Why must the Confederate banner come down?
Because it is the battle flag of white cowards,
And those angry that white privilege is ending
By Douglas A. Blackmon
When I was a Boy Scout in Leland, Mississippi, my patrol in Troop 42 called itself "the Rebels" during 1976. I still have locked in a trunk somewhere little wooden blocks I painted with the names of each scout imposed over a crude image of the Confederate battle flag--a wall decoration of some sort for the scout hall. I was fascinated by the Confederacy, the Civil War, the rebel monuments on every courthouse lawn, the headstone of my ancestor Morris Foshee, with its inscription of his unit, the 47th Alabama infantry.
For a southern boy raised in the wet hothouse of what I call neo-Confederate, nostalgic triumphalism, it is astonishing to see the swift political moves in South Carolina to lower the Confederate battle emblem in the wake of the massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. All the more so, when compared to the decades of intransigence about Confederate symbols in the South and among a certain lethargic group of white Americans everywhere. How could this change happen in the blink of eye--if it does--when there was such fierce resistance and seeming fealty in the recent past to that striking blue cross and 13 stars on a red field ?
It is a mistake however, to interpret the resilience of the Confederate battle flag as "popularity" among large numbers of people, or as something that triggers outpourings of affection or other positive emotions. It is wrong even to suggest that support for public display of the flag is even closely related--as it was for me in childhood--to some fond remembrance of the past, or even a sentimental connection to soldiers of long ago who sacrificed for a cause they believed in. No, only the tiniest numbers of southerners with an attachment to the emblem of the Confederate revolt have even a vague awareness of their familial connections to the Civil War, or even faintly what life looked like in the sweaty, un-airconditioned, drawling, poverty stricken, overalls bedecked, brutish farmboy landscape of the pre-1960s South. Only the most dedicated sad-sack members of the Sons of the Confederacy or unshaven faux intellectuals at loony fringe groups like the "League of the South," or naive little boys in the 1970s, can even tell you that the "Rebel flag" began as a symbol of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and gradually came to identify in the eyes of all Americans the entire white southern uprising to defend slavery. Even fewer white southerners can tell their own family histories--like that of my great-great-grandfather Foshee, and his years as an obscure private under that banner in the 47th Alabama.
No, the seeming immovability of that symbol over the past half century has been about something very different from an appreciation of actual history. The modern resurrection and defense of the flag was wholly a product of the civil rights struggles since the 1950s, and the need for a rallying point for defenders of segregation and apologists for white discrimination and white privilege. The flag wasn't even flying in most southern states until the 1960s, and then it was hoisted with the explicit intention of telling the rest of the country, finally emerging from its own racial dark ages, to go to hell. And wherever that flag was invoked, it was accompanied in those days by explicit defenses of the most virulent racism and ethnic hate.
There was no sugar coating what it meant. The legislators and state officials who brought the battle flag out of the closet in the 1960s were the exact same people who openly praised the murders of civil rights workers, openly called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a communist ape, openly predicted the "mongrelization" of the white race if segregation ended, publicly said science proved the mental inferiority of African-Americans. The flag was as open a symbol of violent oppression of black people and resistance to democracy, as the German swastika was the symbol of fascism and a desperate desire to murder the Jews of Europe. Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett, who said ending segregation would be to "drink from the cup of genocide," knitted together all the imagery, meanings and vile intentions in September 1962, in a 15-word speech at an Ole Miss football game. Standing in a Nuremberg-esque sea of Confederate battle banners, Barnett declared: "I love Mississippi. I love her people, our customs. I love and respect our heritage." The next day, thousands of white men attacked federal marshals protecting the first black student to enroll at the university. It took 30,000 federal troops to restore calm.
The private letters among carriers of the Confederate battle flag back then are most remarkable in one way: those men actually believed the heinous things they were saying in public. And they acted under a misguided belief that most of the rest of white America, actually shared those views deep down. They honestly believed the Civil Rights Movement was an aberration--a course deviation caused by one spectacularly gifted black orator, his weak-bellied liberal supporters, and, it surely must be, his secret controllers in the Soviet Union. They truly believed all that for a good reason: just 15 or 20 years earlier, they would have been right. In the 1940s, white Americans in every part of the country--including Franklin Delano Roosevelt, most members of his cabinet and the majority of the Supreme Court--agreed that almost all black people were naturally inferior to white people. When southern politicians resurrected Confederate emblems in the 1960s, it was part of a genuine, if gigantically mistaken, belief that white Americans everywhere could be led or inspired back to their own past racist instincts.
