UNC Chapel Hill, bastion of southern liberalism, among them. Though at this point, the legend of Silent Sam is such an important part of the school’s culture that no one can generate much heat about it.
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I love how people talk about it being their heritage…and it is. They just don’t realize that, with one exception, those Confederate flags were put up to protest desegregation.
That one exception- Mississippi. They actually put it on their flag to honor and commemorate the Civil War.
I don’t agree with it being up there, but the rest- they’re up there as a symbol of hatred and racism outright.
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Sharpton is no race baiter. Maybe Sharpton of the 80s but not the Sharpton of today. There is a bigg difference between race baiting and activism.
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". . .but that the flag “is part of who we are.”
Yes, Lindsay, we got that. That’s the problem.
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“[T]he Confederate flag belongs in a museum.”
PT Barnum’s Freakseum, Ripley’s Odditorium, or the American Clown Museum?
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I totally agree.
“Must agree with Obama on this one,”
True, but I’d actually like to hear Obama say it, not a spokesperson.
And yeah Sharpy Sharpton, notorious grifter and race baiter.
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There was a time, right up until very recently, when it made sense to say that the Confederate flag belongs in a museum. After all, it’s been 150 years now that the reality it represented was consigned to the ashbin of history and my own family, having lost their plantation, made their way to Texas.
Obama’s own election changed all that.
Like Muslim radical fundamentalists, nursing their hatred since the end of the Crusades hundreds of years ago (with undeniably a little help from Western policy over the last century), southern fundamentalists have been nursing their racism and hatred of the North for a century and a half. “Save your Confederate money, boys, the South will rise again”, was still heard in my 1950s Texas childhood, though more in a slightly humorous cum nostalgic way for a lost civilization than with any real revolutionary fervor, it seemed.
But Obama’s election has brought the racists out of the woodwork, where they have been hiding all these decades. While the rest of us made our way into the 21st century, they were still stuck in the 19th.
That evil flag doesn’t belong in a museum. It likely has more rabid supporters now than it did in 1860.
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Nope…in fact, they’re flying it higher than Old Glory whenever Obama orders flags at half-staff. As I understand it, Obama ordered the flag at half-staff in response to this Charleston massacre and guess what? That’s right, the US flag is, right now, flying at half-staff at South Carolina’s State House PRECISELY BECAUSE OF THIS RACIST MURDERING BULLSHIT and South Carolina is proudly flying the confederate flag at full staff above it. Right. Now.
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Rabid because they’re poor and weren’t able or willing enough to get better educated to improve their lives. I see confederate flag stickers on beat up trucks in MI. Why?
Someone else got something they could have gotten if only…
If only WHAT? They had brains? Did well in school? Had parents that could send them or thought it important enough?
They blame the wrong people for their inadequacies, which they suddenly realized once they graduated from high school.
Ah, EDUCATION.
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…the flag “is part of who we are.”
Yup. Your ancestors were traitors, and got whupped for it. This is what you’re celebrating - treason and defeat. You must be so proud.
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I think STOLE Texas would be a better way to say that (and CA, CO, AZ, NM as well).
Indeed. It’s all about being fundamentally opposed to blaming the correct people, because those people are the successful, insanely wealthy and powerful people the Teatroll Confederates wish to be, wish to emulate, idolize and follow…who they were promised they could become if they just OBEY…and, what’s more, those people are perceived as being almost universally WHITE (partly beacuse they generally are and partly because the Teatroll brain assumes they are). Ergo, it must be the n—rs’ faults. It’s that simple. It couldn’t possibly, ever, ever, ever have anything to do with all those Wealthy White Idols they worship bending everyone over the fence…indiscriminately mind you, because they don’t give a fuck who they’re ruining for their own self-promotion…and fucking us ALL up the ass like their favorite goats.
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It’s like refusing to excise a tumor using the same broken logic. “It’s part of who I am…”
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The bad part.
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The president signs off on what any spokesperson says on his behalf. It’s as good as The Man himself saying it.
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To be specific, why is TPM and even more specifically Tierney Sneed, the writer of the article, so afraid to say it? And why doesn’t whoever is supposedly overseeing the writers do their job? The failure to confront it amounts to a tacit approval because it allows those who spew hate and racism to continue to do so with no repercussions at all. Heck, look at the racism spewed by Trump, Cruz, Palin, and all the others. They (and all the GOP; look at how Romney and McCain are treated compared to Kerry or Al Gore after their losing campaigns) are continually coddled by the media. Even welcomed as part of the “gang” (see Saturday Night Live’s 40th Anniversary Show). I truly believe this is one huge difference between the racism during the 1960s and now. Then, the media stood up for civil rights and presented the hate as hate. Now it is a false equivalency with the vile Chuck Todd’s and Wolf Blitzer’s of the media world too coward and/or too much agreeing with the hate to confront it. The media’s failure to confront hate and racism simply emboldens the haters. Look at Rudy Gulliani’s (sp?) racist comments in recent weeks. Or the fact that every few months, the media gleefully trots out the most detested man in the country, Dick Cheney, just to spew his hate against the President. The fact that the media would seek these people out on something they know little about is disgusting. It just gives them and all of their ilk a soapbox.
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The Confederate flag is either the flag of a country that waged war on the United States, or it is a flag of insurrection against it. Neither one should fly over US soil.
I lived in five states of the old Confederacy over the past thirty years and I told many of the more virulent racist Southerns I worked with that they were lucky it was the United States they rebelled against. In every other civil war the victors slaughtered the losers, sold them into slavery, or deported them.
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And the media all but ignores it. Again, it’s tacit approval.
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FIFY, Lindsey.
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