dagblog - Comments for "Dr. King, Donald Trump, And The South"

Doc, the Confederate flag can

PeraclesPlease — Sun, 24 Jan 2016 18:33:57 +0000

Doc, the Confederate flag can easily mean different things to different people. I've explained before that some people in Europe wave the rebel flag over their weekend cottages or tents as a sign of rebelliousness, country music, symbol of the US. I can tell you that growing up in the south, most of the people I knew thought of the flag simply as a symbol of the south and a trapping of southern music, a bit of rebellious nature, not any nostalgic longing for slavery. Same in western states like Colorado. Yes, it's possible for that to happen even as a Strom Thurmond or George Wallace or the post-Newt Gingrich appeals to white sheet-wearing racists with the same symbol at the same time. What was the breakdown of people who had it as a racist symbol vs. those who simply had it cultural? No clue - maybe someone ran a survey. Did it matter so much to blacks at the time vs now? I also don't know - just because they weren't protesting it doesn't mean it didn't bother them, doesn't mean it did. Strangely enough or not, the use of the rebel flag has become much more racist and political in the last decade than it was in the 70's and 80's - funny what figures like Lee Atwater can do, king of the racist dog whistle.

If you're a Native American, the US flag coming over the hill hardly stimulates feelings of Democracy and freedom - it likely means the cavalry coming to wipe out your tribe, genocide. If you're in Northern Ireland, the Union Jack or walking down the street wearing orange mean something much different than anywhere else. The US flag at a Trump event looks more menacing than I've ever seen the Stars and Bars. (I did get stopped by a Klan march one time way out in the boonies, but was so surprised & eager to get out of there, I didn't bother to note what kinds of flags or anything else they had)

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I thought of anyone here you could deal with contradictions and some ambiguity, even knowing that ambiguity doesn't count as absolute proof. It'd be much harder for an Orangeman to deny pro-Brit significance of his color than a southerner to say his flag had no racist intent, though if that southerner is also clamoring about welfare queens and voting fraud and other dog whistle stances, I'd be skeptical.

From recent flareups in the news, I think we're all informed that Woodrow Wilson was rather a dick towards blacks through reversing progress in government service among other racist actions. That of course doesn't mean everyone who regarded Wilson as a good progressive is also racist, though the more we know about Wilson we will expect people to not gloss over his racist tendencies, and we might find that there's not that much to admire about Wilson after all.

On the other hand, same-sex marriage has become a goal in LGBT circles in the last 20 years - not so much beforehand. But it's become fashionable to judge people on when they supported gay marriage, as if one's ability to leap off a new bridge without thinking or time for adjustment is the only sane adult reaction to change and new proposals.

I'm reading some stuff on heuristics, common iffy patterns we use to simplify our lives. One is Confirmation Bias, which with campaign season it's easy to magnify every offense and every attitude as universal, just as with a modern media echo chamber a news story will get repeated in an infinite feedback loop that will harden opinions and trip away any ambiguity in short time - everything's A or B.

I'm sympathetic to Danny's experiences and the black guy attending the Iowa Trump event (which by the way isn't the south), and others - I would have thought racism would decrease quite a bit by now, but then I see horrid acts that even racist southern cops probably would have been slow to carry out back in the day.

There were supremacists back then - people who believed stuff they thought the Bible said, that intermarriage was a threat, that they were defending the life. Not equally spread, but huge across the south I really have trouble believing there are so many today - I think it's more fashion, an awful kind of Dukes of Hazzard that pumps up fake emotion past the usual bullshit cowboy boots and hats and exaggerated accents and swagger. Randy Newman did "Rednecks" around 1971, and it's not like there haven't been enough southerners college-educated since then to know the real score, that the south's future isn't a bunch of cotton and corn fields, but in places like North Carolina's Research Triangle, Atlanta's tech & manufacturing, the various NASA branches scattered about the south, the relocated car factories from the Rust Belt... The US is 80% urban or suburban these days, and even the stereotypical dumb Southerner is smart enough to figure that out (even though the south is probably only ~65% urban).