Fortunately, that effort failed. Spectacularly.
The refusal to take the flag back down over the 50 years since then has been simply this: an effort to falsely obscure the explicitly racist nature of those leaders--and white southerners and lots of other white Americans generally--in that two-decade long extended moment of national decision when white southern men, women, teachers, preachers, politicians, police, judges, doctors, lawyers, mechanics and every other stripe overwhelmingly failed. Faced with the greatest question of social conscious they would ever confront, they failed as Americans. They failed as Christians. They failed as believers in freedom. They failed as parents and grandparents. And for the next two generations or more, it became important among white southerners to conceal or excuse that abject failure.
As it became apparent that the nation collectively rejected the immoral, backward views of the white South, it became necessary to "window dress" what had happened. The argument hadn't been about white supremacy, they began to claim, it was about the government getting too big. The objection wasn't about having black and white kids in school together, it was about violence on campus, they said. They hadn't meant to suggest that all black boys are inclined to rape, only that teen pregnancy and "welfare queens" are not good. They hadn't meant to suggest that the people whose labor they had exploited for 300 years were in fact lazy and incompetent. And yes, as Gov. Barnett told you in 1962, the Confederate battle flag wasn't about suppressing black people, or defending slavery, or endorsing the violence of the Klan. It was about bravery, honor, appreciation of genteel women, limited government and constitutional principles.
It was about "heritage not hate."
The reason the tide may be turning against this long misuse of the Confederate flag is because, thankfully, enough time and generations have passed that the number of Americans who know anything about the flag or have any legitimate interest in it is getting smaller and smaller. The architects of the flag propaganda of another time have, presumably in the wisdom of god, been taken from the earth, and those of us who remain didn't listen well. It's not just young African-Americans who don't know as much as they should about the abuses suffered by their forebears; hardly any young Americans are interested in all that unpleasant past--especially now that so many of them are dating or coveting members of the other race, listening to Hip Hop and seeing a black man in the White House. One way or another, it has been absorbed that black people achieving some semblance of equality did not in fact cause the earth to consume itself in fire.
So the only people today who exhibit the Confederate flag--other than state governments, ironically, and a few holdout private schools--are in fact white supremacists, loutish rednecks, a has-been country music singer or two, neo-Nazis, and pathetically undereducated fools. Oh, and yes, people who make meth in broken down trailer houses.
That wasn't the case as recently as the debate in Georgia 20 years ago that led to the removal of the battle emblem from that state flag, or the statewide vote on changing the flag in Mississippi at about the same time. (It failed--with even African-American voters supporting the flag in a twisted expression of home state "loyalty.") Even as late as those events in the 1990s, there were still a lot of aging white southern males around who had grown up feeling, even after the dust had settled, that the civil rights movement had been at a minimum "unfair" to whites and wrongly impugned them and their fathers before them.
Even if polite about race in public, they were still offended by and quietly seething at the suggestion that poverty and other difficulties of African-Americans were the fault of past and present white racism--instead of laziness as they had always believed. They still needed to believe their teachers were truthful when they taught the historical hoax that enslaved people actually liked slavery in the 1850s, and were happy to have been brought to America--saved from cannibalism, paganism and bestiality. That generation of southern men were not generally supporters of the Ku Klux Klan or racial violence, but at their core they enjoyed the idea that the continued use of the flag bothered the people who so bothered them. They didn't care a whit--or generally even know a whit--about the true history of the flag or their own connections to the slave-holders rebellion, but they relished how this antiseptic and increasingly invoked "heritage" propaganda innocently explained the battle flag and could be used to goad the critics they so despised.
But time marched on those gentlemen. Those aging white males are no longer the overwhelmingly dominant cohort in the southern states--just as those white voters are declining in political control of the South. Hence Virginia, Florida and North Carolina are presidential battleground states. Georgia is in play. Not many people are so obtuse still to believe that the declining performance educationally and economically of white males in rural America, especially the South, is because of affirmative action or because black people today are allowed to go to high school, and to vote.
