Consider for a moment the vision of an Indian-American governor of South Carolina, flanked by a black senator whom she appointed and an eleventh-term black congressman, and uttering the words “the flag of our country and our state will fly over on our capitol grounds and no other.” In contriving this view of Governor Nikki Haley, Senator Tim Scott, and Representative Jim Clyburn—one in which the former governor Mark Sanford and ranking Senator Lindsey Graham were exiled to the periphery—the Republican Governor’s office was, no doubt, attempting to create a visual counterpoint to the ugly imagery we’ve seen since last Thursday. Even given the political calculations—insuring that this issue does not dominate the South Carolina primary, bringing a merciful end to the embarrassing chorus of mumbles that has characterized the responses of the G.O.P. Presidential candidates—it was an indelible scene.
Twelve years ago, Georgia Governor Roy Barnes changed his state’s flag, which had prominently featured the Confederate flag within it, and was soundly defeated in the next election by Sonny Perdue, who vowed to restore the symbol. (That never happened.) The atrocity of nine deaths gives Haley the cover that Barnes lacked, but her words were not without some political risk. Haley’s speech, which perhaps not unexpectedly equivocated about a decision that will alienate a swath of the electorate, held that it was possible for the tradition that valorizes the Confederate flag to coexist with the one that recognizes it as a symbol of oppression and slavery—just not on state grounds. But outside the realm of demographically calibrated political speech, the massacre in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church has pointed out that these arguments have been, from the outset, dishonest.
Fifty-five per cent of the black population of the United States resides in the South. A hundred and five Southern counties have a population that is at least fifty per cent black. The idea of the Confederate flag as a symbol of Southern pride presumes that there was some universally accessible virtue associated with the circumstances under which that flag came into existence. The more honest assessment would preface the word “Southern” with the adjective “white.” This, more than anything else, is the connection between the South that Dylann Roof glorified and the one upheld by the more mainstream defenders of the Confederacy: Roof wished to speak of this tradition honestly, sans euphemism, with all the racial adjectives included. He wished to be honest about what the South has been in hopes that it might be such a thing once more. And it is precisely this candid contempt, as much as any heinous act he committed in the church, that has made the flag untenable on the grounds of the State House of South Carolina.
Amid the contentious (and absurdist) debates about the flag’s origins and meaning, it would be easy to mistake what is going on in South Carolina as a duel over the meaning of the past. But the relevant fight here is about the present, in ways that Haley’s speech, no matter how impressive, could not address. Roof saw the Confederate flag as a banner of white superiority—not as a figment of nostalgia but as an honest reflection of the contemporary racial order.
On Saturday, two days before Haley’s announcement that the flag would come down, roughly five hundred people gathered at the state capitol to demand its removal. In the recalcitrant late-afternoon heat, the crowd, about three-quarters white, chanted “Take it down!,” echoing the belief that the slogan was a symbol of hatred that ought to be immediately dispatched to the past. The gathering was a mix of native South Carolinians and people who’d migrated to the state, but the sentiment associated with the flag was a particular self-consciousness that could also be parsed from Haley’s speech: Southern embarrassment. The whites who gathered at the capitol spoke again and again about Roof attempting to resurrect an era whose salient features were a source of shame for any person of conscience.
Tom Hall, an attorney who recently completed a film about the history of the Confederate flag in South Carolina, addressed the rally, remarking that the flag had come to prominence as a way for Southern politicians in the nineteen-fifties to cynically play on the interests of poor whites. (In fact, the Confederate flag we have known since then is not the Confederacy’s flag at all but rather one used by Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.) Jim Lane, a fifty-year-old white native South Carolinian who attended the protest with his partner, Justin Daggett, said that the flag remained a gesture toward the prejudices of a portion of the populace stuck in the past. “Anytime there’s a symbol of hate, a symbol of discrimination, that is used against one group of people, it has no place on the State House grounds,” he said.
Then there are the practical considerations. Will Green, an African-American activist who addressed the crowd Saturday, pointed out that the flag, and the backward implications it conveys to people beyond the cloistered world of its defenders, is an impediment to attracting business and investment to South Carolina. This is a point worthy of consideration. A century ago, genteel white opposition to the scourge of lynching centered not on arguments about shared humanity but on the idea that the spectacle of racial homicide conveyed an image of barbarism that ran counter to the economic interests of the South. Racism, or at least its most brutally visible incarnations, was, quite simply, bad for business. The Confederate flag is not the equivalent of a public murder, yet the correlation between it and the acts that Roof committed last week is unmistakable.
The State House flag itself is, on the whole, less than impressive. Tethered to a thirty-foot pole protected by an iron enclosure, the red-and-blue swath of fabric is actually fairly easy to miss. Less easily overlooked, however, is the massive memorial to Benjamin Tillman, the former governor and avowed Negrophobe who spoke proudly of having led lynching parties in his youth. When I spoke to Hall, the attorney and filmmaker, after the rally, he pointed out something that few critics of the flag have observed. “It’s not just the flag. The entire Capitol grounds are basically a tribute to white supremacy.” Sixty feet beyond the monument to Tillman is a memorial for J. Marion Sims, the pioneering gynecologist who perfected his craft by performing experimental surgeries on enslaved black women. “The only black person whose name appears anywhere on these grounds is Essie Mae Thurmond—the illegitimate black daughter of Senator Strom Thurmond,” Hall said. The flag is not the only symbol valorizing the racially horrific past, or even the most visible; it is simply the most obvious.
That fact neatly aligns with the significance, and the limitations, of Haley’s speech this afternoon. Despite the electoral balancing act that removing the flag will require, it is one of the easiest steps she could take to honor the dead of Emanuel A.M.E. Church. The more enduring acts are also far more difficult and unlikely. Haley’s opposition to the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid, for instance, left an estimated three hundred and fifty thousand people without access to health insurance. The impoverished, mostly black school districts along Interstate 95—the so-called Corridor of Shame that Barack Obama referenced during his first Presidential campaign—remain an example of failing, underfunded public education. When I spoke to Anton Gunn, a former state legislator who ran Obama’s primary campaign in South Carolina, he asked, “If you take the flag down tomorrow, what is going to substantively change in the lives of black people and people affected by inequality in South Carolina?”
The situation in South Carolina has become a tragedy wrapped in an irony. The Confederate flag was erected as a pandering symbol to a segment of the white population who could expect little else from the government. Taking it down offers a kind of equality—an equality of emptiness—to black South Carolinians. Given the obvious electoral considerations, I thought that, with her speech, Haley did as much as any Republican could be expected to do. Haley is not, for instance, going to expand Medicaid or allocate funding to black schools—to uproot that disparity that the flag spoke to but most certainly did not cause.
