Tearing it down is a victory

I AGREE with Charlie Post ("Removing the flag isn't enough") that removing Confederate flags, monuments and symbols is a reason for elation, and likewise that racism is not a relic of some pre-modern era, but integral to how capitalism functions on a daily basis. But while he makes some interesting and valid points, I don't understand his ambivalence.

This is a clear step forward for anti-racist activists, both ideologically and materially. Specifically, forcing the government to end its endorsement of racist symbols is much more than "completely symbolic."

To justify his ambivalence, Charlie asserts that the Confederate flag is an "embarrassment to the capitalist class." This may be true, but they did not arrive at this sentiment on their own. They are embarrassed precisely because anti-racist forces have argued and struggled for years over this. Big business was not embarrassed in the '50s and '60s when the flags went up all over the South in defiance of the civil rights movement. They were still not embarrassed by it in the 1990s, when Confederate flags appeared on campaign materials for Clinton and Gore (the first and so-far only presidential ticket composed of candidates from the former Confederacy).

They only started being embarrassed by it when a movement and boycott erupted over the Confederate flag in the late 1990s, with thousands of people marching against the symbols and forcing, for example, South Carolina to remove the Confederate flag from over its Capitol building and Georgia to change its state flag.

In the aftermath of 9/11, responding to the twin pressures of that movement and a surfeit of pro-war nationalism, many white supremacists quietly removed their Confederate flags, replacing them (and then some) with American flags. (I remember remarking to a comrade from Australia that the one consolation prize in that dark era was seeing those Confederate flags disappear.)

But when the mainstream liberal groups like the NAACP that led that movement went into hibernation at the behest of the Democratic Party, and particularly since a Black man was elected president, the neo-Confederates have crept back out of the gutters, merging into the Tea Party right.

THIS IS not just symbolism, as the horrific massacre in Charleston clearly shows. Murderous Confederate fascists like Dylann Roof don't appear out of nowhere. They are nurtured in a warm cocoon of "soft" racism embodied by the Confederate flags and memorials that give legitimacy to the idea that there is something honorable in figures like Robert E. Lee, who ordered the summary execution of any Black troops taken prisoner in the Civil War.

We want to deny them that cocoon. We want to expose these neo-Confederates as the fascists they are, tear away their muddle-headed "I'm-not-racist-but" soft supporters, deny the dog whistles to the politicians and pundits, and root out the long tradition of white supremacy in the South and the rest of the country. Denying them that space not only pushes the hard right to the margins, it also opens up space for little-known histories of anti-racist resistance and interracial struggle to take hold, histories that can inspire and guide a different kind of struggle than the racist violence that has marked our country--South and North--since its beginning.

That will not happen because corporate tycoons like Bill Gates eventually become embarrassed by Confederate symbolism. That sentiment plays into the exact idea that Post rightly argues against--that neo-Confederate symbology and racism are something so backward that big, advanced capitalist firms like Walmart would innately be against them, even without a mass movement and active struggle.

In fact, far from being embarrassing, racism at Walmart is legendary, and efforts to unionize its workforce have rightly pointed out its racist (and sexist) hiring and staffing policies. Likewise, the most advanced tech firms in Silicon Valley have demographics that wouldn't be unusual in the 19th century--and this is not an accident. (If they can control the behavior of electrons at the nanometer level, then they can certainly control who they hire.) In fact, it is clear that these firms are only "embarrassed" by the Confederate flag now because there is a generalized and growing movement against racism that is not limited to protesting police brutality.

Taking this issue head on is more important than ever. Because if Post is right that racism is thoroughly modern and not some anachronistic holdover from a primitive pre-capitalist past, it is equally true that the South is not the economic and cultural backwater it is often portrayed as. In fact, the South is Corporate America's model for the future of the whole country: a low-wage, high-poverty, low-regulation corporate utopia with a desperate and segregated working class at its core. As they implement this strategy, racism has been and will continue to be central to that project.

Fighting that racism in all its forms--and understanding that the opposition to reforms like universal health care, public housing, and public education are irrevocably intertwined with racism--needs to be central to ours.
Dave C., Atlanta