We all understand pretty clearly now that a Dylann Roof actually has to stand on his own two feet. He can't depend on an entrenched system of silent abuse and unspoken conspiracy to prevent women or African-Americans from seeking the same entry level job that Dylann might have desired. He can't count on "heritage" and tradition to make sure that the majority of the black kids in his town can't get an education sufficient to seek upwardly mobile employment--as heritage and customs guaranteed for 150 years. The Dylann Roofs of the world have to actually compete now. And for the first time in at least a century, they actually have to be men now--not just members of cowardly mobs protecting themselves with violence and intimidation, and always anonymously. We all understand that now, at least on some level. The government isn't going to ensure your success by openly harming black people for you anymore, white man. You're actually on your own now. The petty complaints and invented aggrievements of that generation--blaming black people for all their woes--make sense to a smaller and smaller group of other people now. Even the sons of the men who still feverishly insisted on that pitiful, self-emasculating logic 20 and 30 years ago increasingly don't get their own dads anymore.
It's not dissimilar to what happened with gay marriage: at some point the hollow nature of ridiculously inflexible positions simply begins to be obvious--especially when confronted by some event so clearly horrifying and indefensible as what happened in Charleston.
That's the reality that Dylann Roof--and the rest of his scraggly, stupid ilk--are truly reeling from. Their own inadequacy. Their own failures. The slow disappearance of the certainty that all the white men will look out for all the other white men first--and somehow still save some kind of place even for the broken, intellectual runts like him. The Dylann Roofs of American today instinctively realize that their day is past. He never even had that day. They see white girls at school making the very rational choice to prefer over them black boys who are actually going somewhere. They discover that the police are willing to arrest them too for their petty drug schemes--and that harsh sentencing laws will wreck their misbegotten lives too.
Even the people that the Dylann Roofs once imagined might be allies now profess politics in which white losers like him--along with everyone else--are on their own. The government isn't here to help anymore. There is no certainty. Just being white isn't good enough, Dylann.
So a Dylann Roof lashes out in the perverse way that such an inadequate, violence-intoxicated mind can invent, swathed in the ideas and imagery so intertwined with the Confederate battle flag today. Yet, his rampage becomes a renunciation of whatever little honorable character attached to that symbol long ago. When my great-great grandfather and the rebels fighting with him to dismantle the United States charged up the hill called Little Round Top on July 2, 1863, in a decisive moment of the Battle of Gettysburg, they and their flag made clear who they were and the wrongs they were fighting for. We can at least give them that. And a third of the regiment of 1,500 fell on the battlefield that day, repulsed, thankfully, by soldiers defending the America we live in now.
Perhaps the Confederate battle flag did represent some sort of misguided valor back then. But no more.
Today, it stands for Dylann Roof, a wretch unable even to meaningfully articulate his anger at being required to take responsibility for himself, enraged at being forced to compete and survive in a world finally glimmering with at least a potential for equality. It stands for a coward like him, stripped of the protection of the lynching mobs that would have carried his flag. It stands for a loser without the spine to tell the people he found at Emanuel church who he truly was or what he truly believed--until he already had his gun trained on them. It stands for people like him who lie--by omission or commission--about their intentions. It stands for a murderer who could only savage the defenseless--who was so blind and terrified by his own emptiness that he would assault the only people who actually wanted to help him.
What bloodless shell of a person would choose to fly such a flag now? Finally, all who are willing can see that.
