The biased and bigoted self

The Confederate Flag came down in South Carolina.  But, it is a mere symbol.  A symbol that stood for various things to various people.  Reflecting on his own life, a Caucasian Southerner who has lived there all his life, writes:

Among people who see this rag of stars and bars as an odious reminder of our Southern delusion, this is a moment of hope.
But taking down the Confederate flag won’t change the landscape, of course, by more than a gesture. We need to look inside ourselves and see that the roots of this racial antipathy lie in all of us, and that it can rise to hatred in any of us. This is a hatred we promote without being aware of it, and share without admitting it, and we must learn to see that. 

In that piece, the author reminds us:

so many Southern whites wrapped themselves even more tightly in the myths of past glories and tattered traditions.
In the process, the reality of what slavery meant, the way it warped that old society, became obscured. Southerners could tell one another chapter and verse about Yankee armies, troop movements, the personalities of generals, the facts of battle. But the facts of slavery, the truth about our white brutality, about the system of terror that permeated the South for centuries, that sustained the idea of human property, became obscured, then romanticized, then lost.

Which is why sending the Confederate Flag to the museum is a mere first step.  There is a lot more that has to be done.  To think that a Barack Obama presidency means we live in a post-racial society is to be in complete denial of the racially charged and segregated lives that we continue to live.

Source

I come from a land where power and privilege have been played out in atrocious ways for centuries.  Brahmin supremacy was/is as bad as--or even worse than--White supremacy.  I had hoped to think through and analyze the bigotry that Brahmins systematically practiced, and do so in an autoethnographic manner.  I started with this post from a while ago.  But, I chickened out; that topic is a world of landmines for me to walk.

I can only hope that I am doing my best to look at the world and the people in far less biased and bigoted ways than how my people did, and how I too did, in the past.  Unlearning the childhood indoctrination that happened when growing up in that stratified and segregated society of the old country has not been easy and has been a long struggle.  But, we shall overcome ... one day!

On the creepy confederate flag

Way back when I was in graduate school, I was once talking about the road trip I wanted to go on in the Deep South, thanks to having read Gone with the Wind when I was in high school.  The three guys listened to my plan.  One of them--btw, all the three were Whites, born and raised in the US--said something like "even I would not want to get off the freeways there" which puzzled me.  He saw my puzzled expression and clarified--he was Jewish.

There is heritage and then there is heritage that comes with a mile-long freight train full of baggage.  The worry is that not only the baggage of the confederacy has not been completely thrown out but that it is even cherished!  As the NY Times noted in its editorial, "the Civil War is winding down":

to put away old business — the Civil War, Reconstruction, jut-jawed defiance to equality for black citizens — so their state could finally take up the ever-pressing, unfinished job of reconciliation.

Earlier this spring, the friend and I went to the coast.  On our way back, we decided to detour via a road that we normally do not take.  It was pretty, of course.  Not much of a traffic, other than a pickup truck that was behind me and was in a hurry.  No surprise for me when the vehicles behind want to pass me, because I am always the slow guy on the road!  When I got a break, I moved over to the sandy shoulder space to let the pickup overtake me and it did.

A couple more miles in, and the friend and I decided to pull over, figure out where exactly we were and to then proceed.  As I reached a clearing, where I thought I would stop, I passed the same pickup truck that was parked there.  Strange it seemed that the driver was in a hurry and yet was parked there.

We checked the map and figured that we had taken a wrong turn, which meant that I had to make a u-turn at that point.  I started the engine and crawled forward to find a sweet spot to make the u-turn.  The pickup truck also headed out slowly.  We thought it was creepy.  I made the u-turn and passed the pickup, and we never saw that truck again.

A few miles later, we passed a relatively rundown house with a huge confederate flag that was fluttering with the breeze.  After that pickup truck experience, the sight of the confederate flag worried me.  A dark-skinned me, and with a white woman too!  I visibly shifted into a worried mode.

If a dark-skinned me feels this way here in Oregon, far away from the Confederate states, then I cannot even begin to imagine how African-Americans feel about that flag and the "heritage" it represents.

I will leave it to my favorite go-to intellectual on race issues in the US; Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the confederate flag:

Put it in a museum. Inscribe beneath it the years 1861-2015. Move forward. Abandon this charlatanism. Drive out this cult of death and chains. Save your lovely souls. Move forward. Do it now.