne Doctor, 49; Ethel Lance, 70; Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; Cynthia Hurd, 54; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Myra Thompson, 59; and state Senator Clementa Pinckney, 41, a pastor of Mother Emanuel. But we will not remember their names, just as we do not remember the names of the four black girls bombed to death in 1963 in a Birmingham church by white racists.

I feel like I can have hope or honesty, but not both. The truth is that this massacre could lead America to atone for racism. In the truth lies liberation that could unshackle African Americans from the nation’s bottom rungs. But we can’t handle the truth.

We prefer to lie.