Confederate Flag Rebel the South Shall Rise Again
Earlier today, Southward Carolina governor Nikki Haley signed a law ordering the removal of the Confederate battle flag from capitol grounds. For decades, South Carolina had joined with other states and land institutions below the Mason-Dixon Line in flying the flag. Many Southerners insist that the Confederate flag symbolizes pride in Southern heritage and Insubordinate spirit. It is non, they claim, an endorsement of slavery or race-based hatred.
South Carolina is not alone. In Washington, D.C., Rep. John Boehner (R. – OH) chosen for civil debate over whether Congress ought to order the removal of Confederate symbols from federal lands. The House Speaker, apparently overlooking the difficulty of what he was proposing, told reporters, "I really think information technology'due south time for some adults here in the Congress to really sit downwardly and take a conversation nearly how to address this issue."
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Walker v. Sons of Amalgamated Veterans that Texas officials could refuse an application for license plates begetting the battle flag. Other states are making similar moves, forth with canton and municipal governments. Even the Onion is weighing in on "The Pros and Cons of Flying the Amalgamated Flag."
When You Say 'Heroes,' Whose Heroes Are You lot Talking Nigh?
In contempo weeks, statues of Confederate icons take been defaced in Maryland, Southward Carolina, and Texas. In Charleston, someone spray-painted a statue of John C. Calhoun with phrases including "Blackness Lives Matter." Another Charleston monument was spray-painted with that phrase and "This is the problem. #RACIST."
No give-and-take on whether the protesting vandals thought that including a hashtag would help people searching for graffiti virtually racism to improve discover their work.
Academy of Texas at Austin President Greg Fenves assembled a task forcefulness to consider removing statues of Jefferson Davis and other Confederate Civil State of war heroes after the monuments were similarly spray-painted by protestors.
What to make of the push button to strip public places of symbols of the Sometime South?
When asked nigh the controversy on the local public radio show "Houston Matters," I began by confessing that I find fixation on Confederate culture inexplainable. I take lived in Texas for years of my adult life, but my instincts confute my Yankee upbringing. My ordinarily conservative political leanings don't alter that.
Moving by gut reactions, I find the common arguments in favor of displaying Amalgamated imagery pretty deficient, or at least incomplete. Accept, for example, the claim that flying the flag is a mode for Southerners to honor their ancestors who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil State of war.
At present, I don't know your great-grandfather. Merely even if he was a Insubordinate veteran, I bet you tin discover a style to memorialize him equally an individual without using the symbol of the political regime for which he fought. If you choose to focus on the political symbol, then y'all need to exist prepared to business relationship for that political symbol'south social pregnant.
Either you accept the symbol's significance as it is today or y'all owe the world a damned clear explanation of why you but can't call back of whatever other mode to express cultural or familial pride. Examples might include . . . any fashion that doesn't jab at unhealed wounds left by an American Holocaust. After all, mail service-Earth War Two Germans seem to have figured out how this sort of thing goes. Are American Southerners less capable than Germans?
Many Confederate heroes were responsible for social appurtenances, others contend. I concur that publicly honoring them for those good deeds, without praising their endorsement of slavery, is at least plausible.
In that case, why not take this every bit an opportunity to employ the public space to open a dialogue nigh a pervasive tension in American history? Juxtapose Confederate statues with works of art — statues, murals, sculptures — depicting the atrocities of slavery, for example.
So, Maybe That's What Kid Rock, Et Al. Are So Excited About
Supporters of keeping the flag in public space may fence that they are jubilant aspects of the Confederacy that accept nothing at all to do with slavery per se. Ask many contemporary bearers of the flag what it symbolizes, if not institutionalized racial oppression, and they volition apply phrases similar "land sovereignty" and "Southern self-determination." You might even hear about resisting "The War of Northern Aggression."
When, in a fit of clemency, i reads the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, simply a few differences from the U.Southward. Constitution — known to most Americans exterior of the South equally the Constitution — appear. Bated from the clauses providing for the perpetuation of Southern slavery, the nigh notable differences involve states' rights. For example, the preamble begins, "We, the people of the Amalgamated States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character . . . ." Article I, Section 2 of the Confederate version gave states the power to impeach federal judges and officers working within their borders. The Old Due south liked powerful states.
We might accept provisionally that the American Ceremonious War was non almost manumissive slavery, but rather almost Southern states' self-decision. Simply if the empowerment of individual state governments is what flag-waving Southerners are celebrating, then they shouldn't take much umbrage at what happened in South Carolina, nor in most other recent cases.
Subsequently all, the process looks awfully similar federalism in action. Individual sovereign state and local governments are deciding to remove Amalgamated symbols from public spaces. Even the U.S. Congress is just considering legislating what happens in expressly federal spaces like National Parks. They aren't mandating a universal ban on all public property.
Representative Democracy Is Still Democracy
Legislatures get to prohibit or endorse all sorts of things without constitutional strictures compelling the state one way or another. Most frequently, the democratic process decides, not the land or U.South. Constitutions. Certainly not unelected, life-tenured jurists hell-bent on social engineering at the expense of ramble interpretation. At least four people accept been trying to tell Justice Kennedy that, to no avail. But that shouldn't deter the residual of usa.
Recent decisions similar the one in Due south Carolina originate in the halls of the legislature, non from a judge'due south bench in the courthouse. No federal guess issued a fiat in this case. Elected representatives, subject to political consequences, acted. Mistaking legislative activeness with a pop vote or referendum would be naive, but mistaking legislative activity with exterior oppression would be foolish. Representative democracy may not be direct democracy, but it is notwithstanding republic.
Fans of the Confederacy are free to disagree with the removal of Southern symbols as a affair of pure policy, of form. But it would exist ironic if people who want to display symbols that they claim only signify states' rights and cocky-governance would refuse the choices of individual states to govern themselves in a slightly less racially inflammatory mode. Rising up to take down the Amalgamated flag may be the sort of Southern independence that Americans on both sides of the Bricklayer-Dixon Line can appreciate.
Tamara Tabo is a summa cum laude graduate of the Thurgood Marshall School of Constabulary at Texas Southern University, where she served as Editor-in-Master of the school's law review. Subsequently graduation, she clerked on the U.South. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She currently heads the Center for Legal Pedagogy at Texas Southern University, an plant applying cognitive science to improvements in legal pedagogy. You can reach her at tabo.atl@gmail.com.
Confederate Flag Rebel the South Shall Rise Again
Source: https://abovethelaw.com/2015/07/the-south-will-rise-again-and-this-time-it-will-try-to-be-less-racist/