On Wednesday night, demonstrators on the streets of Oklahoma City waved Confederate flags as President Obama’s motorcade arrived, a stark scene captured by a New York Times photographer.
The New York Times @nytimes 15 hours ago
The scene as President Obama’s motorcade arrived at his hotel in Oklahoma City tonight. Photo by @dougmillsnyt
What a gruesome, terrible place this country is in so many ways. The Declaration of Independence was written by a slaveowner, a guy who kept his daughters’ half-sister as a slave and impregnated her at least once. We’re all about the human rights and we’re racist as fuck.
The incident comes in the midst of a renewed national push to remove the battle flag from government sites after the massacre inside a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, last month. Similar counter rallies embracing the slogan “Confederate Lives Matter” were scheduled in Oklahoma City ahead of the president’s visit.
Following the attack in Charleston, Obama delivered an impassioned eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a South Carolina state senator and one of the nine people murdered, in which the president called the flag’s enduring presence in the South a “reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation.”
Therefore it’s urgent to say “but racism is part of our great history and heritage.”
“It’s not a symbol of hate” is the new “it’s about ethics in games journalism”.
Or more analogously, “It’s about Southern pride” is the new “It’s about ethics in games journalism”.
WRT the author of the Declaration of Independence:
um…not quite.
Sally Hemmings was Thomas Jefferson’s *wife’s* half sister (they had the same father, natch.). She was only a few years older than one of TJ’s daughters.
Still a profoundly problematic relationship, of course.
Pulling out Stars and Bars to welcome a black president, co-opt actual social justice slogan for irrelevant use… not racist at all.
The short intro in the post link, said,
(Maybe because I have an old, 3×4 screen.)
Wait, what? I thought Obama had banned that flag….according to many conservatives, anyhow.
Ah, thanks, Funny Diva. I was going by memory so of course…memory was inaccurate.
That’s the kind of welcome Martin Luther King, Jr. used to get when he went places. They know their heritage, all right.
They wouldn’t have mustered all the racist fucks they could get to wave those slaveowner-glorifying banners if our president hadn’t been a *BLACK* man, you know. Remind him of his place – someone’s gotta do it, given how insanely librul the country’s gotten to, on its way to hell in a handbasket. If that flag had won, Obummer wouldn’t be president. No sirree! He’d be minding his p’s and q’s and serving the white folks, which is as it should be.
Gotta wonder what they’re going to pull out when it’s a *WOMAN* president going by – I can only imagine…
Blanche Quizno @ #9
Otoh, I can’t help thinking that if someone the rebel-flag-wavers wanted had been elected president, they’d STILL be out there waving those flags to greet that president too. It’d mean something a little bit different, but I can imagine them being there nonetheless.
Wow! You mean there are some members of the Confederate Army still alive?
No?
Oh, I guess you mean that some of you people consider yourselves to be just like those traitors against the U.S.A. I’m glad you are identifying yourselves. Should make the FBI’s job a bit easier.
*blinks*
The police officers in the picture don’t seem to be assaulting the people carrying those confederate flags. Oh, I forgot, they’re using “conservative logic”, where the president being black is the same thing as being assaulted by the police.
oh yea, and it’s all about ‘heritage’…in a state that was not yet a state during the war and therefore has no direct connection to claim, and itself was a big part of another lovely race related chapter in our history.
Perhaps it’s because I studied History at university but when I feel my preconceptions being challenged and my privileged being revealed, I ask myself: Do you want to double-down on this prejudice and/or oppression or do you want to be on the right side of History?
The people who thought that waving a confederate flag was a wise, courageous decision have not been asking themselves that question.