The Confederate flag is not enough: Why our new race debate misses the point

Responding to widespread public pressure, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is calling for the removal of the Confederate flag from the State Capitol inCharleston. Although my colleague, S.E. Smith, pointed out that Haley has no power to actually remove it, she has joined other GOP politicians in denouncing the flag—including Lindsey Graham, Mitt Romney, and Donald Trump. In addition, Walmart and Amazon have dropped all apparel donning the flag, while Virginia is dropping the flag as an option from their personalized license plates. While it’s absolutely time for the flag to go the way of the dodo, it’s hardly a cure for the real problems haunting Charleston less than a week after nine people were gunned down in the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church by Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old who subscribed to white supremacist ideologies. You can kill a symbol, but it’s not as easy to extinguish an idea—or the gun politics that help enforce it.

his is not to deny the power of the Confederate flag’s removal. The flag is not simply a memorial commemorating “bravery in the Civil War,” as Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly recently argued, it’s a reminder of the peculiar institution that the South fought to protect: slavery. If Barack Obama told Marc Maron that the slave trade “casts a long shadow and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on,” it is not an abstract idea. He was being literal—slavery’s shadow can be seen flapping in the Charleston wind every day.

However, if slavery is part of our DNA, the effects of America’s troubled history won’t be quelled by taking down the flags of South Carolina, Mississippi, or any other flags that honor “Southern heritage.” Instead, we must combat that heritage itself, which continues to be romanticized in our schools, our homes, and our entertainment.

In a widely circulated photo that’s indicative of Dylann Roof’s ideologies, he’s pictured in front of the Confederate Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, one emblazoned with the Confederate flag, and the image shocked Americans. But shouldn’t we be more concerned with the fact that such an establishment continues to operate? Or that it’s far from the only museum of its kind?

This speaks to the stark discrepancy between how different parts of the country remember the Civil War. While 52 percent of all Americans believe that the war was a dispute over slavery, a 2011 CNN poll found that an alarmingly high 42 percent still believe that it was about states’ rights. Even more disturbing is the fact that nearly a quarter of respondents reported that they empathize more with the South’s cause than the North—and that figure jumps up to around 40 percent among Southern white folks. Clearly Charleston’s Confederate Museum does not want for potential customers.

This divide comes down to the words we use to describe the Civil War itself, often known in the South as “Lincoln’s War” or “The War of Northern Aggression,” which suggests that it was a conflict started by the Abraham Lincoln and Union.Idaho Statesman writer Banyard Woods grew up in Charleston, where their classroom education about the “War of Northern Aggression” tiptoed around the painful realities of the conflict, truths that many in the South clearly still cannot face up to.

“When we studied the Revolutionary War, we learned about Francis Marion, the ‘Swamp Fox,’ but we did not learn that despite hosting more battles than any other colony, South Carolina contributed fewer fighters than any other to the Continental Army, because they needed the men to oppress the slave population, partially because of the fear of another Stono Creek,” Woods writes.

This apologia for the war—cherrypicking the aspects most ripe for nostalgia—is surprisingly common in popular narratives about the Civil War, from the absurdly successful Gone with the Windto Birth of a Nation, a movie that wasn’t just popular among Southern Democrats. Woodrow Wilson liked D.W. Griffith’s ode to “Southern bravery” so much that he regularly showed it in the White House. In the film’s most infamous scene, Griffith depicts the effects of allowing black people intoCongress after Reconstruction. It’s presented like a zoo.

However, our double consciousness around the Civil War reflects more than just how we view the past. It’s a reflection of our historical present. The current NRA president, Jim Porter, even referred to the “War of Northern Aggression” in a 2015 speech.

The NRA was started, 1871, right here in New York state. It was started by some Yankee generals who didn’t like the way my Southern boys had the ability to shoot in what we call the “War of Northern Aggression.” Now, y’all might call it the Civil War, but we call it the War of Northern Aggression down south.

But that was the very reason that they started the National Rifle Association, was to teach and train the civilian in the use of the standard military firearm. And I am one who still feels very strongly that that is one of our most greatest charges that we can have today, is to train the civilian in the use of the standard military firearm, so that when they have to fight for their country they’re ready to do it.

Porter’s statement (note the way he says “my Southern boys”) is a reflection of the ways in which we’ve allowed a debate over the removal of a flag to usurp the conversations we should be having instead. In addition to fighting the legacy of slavery—as well as America’s broader racial issues—Porter shows that racism and opposition to gun control often go hand in hand.

