The Secesh category archive

Leonard Pitts, Jr., argues that one factor contributing to yesterday’s racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, was our society’s inability to be honest about racism. A snippet:

Indeed, as the moral authority of the Civil Rights Movement recedes deeper into memory, as cable news and social media offer new platforms and broad reach to voices of acrimony and hate and as facts become “facts” become untruths become lies and too few of us seem to notice or care, the intellectual dishonesty surrounding race has become starker, more brazen and more creative than we have seen in years.

Like when people say that talking about racism is racism.

Or when they babble pious inanities like “racism goes both ways” and “all lives matter.”

Nor have news media always brought clarity. It was pundits, after all, who kept ascribing Donald Trump’s rise to “economic anxiety” even as his followers were yelling racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic slurs with unbridled glee. And leave us not forget how media have allowed the folks who brought such chaos to Charlottesville to brand themselves under a banal-sounding new euphemism — the “alt-right” — as if they were not the same bunch of mouth-breathing, lowlife racists they always were.

Bree Newsome makes a convincing argument that, even though they lost the war, the Secesh won the peace.

Still rising again after all these years . . . .

Jasmine Shepard should have become the first Black valedictorian in 110 years at Cleveland High School in Mississippi. An amazing achievement considering that Cleveland, MS still has not fully complied with federal desegregation orders from Brown v. Topeka Board of Education. But Jasmine was denied this honor when she was forced to share it with a white student who did not qualify for it.

Since filing a lawsuit against the school district a few weeks ago, Jasmine and her family have been the target of a torrent of racist and hateful messages. Messages that are too sickening and hateful to be shared here.

Back in the 1960s, my Southern school district finally realized after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that segregation was done and began a show process of integration. There was one black student in the white high school, a senior, the first year; eleven black students joined it the next year as juniors; and so on–full merging of the black and white schools did not occur until I was in college.

I am certain that those students were carefully picked and all of them acquitted themselves well. There were no overt tensions at the school (of course, this wasn’t in Mississippi, either). By the time my brother graduated a few years after me, the valedictorian was a black girl. The students accepted it, because she had clearly earned it.

More to the point, the parents, the administration, and the community accepted it, though a small percentage of the white student body fled to two “seg academies” and were roundly resented by the students who remained in the public high school. I have long been grateful that the administration had the wisdom to admit defeat.

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Keith Elkon has seen it before.

People of color pulled from the streets and thrown into paddy wagons. Relentless attacks on the “liberal press.” Persistent distortion of truths, nationalism and patriotism. That is the apartheid South Africa I remember and the country and system of injustice that I left in 1976. Not an act of courage, an act of defeat. The courageous stayed on and opposed the regime in whatever way they could. The courageous were persecuted, prosecuted, put under house arrest and some disappeared.

How did such a system of injustice become law of the land? The answer is that a simple and powerful tactic — fear — the “swart gevaar” won over the white electorate. Swart gevaar is an Afrikaans term literally meaning “black danger.”

Follow the link the rest.