Here's a chance for white folks to prove that they've banished racism: Recognize the facts that the Confederacy was no better or different than the Nazi empire, and remove all state-sponsored celebrations of it. Supporting that flag and its leaders can, in my assessment, be justified on either of two grounds: ignorance of the facts, or devotion to white supremacy. I believe that most whites who celebrate the confederacy are simply ignorant of the facts, and have not opened their minds to this subject.
Here some politicians address the flag problem in South Carolina. But removing the flag from state property represents only one step among several required to rectify this situation:
1. Remove confederate flags from all state-sponsored property or activities.
2. Remove statues as well, placing them in museums.
3. Replacing those statues with statues to people who fought the confederacy, fought for black liberation, or otherwise fought against slavery and for racial equality.
4. Rename schools, streets, and counties in a similar fashion.
By the way, I oppose any measures to ban private citizens from celebrating the confederates or the Nazis, such as Harvard's ban on swastikas and confederate emblems. I do support challenging such people in public, however.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
10 comments:
The only problem with your proposal is that it forces the racists underground.
This is why I feel racial conditions in the south are better for Blacks than in the North. In the south, you know who your enemies are. In the North, they lurk and hide using covert tactics.
I am certainly opposed to the Confederacy and the racism for which it stood. Others believe that racism is a part of their heritage, and they embrace it and celebrate it.
Ultimately the civil war was an economic war and a political war with Southerners wanting to continue their subjugation of other humans and using that free labor as an ecomomic advantage. The industrial north (almost as racist as the south) just didn't want the southern agriculturalists to have the unfair advantage of free labor.
In the end, slavery is a bad economic model. Southerners found that they could use sharecropping and slave wages to increase profits and lower costs. Then they used this model to start taking industrial jobs from the north's union labor force. Now other countries are using this model to take jobs from the US as a whole.
Karma is a bitch, ain't it?
By the way, the references to Barak Obama were completely out of place in this story. I thought it was about the Confederate flag in SC. Why all the references to Obama in Chicago preaching to an African-American audience that isn't thinking about South Carolina at all?
Barak Obama would lose South Carolina as would Joe Biden. There is no relation.
Nadir writes: ========================
using that free labor as an ecomomic advantage.
=======================================
Slave labor was *NOT* free labor. To the contrary, it was more expensive than wage labor (then known as "free labor" because free people performed it in exchange for wages). This placed southern white businesses not at an advantaged, but rather at a disadvantage, which is why the southern economy was a wreck... and so much so that from 1800 until 1860 the white population's size froze in place, as so many honkies born in slave states moved to free states, and so few moved in, that only the free states had a population increase during that time. The southern economy boomed after the war, then stagnated again with the end of reconstruction and the effective re-enslavement of blacks. These economic data help disprove any profit-based advocacy of slavery or racism.
The appeal of racism and slavery lie outside of economics. Many humans prefer non-economic rewards to economic ones. Sometimes this is good, but often it is bad.
The economic issue of the US civil war boils down exactly to this: whites in the north who preferred economic benefits over the non-economic benefits of white supremacy in the form of slavery vs. white supremacists of the south who wanted to spread slavery to the new states. The white "free labor" advocates wanted to protect the new states from economic ruin caused by slavery.
But in addition a very substantial moral crusade of Abolition existed in the north. This movement was decisive in the feds winning, and it even became dominant. Without it, whites in the north would have ended their pro-war support after years of crushing defeats.
"Slave labor was *NOT* free labor. To the contrary, it was more expensive than wage labor (then known as "free labor" because free people performed it in exchange for wages). This placed southern white businesses not at an advantaged, but rather at a disadvantage, which is why the southern economy was a wreck... and so much so that from 1800 until 1860 the white population's size froze in place, as so many honkies born in slave states moved to free states, and so few moved in, that only the free states had a population increase during that time."
That's what I said:
"In the end, slavery is a bad economic model."
