Race relations in the United States are not perfect, nor will they ever be. Since the election of Barack Obama, the problems seem to be increasing.
White racists have been coming out of the woodwork under the banners of the Tea Party, and one of their members was arrested for spitting on African-American Rep. Emanuel Cleaver while simultaneously shouting racial slurs.
“The Daily Show” aired a segment last week about an all-white basketball league in Atlanta that hopes to return basketball to its roots of segregation and hatred. The next day it aired a story about a white caller to C-SPAN telling them to rename themselves Black-SPAN because of the apparently high volume of African-American callers to the channel.
The president is facing a lot of hatred and criticism from the zombie-like supporters of Glenn Beck, who claims the president has an inherent hatred for white culture.
And finally, Michael Steele criticizes the left of the country for using the race card, then subsequently uses the race card months later. In our racially polarized society, you would think we wouldn’t try to antagonize the problems that are already there. And then there’s Virginia. Gov. Robert F. McDonnell decided that it was, yet again, time to honor the Confederate States of America with Confederate History Month. We tolerant people like to call it April.
Why would we want to open the old wounds of slavery and racism? Tourism and politics. McDonnell believes it will help the tourism industry during the recession, and he wants to please his conservative base that elected him.
Two points: First, the tourists who would flock to Virginia because of Confederate History Month are not the kind of people I would want coming to my state. I’m sure no one wants to see a group of drawling, camo-wearing racists blasting country music in their army vehicles complete with “The South Will Rise Again” bumper stickers and Confederate hate-flags traveling through their state. Second, is this really what pleases the right wing now? I don’t believe we should be white-washing history and forgetting about the Confederacy. We should continue teaching that, while there were many reasons as to why the Civil War began, slavery was at the core of the Confederacy.
Ridding the country of slavery should not be something to look back on and regret, but that seems to be what this month wants you to do. Conservatives want you to see how evil government involvement is, no matter how it is involved. So getting rid of slavery, like giving people who can’t afford health care the opportunity to not have to go into debt to save and prolong their lives, is an evil because it involves the federal government too much. The most disturbing part of the proclamation McDonnell was that there was no mention of the evils of slavery until he was pressed to do so. The fact that a governor of a large state in the U.S. chose to re-introduce a month honoring the Confederacy but didn’t think about the racial repercussions is ridiculous. I can’t look at a Confederate flag without thinking about its ties to a horrible part in the history of America, but McDonnell didn’t even consider it.
McDonnell backtracked after media and public scrutiny in an I’m-not-a-racist-I-have-a-black-friend manner by describing how evil slavery was.This came soon after his original response to not mentioning slavery – he didn’t focus on slavery because it wasn’t important enough. Instead, he focused on the ones he “thought were most significant for Virginia.”
There is clearly a problem in the mentality of people like McDonnell and the base he was pleasing with his proclamation. This goes beyond the idiots who show their racism by putting the Confederate flags on their trucks. This is a political move by a governor to show support for the Confederate States of America, which is a problem.