A Race of Whiners and Deniers
Nicholas Kristof gets it right in his NY Times column today, about how hard it is for us white folks in America to admit what enormous advantages we were born with because of the abuses of the ancestors of people who don't look like us. He is generous to mention my book, in company of superb work by Orlando Patterson, Charles Blow and others. As I've said and written thousands of times, it's not about all of us alive today with paler complexions being made to feel guilty, or other people being given a big check. Instead, it's about what kind of society we'd like our children and grandchildren to live in. It's not unlike the flawed but brilliant Founders of our country, who recognized many of the failures and tyranny of the system that nonetheless had created them and in many ways was the envy of all humanity at the time. They nonetheless imagined a yet better future, confronted the failures of the status quo at great personal risk, then invented the kind of government and institutions that they believed could achieve their visions. We have the responsibility in our time to do the same--to recognize the flaws in a system that is still the envy of the world, and be willing to imagine a future that improves upon it, and what resources and mechanisms must be in place for the most creative society in history to build that world. If there is any kind of American exceptionalism, it is our capacity to do that as a diverse and varied single nation. In the days ahead, the news from Ferguson, Missouri and other places is going to be upsetting. People of similar minds and hearts are going to be in conflict over the decision of the grand jury there--whatever that decision is. Almost certainly, the news is going to be neither a sweeping criminal indictment of the policeman at question, nor an exoneration of the police--or of the young man whose life was lost. No one is going to be satisfied--because we have a become a country where these questions cannot be sorted out in clean or satisfactory ways. How American citizens react to that conclusion is unpredictable, contradictory and worrisome. No matter what happens, we must ask why do we continue to find ourselves in this paralyzed and tortured place of uncertainty so often, and for reasons we almost always cannot untangle. We must be open to designing a future in which these things no longer are a fact of American life. If nothing else, back to Kristoff's column, white people must bring an end to this http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/opinion/sunday/when-whites-just-dont-get-it-part-4.html cross-generational behavior of denial regarding the consequences of our ancestors' racially motivated behavior, and cease--dear god, please cease--the decades of whining whenever we are asked to face reality.Is President Obama truly ready to release thousands of prisoners?
My American Forum Interview
With Attorney General Eric H. Holder
by Douglas A. Blackmon
Attorney General Eric H. Holder made some remarkable comments to me recently about the inequities of the American system of justice, and strongly suggested that the Obama administration is finally ready to directly address that more than 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the U.S.--25% of all prisoners in the world--and that more than 10,000 non-violent federal inmates sentenced at the height of the drug war are serving sentences far longer than they would receive if convicted under current U.S. law.
- Holder said there are “probably thousands” of Americans imprisoned in the U.S. serving sentences unjustifiably long sentences.
- He acknowledged the growing evidence that substantial numbers of people are convicted of crimes they didn't commit, and called this reality the “ultimate horror” of our justice system.
- Most dramatically, the attorney general--the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the U.S.--strongly suggested that a wave of presidential commutations and judicial reviews for non-violent drug offenders may be coming from the White House and federal courts in the months ahead.
WATCH THE INTERVIEW HERE: http://millercenter.org/events/2014/a-conversation-with-eric-holder
If it comes to pass, the possibility that Holder and President Barack Obama may be ready to more directly confront mass incarceration will be welcome news to many Americans. The problems of "mass incarceration" and an urgent imperative that they be addressed has become an article of faith among liberals. In recent months, many conservatives and libertarians have joined the bandwagon--often motivated by the staggering cost of imprisoning such a huge number of citizens. Polling in recent years indicated that at least half of all Americans believed too many people were in prison, and that Americans on average felt at least 20% should be released.
The administration has been harshly criticized for not moving faster on this issue in the past five years--especially amid evidence that African-American men are disproportionately imprisoned. "Although both the president and Attorney General Holder often say they want to encourage frank dialogues about race, we’ve seen relatively little in terms of ... actual initiative and leadership," said Michelle Alexander, author of the bestselling book on mass incarceration The New Jim Crow, in an interview last year.
But a serious effort to set thousands of inmates free is also going to force open a conversation that few Americans--and certainly not our national leaders--have been willing to confront. That's because beyond the approximately 12,000 federal prisoners serving sentences for drug crimes that clearly are indefensibly long, there are vastly larger numbers of inmates in state and local prisons and jails who by similar standards should also be set free. That 20% of all prisoners who poll respondents said should be set released, for instance, would add up to nearly half a million people. On top of that, there are approximately 600,000 prisoners released each year at the normal end of their incarcerations. That conjures the vision of potentially 1 million or more ex-cons returning to the outside world in the not too distant future.