While they’re treated as separate issues, research has shown they’re all part of the same problem—white supremacy. In 2013, Pacific Standard’s Tom Jacobs reported on a study from Australia’s Monash University, which found that a “high score on a common measure of racial resentment increases the odds that a person will (a) have a gun in the house, and (b) be opposed to gun control. This holds true even after other ‘explanatory variables,’ including political party affiliation, are taken into account.”

It goes further than that: Our current gun control debate is actually a product of the Civil War itself, with the post-Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan fighting for gun control as a way to keep guns out of the hands of black people. “Before the Civil War, blacks in the South had never been allowed to possess guns,” the Daily Beast’s Adam Winkler writes. “During the war, however, blacks obtained guns for the first time.” That power scared whites so thoroughly that Southern states developed reactionary Black Codes, discriminatory policies that barred gun ownership from black people.

Although the development of the NRA should have then empowered black people (by lobbying for everyone’s right to own a gun), the gun laws that developed in the wake of the Uniform and Firearms Act continued to prevent equal access. The first gun control law, the Uniform and Firearms Act of 1934, required gun owners to apply for a license. But Winkler writes that there was a catch: “According to the law, only ‘suitable people’ with a ‘proper reason’ for being armed in public were eligible.” These terms were so vague that they could apply to anyone, and that loophole was often used to target prospective black gun owners.

While the Right’s stance on gun control has since shifted to the other extreme, policies continue to arm white men at the expense of people of color, who are structurally barred from ownership. “America’s most recent gun control efforts, such as requiring federally licensed dealers to conduct background checks, aren’t designed to keep blacks from having guns, only criminals,” Winkler writes. “Of course, the unfortunate reality is that the criminal population in America is disproportionately made up of racial minorities.”

Winkler reminds us that the more things change, the more they stay the same, especially for black folks in America. Retiring the Confederate flag might be a way to cosmetically address those concerns, but it doesn’t explain why it was still flying to begin with—or why so many people will fight to protect it, clutching their guns and heritage. Confronting the symbols of white supremacy means a true reckoning with a past that is very much alive—in Dylann Roof’s Facebook photos, on the streets of South Carolina, in our textbooks, and in our courts.

Throwing away a flag is a nice gesture, but for those mourning Charleston’s dead, it’s not the one they need.

Nico Lang is the Opinion Editor at the Daily Dot, as well as a contributor to L.A. Times, Rolling Stone, and the Onion A.V. Club. You can follow him on Twitter @nico_lang.

First I said:
“You mean like John Brown murdering and terrorizing non-slaveholders in Kansas...”
Then you responded:
“But John Brown was captured (by Col. Lee), tried and lawfully hanged for his crimes, on December 2, 1859, well more than a year before Lincoln took office. So that issue was long settled.”
I countered:
“John Brown was never punished for his murders in Kansas (or Missouri) he was hung only for his transgression(5 murders, etc) at Harper Ferry. Therefore those murders are not “long settled” often they are hardly mentioned.”
Then you argued:
“But “Bleeding Kansas” suffered deaths & destruction from terrorists on both sides, not just John Brown.
Do you recall how many pro-slavery terrorists were punished for their actions, FRiend?”
.....
I don’t engage in arguments where the subjects are always morphing into different arguments.
Incidentally the May 6, 1861 date is not a date the Confederacy “Declared War”, it is the date the Confederacy RECOGINIZED a state of war existed between the US and the Confederacy. The state of war had existed for some months before. There is a difference.
bye

ought-six: "Approved by the Missouri Legislature on October 31, 1861."

On January 17, 1861 the Missouri General Assembly passed a law calling for a state Constitutional Convention to decide the issue of Union or secession.
That Convention was elected on February 18, met and then voted on March 19, 1861 89-1 against secession.

In the events which followed, the pro-Confederate governor and 20 delegates from the convention fled to Neosho in far south-western Missouri, where they set up a rump government which declared secession in October 1861, and was recognized as a Confederate state by the Confederacy.

In the mean time, in July 1861 Missouri's elected Constitutional Convention declared all state offices vacant, and appointed new officials, including a new governor.

After the March 1862 Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas, the alleged Confederate government of Missouri never again controlled territory in Missouri.
Missouri's Confederate capital eventually moved to Marshall, Texas.

