Race:On Civil Discourse and Decorum

By Gary L Flowers
Executive Director & CEO
Black Leadership Forum, Inc.

I read with breathtaking bafflement an editorial by Kathleen Parker in the Washington Post (dated Sunday, September 20, 2009) entitled “Playing the Racial Deck.” In sum, Ms. Parker asserts that while Congressman Joe Wilson’s exclamation, “you lie” to President Obama was a “rude display”; the comment was not necessarily racist. With all due respect, is she serious?

In short, I agree with Reverend Al Sharpton when he said: “One cannot play the ‘race card’ if every card in the American deck is racial.”
A review of world history reminds us that civilization is barbarianism all grown up. From the earliest civilizations of humans on the Continent of Africa to more recent nations, all have respected differing opinions by codification of social mores and rules of decorum.

With centuries of civility behind us, the un-civility of Representative Joe Wilson is averse to the American way of amicability, and not a good look for our nation as the “civil police” of the planet. As a relative “baby” of the world family, the United States of America at 230-something years old has established, for the most part, civil codes of behavior. Of course, I am aware of the rape, pillage, and plunder of Native Americans, the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, the American Civil War, and the racial Apartheid system that followed are uncivilized behavior at its worst.
Yet, America has always at least sought honor—albeit by hypocrisy—through civil discourse. For example, the American transference of leadership without bloodshed is commendable. The discouragement of personal attacks in writing with the 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution is a good thing. Thus, the American agreement to disagree with temperance is our nation’s contribution to world civilization. Not to do so is inherently un-American.

As a former field director, and activist for progressive public policy, I understand that policy protest is healthy for our democratic republic. However, there are rules. Congressman Wilson traveled way across the line.

That is why the argument of Mr. Wilson’s comments not being race-oriented falls short of believability. In her historical journalistic sojourn, Ms. Parker admits that the Congressman: 1) Is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans; 2) Referred to the revelation of Senator Strom Thurman’s African American daughter out of wedlock as a “smear” on the Senator’s legacy; and 3) his opposition to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina State Capitol. She also admits South Carolina’s support of the racially disenfranchising policy known as the Southern Strategy that baited southern whites to vote against politicians who supported racially inclusive legislation.

To view such public positions as anything but racist is at least naïve. Perhaps, as a South Carolina resident, Ms. Parker cannot view such anti-Americanism with objectivity. By the way, it is illegal to fly the swastika flag is Germany. So too should be the case relative to the Confederate flag in America.

After all, the Confederate flag symbolized slavery, succession, sedition, and racial segregation. Notwithstanding her point that many southerners view the Confederate flag as a symbol of their ancestors’ valor, I, too, am from a former Confederate state, Virginia (the Capital of the Confederacy).

Truth is, the Confederate flag was not publicly displayed until after the Brown v. Board Supreme Court ruling in 1954. Why? The “symbols of vanquished nations” must be surrendered after losing a war. South Carolina and the south lost the war. After 1954, White southerners, sympathetic to the traitorous Confederacy, used the flag to represent their racial hatred and opposition to racial desegregation of public facilities.

There is a direct historical connection to Congressman Joe Wilson’s racially rude outburst and a sign I saw at one of the Tea Party gatherings. A woman held a sign reading, “We want our country back.” We? She was White, and definitely not Cherokee, Blackfoot, or Apache. The glaring historical reality is that some people in this nation have never—and may never—accept that the United States of America is the embodiment of the Latin phrase, I pluribus Unum (out of many, one).
Congressman Joe Wilson and his Confederate supporters should come across the American bridge and get over it!