Nadir wrote: =================================
The industrial north (almost as racist as the south) just didn't want the southern agriculturalists to have the unfair advantage of free labor.
================================================
You are espousing a myth. Slave labor was so expansive that the typical slave owner owed debts to northern bankers who financed the purchase equivalent to several tractors (or a single tractor that could perform for 40 years). Slave labor's expense and inefficiency put slave owners at a huge economic disadvantage. The massive inefficiency of slavery took two main forms. Perhaps most importantly was the rendering of labor into capital instead of expense. Where the free state capitalist could hire or fire workers in response to market fluctuations, the slave state capitalist could increase labor or reduce labor only via the purchase or sale of what amounted to a massively expensive machine.
The second form of inefficiency involved the workers themselves, who were required to be uneducated, and many of whom practiced passive resistance.
Then there is the ability of free laborers to earn and save and then purchase the goods and services produced by other capitalists, vs. the enforced poverty and denial of such options to slave laborers. In the free states, the free laborers in one factory could and did purchase the output of the free laborers in other factories. In the slave states, meanwhile, the people providing the labor provide consumers for nobody.
What shocks me is not that anti-black racism in the north was pervasive, but that so many areas provided support for blacks. Many is the time that thousands -- sometimes 100s of thousands -- of whites massed together too rescue black escapees from southern slave snatchers. The abolitionist movement was real and substantial.
I'm on board with banning the confederate flag from public buildings, but I object to the statement that the confederate south was "no different from" Nazi Germany. No that their weren't similarities -- both regimes hinged on racism backed by state violence -- but they emerged from radically different political situations. Let's be nuanced enough to make historical comparisons without resorting to flat historical equations. Hitler and John C. Calhoun were both despicable human beings, but Hitler doesn't equal John C. Calhoun.
"Let's be nuanced enough to make historical comparisons without resorting to flat historical equations. Hitler and John C. Calhoun were both despicable human beings, but Hitler doesn't equal John C. Calhoun."
I agree, Tom. Paul is a good student of the George W. Bush "oversimplification" school of debate. Hence his comparison of the Iraq war to the US Civil War and WWII.
Tom: Please explain how you reject my equation. Of course no two things are identical; if they were they wouldn't be two different things, but rather the same thing.
Do you equate the prohibition on drugs with the prohibition on booze?
The question is: how can people who agree that the German government should not officially fly swastikas or name streets and schools for Nazis or erect and maintain statues for them agree that US states should?
What do you gain by agreeing with the neo-confederates that, unlike the Nazis, their heroes deserve contemporary official respect, and that their displays of confederate symbols any less signifies racism and tyranny than do the Nazis?
Please explain the significant differences between the Nazis and Confederates that invalidates my equating them. After all, many liberals call Bush a Hitler and the Republicans Nazis. Is Bush more of a Hitler than Calhoun? Are today's republicans more like Nazis than the Confederates were?
Tom: With the absolute popular rejection of Naziism and its symbols, please help me find a rhetorical shorthand in my attempt to obtain the same social prohibitions for the confederates. Both:
1. Opposed democracy.
2. Were premised on white supremacy, but the Confederates even more officially so.
3. Subjugated people based on racial categorization, though for the Nazis only 1% of the German population was Jewish, whereas nearly 50% of the confederate territory's population was black.
4. Sought an expanding empire based on tyranny and racism.
5. Employed slavery, but the confederacy a much greater fraction of its population.
6. Used democratic processes to implement tyranny.
7. Mandated the death penalty for people who espoused anti-racist views.
8. Both employed violence to annex lands that were subject of long-standing dispute.
9. Both regarded themselves as victims of "foreign" and unfair subjugation.
If I am correct in the above similarities, what is left to invalidate the equation? That the Nazis used gas chambers and the Confederates used plantations? The Nazis had tanks and submarines? What distinction is left worth to make when convincing a person who is appalled at the sight of a swastika, but countenances a confederate bumper sticker or statue on the courthouse lawn, to apply the same disdain to both?
Post a Comment