Bottom line: Missouri was always a majority Union state, with a small minority of slave-holding Confederates who neither outnumbered nor out-fought their Unionist fellow citizens.

ought-six: "Adopted 20 Nov 1861, by a Convention of the People of Kentucky"

Like Missouri, Kentucky was majority Unionist, but had a pro-Confederate governor.
After overwhelming Unionist election victories in August 1861, pro-Confederates formed their own rump government in October 1861, declared secession and were recognized by the Confederate government as a Confederate state.

That alleged Confederate government of Kentucky never controlled significant state territory, and after the Battle of Perryville in October 1862, the Confederate government of Kentucky never again set foot in Kentucky.
It was said to be located somewhere in Tennessee, but seems to have more-or-less faded into nothing by war's end.

Bottom line: Like Missouri, Kentucky was always a majority Union state, with a small minority of slave-holding Confederates who neither outnumbered nor out-fought their Unionist fellow citizens.

Agreed.

I’m a New York Born Yankee and the attack on Southern Tradition by Ignorant Fools really pisses me off.

Some of my Wife’s Family retired to MS, so I spend some time down there every year. The nicest, kindest People you would ever meet live there.

The one thing that amuses me about where they live is the large Gay Population. I was surprised to say the least, but everyone gets along simply because nobody cares.

The Gay Lifestyle isn’t pushed on People and just about everyone I know down there has Gay Friends.

It’s live an let live, but you would never know it the way Liberals talk about those supposed Bigoted Southerners.

BilLies: "Then you argued: 'But “Bleeding Kansas” suffered deaths & destruction from terrorists on both sides, not just John Brown.
Do you recall how many pro-slavery terrorists were punished for their actions, FRiend?'
.....
I don’t engage in arguments where the subjects are always morphing into different arguments"

No, you argued that John Brown deserved to be punished for his terrorist actions in Kansas.
I simply asked if pro-slavery terrorists in Kansas were ever punished?
If not, shouldn't they have been, along with John Brown?

So I'm not saying John Brown was innocent of anything, only that if we wished to punish one, shouldn't we punish them all for the same crimes?

BilLies: "Incidentally the May 6, 1861 date is not a date the Confederacy “Declared War”, it is the date the Confederacy RECOGINIZED a state of war existed between the US and the Confederacy."

It was certainly a declaration of war, in every sense of that word, establishing a formal state of war, and making any pro-Confederates in Union states subject to arrest for treason.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt declared war on Japan in exactly the same language:

"I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire"

So a declaration of war is a declaration of war, regardless of how much you gussie up the language.

ought-six: "Again, you totally miss the point. Missouri and Kentucky did approve secession measures, but they were not ratified."

Sorry, FRiend, but you just don't know the real history.
In your post #110 you quoted from resolutions of secession dated October and November 1861.
Those resolutions were not adopted by any KY or MO legislature, nor by any state Constitutional Convention.

Instead, they were adopted by rump-governments consisting of secessionists only who fled from their state capitals, setting up house elsewhere -- Missouri's in Neosho, Kentucky's in Bowling Green -- until in 1862 both were driven out of their states by military defeats.

By the way, in both Missouri and Kentucky, the original governors were highly sympathetic to the Confederacy and would likely have signed declarations of secession, had they been presented, but they never were.

So Missouri's governor fled with about 20 sympathetic delegates and declared their own little secession in Neosho.
They were immediately recognized by the powers in Richmond, Virginia as a Confederate state, but never controlled significant Missouri territory and were completely driven out of Missouri after military defeat at Pea Ridge in March 1862.

In Kentucky the pro-Confederate governor stayed, but had veto after veto overridden by huge majority Unionist legislators.
The alleged Confederate government in Kentucky was strictly a gathering of slave-holders who first declared themselves a government, then declared secession, and then were recognized by the powers in Richmond, Virginia as a Confederate state.

For more details on the Confederate government of Kentucky see this link.

For more details on the Confederate government of Missouri see this link, and also this one

ought-six: "I don’t know if it is you or someone else who keeps on screeching that secession was wrong, illegal, , etc.
Yet, those who take that position are just fine with West Virginia seceding from Virginia.
So, secession is wrong, expect when it isn’t?"

The US Constitution specifically allows for "secession" within states, provided both the Congress and the state approves it (Article 4, Section 3), which is exactly what happened in the case of West Virginia's "secession" from Virginia.

As for secession from the Union, that is also lawful-constitutional, provided that both Congress and the state approve it.
What is not lawful, under any circumstances are unilateral, unapproved declarations of secession, provocations of war against the United States, starting war against the United States and formally declaring war on the United States while sending military force to aid secessionists in Union states.