One area MLK likely would have found common ground to discuss is endemic poverty in the south - they have 9 out of the 10 poorest states. And he was smart enough to know that poverty breeds division, jealousy, hatred. Here's the map - instead of the Cotton Belt, we've got the dirt poor belt. And with the south's leaders determined to keep people poor, bitter, uneducated, it's a bit of a quandary what to do about it.

Thanks Doc! We finished up a

Danny Cardwell — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 02:10:13 +0000

In reply to Another good post, Danny.

Thanks Doc! We finished up a long and strange week of celebration. I had a lecture today followed by a prayer meeting. These are interesting times in the south.

Another good post, Danny.

Doctor Cleveland — Fri, 22 Jan 2016 01:24:49 +0000

In reply to Dr. King, Donald Trump, And The South

Another good post, Danny.

It's maddening that so many people talk about race relations in this country in such an abstract, fact-free way.

A Confederate flag doesn't NOT mean what it means just because YOU say that's not what you mean, any more than a swastika "doesn't necessarily" mean support for Nazism if I say "no, it's just an old Sanskrit sun symbol."

And there's this.If you're

barefooted — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 03:52:15 +0000

In reply to Dr. King, Donald Trump, And The South

And there's this.

If you're white, you don't get it. I live in NC, a much more diverse state than some others, but I don't get it. Not like I could, or likely ever will - but it's not just the South anymore.

I have some cousins in

moat — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 00:53:46 +0000

In reply to Dr. King, Donald Trump, And The South

I have some cousins in Mississippi who probably waved the Confederate battle flag or something similar to commemorate the day. I think of them when I remember Martin Luther King Jr. insisting that changing the most basic immoral set of laws was just the beginning of the struggle he foresaw.
I also think of the address he made receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. He spoke of three problems standing in the way of humans surviving for much longer: Racial Injustice, Poverty, and War. As crappy and compelling as problems get with our immediate neighbors, those local difficulties are now all connected to problems throughout the world.
Against that measure, I cannot look down upon my cousins from a great height. My negation does not amount to anything by itself.

Thanks for sharing these

Oxy Mora — Wed, 20 Jan 2016 00:31:15 +0000

In reply to Dr. King, Donald Trump, And The South

Thanks for sharing these thoughts, Danny. I don't know how a black guy can stomach such racism. I do think that Trump is showing how disgusting racism is and that many will decide that we need to rid ourselves of it.

(No subject)

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 23:48:00 +0000

In reply to As I said an old, repetitive

As I said an old, repetitive

rmrd0000 — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 23:06:57 +0000

In reply to That has little to do with

As I said an old, repetitive discussion. I agree with Lee's contemporary Frederick Douglas that Lee was a bigot, a terrorist, and a waste of carbon atoms.

“After Lee’s death in 1870, Frederick Douglass, the former fugitive slave who had become the nation’s most prominent African-American, wrote, ‘We can scarcely take up a newspaper ... that is not filled with nauseating flatteries’ of Lee, from which ‘it would seem ... that the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven.’

http://richmond.indymedia.org/newswire/display/12541/

I agree with the Mayor of New Orleans that the statue of Lee in NOLA should come down.

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/06/lee_circle_statue_new_orl...

This is a side issue. It's 2016. The blog is about current events. The current event of separating King and Lee birthday celebrations. There was a comment about a joke made in 2016.

That has little to do with

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 22:21:17 +0000

In reply to Lee's state supported slavery

That has little to do with Benedict Arnold. Perhaps if Robert E. Lee had secretly conspired to surrender Richmond to Lincoln it would. Apples, Oranges & Peaches - all have their own taste, color and texture, despite being relatively round. Anyway, sometimes despite your druthers, there's just one way out.

Lee's state supported slavery

rmrd0000 — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 21:53:16 +0000

In reply to That's cute, but Lee defended

Lee's state supported slavery. Lee's state seceded because slavery would not be expanding in the United States.This is an old, repetitive argument.