The conflict that will inevitably develop around any mass release effort is driven by this: some of those prisoners were innocent of any crime, but the vast majority did in fact break the law. That matters, even if the law or penalty looks unjust, or absurd, in some eyes. Because when most of those inmates were imprisoned, their fellow Americans, regardless of race, seemed to overwhelmingly support the most harsh sentences short of death. Three-strikes-and-you're-out laws and mandatory requirements of life in prison for many non-violent offenders were the rage among voters in the 1980s and 1990s. (The state of Massachusetts passed a 3-strikes law only a little more than a year ago, and it was signed into law by an African-American governor.) Attorney General Holder himself tells a story of when he was a young federal prosecutor in Washington D.C. promoting inner city programs aimed at reducing the number of young black men headed to prison. Many black residents in crime-blighted neighborhoods told him his efforts sounded like a very idea to pursue, but that in the meantime would he please go ahead and arrest all the hoodlums outside the building right then and take them away.
Now that crime rates have been plummeting for more than a decade, many Americans are suffering a mass incarceration hangover. After binging on prison sentences and boot camps for two decades, they have doubts about the support they offered for so harsh a system back when police raids on drug dealers were a nightly staple of local television newscasts. Nonetheless, imagine the conversations that will occur as a million ex-prisoners return to communities that already offer woefully little support for ex-cons or programs designed to help former prisoners avoid getting in trouble again. The "felon" status for prisoners wouldn't be going away for these men and women in either of the new initiatives described by Attorney General Holder. Prospects for jobs or bank loans will be slim. The toll of years in prison will be obvious. And as it has been for generations, most Americans won’t have much sympathy for anyone explaining their absence from the workforce by saying they just finished a long stretch in the penitentiary.
It may also be extraordinarily difficult for either President Obama or federal judges to sort out which of these thousands of federal prisoners are fully victims of an era of over-punishment, versus others whose sentences look too harsh on paper but in reality were the result of law enforcement officials using whatever means possible to remove truly bad actors from the streets.
And finally, perhaps the biggest question of all, who will represent these thousands of prisoners in their petitions to President Obama or through the courts? The vast majority of prisoners have no resources of their own to hire a lawyer. Most probably had no real representation when they accepted one of the plea bargains that puts most prisoners in jail. If they did have a lawyer, they haven’t had contact with that attorney since the day they went into the system—back in 1988 or 1992 or 2001 or some other distant year hundreds or thousands of clients ago, and that their public defender now barely remembers. Few inmates have family support systems that could find or pay for a lawyer. And unless an inmate is on death row—whose residents receive the overwhelming majority of every dollar spent for indigent defense in the U.S., the availability of pro bono lawyers for most incarcerated Americans is virtually nil.
So the question will be: are private attorneys across the country—thousands of them—willing to take on this enormous task, presumably on their own dime?However complicated all this may be, Holder made it clear in my interview that he and President Obama plan to do much more in the administration’s second term to start the ball rolling by facilitating the possible release of larger numbers of prisoners. That effort includes support for legislation currently pending in Congress to create a new, faster avenue of judicial review for federal prisoners serving jail terms longer than what would be imposed under current U.S. law. If passed, that measure would address what is widely viewed as a gaping hole in the administration’s highest profile effort so far to address mass incarceration: the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act. That law greatly narrowed the disparity between sentences mandated for offenses involving crack cocaine—a drug often associated with the very poor and African-Americans—and those with powder cocaine—a form of the same drug more used by whites and the affluent. But the 2010 changes weren’t retroactive—meaning about 12,000 non-violent prisoners given very long sentences at the height of the drug war got no relief. The total number of federal prisoners serving sentences related to crack cocaine approaches 30,000.
“We put in place some pretty draconian sentencing measures,” Holder told me. “Where people who were not engaged in the violent distribution of drugs ended up with ten, twenty, thirty [years]--lifetime sentences. And without a violent component to those crimes it seems to me that some people are serving jail sentences that are far too long and that don’t serve any particular law enforcement purpose.”
More startling than Holder’s support for allowing federal judges to more easily review—and shorten—sentences, were his statements suggesting a faster process for seeking direct presidential intervention and a blunt acknowledgement that the justice system makes many errors.
“With the laws that have been passed and the laws that are potentially going to be passed … there is going to be, I think, a greater capacity, a greater legal capacity for these kinds of claims to be raised,” Holder said.
