June 23--In announcing her belated determination to remove the Confederate battle flag from its position of honor on the grounds the South Carolina statehouse Monday, Gov. Nikki Haley said, "We do not need to declare a winner and a loser here."
Wrong.
We do.
The losers here are Haley, South Carolina U.S. Sen. and presidential hopeful Lindsey Graham, former President George W. Bush and the millions -- make that tens of millions -- of other equivocators, apologists, panderers and ignoramuses who have for years provided cultural and political cover for the racists who normalized the display of a symbol of hate.
The losers here are all those who either didn't know or didn't care that the defense of slavery and white supremacy was sewn into every stitch.
The losers here are those who thought that airy sophistries about regional pride would forever trump the insistence of those who see in this symbol an ill-disguised celebration of the ugliest, most shameful chapter in our history.
The losers here are those who continued to celebrate the heritage of the 19th century battle flag of Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia even after its repugnance was underscored when segregationists adopted and revived it in the mid-20th century.
The losers here are those who minimized the pain of African-Americans in the South and in backwaters coast to coast who are subjected daily to the symbolic glorification of those who fought to perpetuate their dehumanizing enslavement.
The losers here are those who hoped that the murder of nine black churchgoers last week, allegedly by a young man who proudly waved this banner, would further divide our nation rather than bring it together in determination and grief.
The Confederate battle flag is headed for mothballs and museums.
The long, barely simmering controversy over the symbol went to full boil almost immediately after photos emerged showing the man charged in the mass slayings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., posing with the flag.
Wal-Mart, Sears, eBay, Amazon and Etsy all announced this week they'd no longer traffic in products emblazoned with the pernicious logo. Politicians who had waffled and sidestepped for fear of alienating white conservative voters found their courage and principles after the announcement from Haley, who, herself, was infamously late to the right side of history.
As late as Friday, Haley, who had kissed up on the campaign trail to the 61 percent of South Carolinians who expressed support for the Confederate symbol in a 2014 poll, was saying only that "the state will start talking about that again, and we'll see where it goes."
Clearly she was "Penced" -- subjected to the same sort of firestorm of coast-to-coast condemnation that caused Indiana Gov. Mike Pence to do an about-face in April and lead an effort to add protections for gays and lesbians to a new "religious freedom" law.
And clearly that's a good thing. At this writing, it appears to be only a question of when, not if, the South Carolina legislature heeds her call and orders the flag taken down from the statehouse in Columbia.
Mississippi, where the vile emblem has a place of prominence on the state flag itself, is surely next. "As a Christian, I believe our state's flag has become a point of offense that needs to be removed," Mississippi's Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn said in a statement Monday. "We need to begin having conversations about changing Mississippi's flag."
Great! Time's up. Conversation's over.
For some 150 years we've countenanced the brandishing of a symbol initially animated by the idea that the right to enslave and oppress black people is worth fighting for -- "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery," said Mississippi's declaration of secession, "and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization."
For roughly 50 years, since the civil rights era, most of us have failed to regularly and loudly attack the assertion that the Confederate battle flag honors a heritage that is somehow distinct from its poisonous origins. And that those who feel a chill to see it are simply oversensitive.
We need to declare winners and losers because with surprising suddenness we are seeing an important triumph, not a wretched compromise.
The winners here are those who never gave up the fight against the flag.
The winners here are the African-Americans who will no longer have to endure seeing their government nod and wink at the legacy of a rebellion aimed at keeping them in bondage.
The winners here are those who believe in the true promise of America.
Comments: chicagotribune.com/zorn