Such actions are guaranteed to get your b*tt kicked up one side of the hill and down the other.
So don't even think about doing it again, FRiend.

Sherman Logan: "If we’re talking about what the Left “wants to do” with gun control, are we talking about their present proposals or their ultimate goal?"

You make a valid point, separating 1860 Republicans' short-term from long-term goals.
Doubtless some Northern voters did wish to totally outlaw slavery, even in the South.
But in 1860 these were still a small minority, and abolitionism is not the reason Republicans attracted the majority of Northern voters.

The reason most Northerners voted Republican was their adamant opposition to expanding slavery into their own states, or into western territories which didn't want it.
And that is just what the 1860 Republican platform promised.

Certainly in 1860 Abraham Lincoln had no particular problem with slavery in the South.
Like nearly every citizen of his time, Lincoln well understood that southern slavery was a price of Union -- that if the Founders had opposed slavery in their Constitution, or if political parties had advocated abolition since, then there would be no United States.

Indeed, Lincoln is often quoted on these threads as saying that if he could abolish slavery and save the Union, or keep slavery and save the Union, or something in-between, then he would do whatever it took to save the Union.
And by everything I've seen, that was also the view of the vast majority of Northern Republicans.

Only when civil war was on them, and Lincoln could see a military advantage to feeing slaves, making some soldiers, taking others away from their Confederate masters, then abolition became the practical choice which fit rather nicely into some Republican's long term goals.

And by war's end, in 1865, no Republican could even imagine, after sacrificing hundreds of thousands of young men's lives, that slavery would still not be abolished.
By 1865, there was no doubt in any Republicans' minds that slavery must be abolished constitutionally, and freed slaves be made full citizens.

Okay, I must have missed something. What was illegal — i.e., unconstitutional — in 1861 and “is still”?

I know where you are trying to go with this: Secession.

Where, in the U.S. Constitution in effect in 1861, was secession declared unconstitutional? The simple fact is, it wasn’t.

Now, if you’ve read my FR profile you will see that I saw the secessions of 1860-1861 to be a tragedy, and that I wish it had never got to that point (though I understand why the Southern states that seceded, had, in fact, seceded).

If you are one of those “My country, right or wrong” folks, then any further discussion is pretty meaningless. Because such a sentiment implies that no matter what your country does, no matter what or whom it oppresses and violates, it is okay with you.

I love my country’s TRADITIONS, and its FOUNDING PRINCIPLES. But I despise my country’s betrayal of those virtues.

ought-six: "I know where you are trying to go with this: Secession."

Then yet again, you've not really read my posts, and do not know your history.
In fact, our Founders contemplated "disunion" in 1787 and beyond, and they are consistent in their responses to it: disunion was acceptable when it came through 1) mutual consent, or 2) from some abuse of usurpation of federal powers.
But neither condition existed in 1860 when Deep South Fire Eaters first began declaring their secession -- so those declarations were unconstitutional.

But those declarations of secession did not cause Civil War.
Neither did their formation of a new Confederate government in early 1861.
Neither did their dozens of provocations of war in seizing Federal forts, ships, arsenals and mints, among others.

Civil War did not come because the Deep South declared secession and formed a new Confederacy.
Civil War did finally come when the Confederacy provoked, started (at Fort Sumter) and formally declared war on the United States, May 6, 1861, simultaneously sending military aid to pro-Confederates in Union states.

All of that happened before a single Confederate soldier was killed in battle with any Union force, and before any Union army invaded a single Confederate state.

Yes, I know, these are facts which pro-Confederates are desperate to ignore or obfuscate, since you people want a debate over the legality of secession, in 1860.
But I'm saying that debate is irrelevant, doesn't matter, since secession is not what caused Civil War.

The Confederacy started and lost their Civil War, and that's all there is to it, FRiend.

ought-six: "If you are one of those 'My country, right or wrong; folks, then any further discussion is pretty meaningless.
Because such a sentiment implies that no matter what your country does, no matter what or whom it oppresses and violates, it is okay with you."

Now you're just being ridiculous.
The truth of this matter is that you, my FRiend are the 'My country, right or wrong' folk because you stand by and defend your country, through thick or thin, regardless of facts, right or wrong, you worship at their graves.
But like most-all the pro-Confederates who post on these threads, your country is not the USA, it's the CSA, and on these threads at least, there's nothing y'all won't say to defend them, let the facts be d*mned.

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