“Having laid the foundation in the first term … the president, yeah, is going to be more willing to look at those things,” Holder said. “But … for him to look at them we have to get them into the system and to him, and that is a process that is often times a long one. That is why I think the passage of this legislation is so important so that someone can raise those kinds of concerns and have an adjudication done by a district court judge. Perhaps not agreed to by the government, perhaps challenged by the government, but have a judge decide whether or not a person can be released. But I think both of those should be operating."
Holder said the Department of Justice would begin actively encouraging lawyers to identify prisoners whose sentences should be shortened and to file petitions for White House commutations.
“We have…to make people who are incarcerated aware of that avenue,” Holder said, “So I’ve asked members of the private bar to somehow engage with the people who are in prison so that the appropriate papers get filed, are put into the system, and ultimately the White House counsel’s office, and ultimately on the president’s desk.”
Asked about the attorney general’s comments, a White House spokesman referred to President Obama’s statement in December accompanying the commutation of eight prisoners who had received long sentences for non-violent drug offenses. The president said then that “thousands of inmates” are imprisoned under an “unfair system” of sentencing requirements that are no longer applied in new prosecutions. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/12/19/statement-president-clemency
A few day after Holder's comments to me, Deputy Attorney General James Cole elaborated on the new approach in a speech to the New York State Bar Association, asking lawyers to help identify inmates who may deserve sentence reductions and filing for commutations or court reviews on their behalf. In the American Forum interview, Holder also strongly endorsed the legislation pending in congress to create a faster, channel for judges to review sentences. Federal prosecutors around the country have already raised some concerns about how far this effort might go. One slightly stunned regional U.S. Attorney told me, "This could be a huge headache for us."
All this possible activity comes at time when evidence is mounting that far more innocent people are falsely convicted in U.S. courts than was long imagined. DNA based exonerations of death row inmates have rattled confidence even in what are supposed to be the most well-resourced and closely monitored proceedings in the system, because the life of the defendant is at stake. Earlier this week, an annual report from the National Registry of Exonerations, compiled by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, said nearly 90 falsely convicted prisoners were cleared of their crimes in the U.S. during 2013—more than in any previous year. A total of more than 1,300 exonerations have occurred over the past 25 years. http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Exonerations_in_2013_Report.pdf
Citing President Obama’s commutations in December (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/12/19/president-obama-grants-pardons-and-commutation) Holder said in the American Forum interview, which began airing on Feb. 9, that the White House is prepared to use its executive power more forcefully in the second term in similar cases.
Holder, the nation’s first African-American attorney general, said the recent commutations should be interpreted as a signal that the president is ready to move on even larger numbers of such cases.
“The president has indicated a willingness and has demonstrated that willingness by those commutations that he granted,” Holder said.
The Attorney General’s comments came during an interview that has already triggered a small frenzy of news coverage in the New York Times, Politico, major networks and papers all over the U.S. Those headlines were mostly about Holder’s surprise promise to make it possible for banks to do business with newly legalized marijuana sellers in Colorado and Washington, his criticism of former Defense Secretary Bob Gates’s book and comments on whether NSA leaker Edward Snowden could get a plea deal from the U.S.
But reporters largely overlooked what may have been some of Holder’s most significant statements about the mass incarceration. Holder defended the U.S. judicial system as well-intentioned and ultimately reliable, but also said too many Americans have been too harshly punished for non-violent crimes, or for crimes they didn’t commit.
“Some people are serving jail sentences that are far too long and that don’t serve any particular law enforcement purpose,” Holder said. “My guess would probably be thousands if you look at the totality of our prison population.”
Holder called the growing evidence of false convictions of innocent Americans “the ultimate horror.”
“The notion that we have innocent people serving time … that’s why we have pushed, for instance, to make sure that that the indigent defense system that we have in place…is much more effective,” Holder said. “We have to really as a society say that is simply something that is unacceptable…As good as our system is, it is ultimately a system that is filled with men and women who are well-intentioned, but who make mistakes.”
If big changes are truly--finally--coming on the issue of mass incarceration, this isn't going to be a simple process. Throwing open the prison cells will only be the beginning.
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