Archive for the ‘Civil Rights’ Category
It is the Parts that Make Up the (W)hole…
September 15, 2009
A great deal has been written in the day following the “You Lie” outburst directed towards President Obama by South Carolina Rep. Addison Graves “Joe” Wilson (seen above in a lovely apology/fundraising video). Over at Civil War Memory, Kevin Levin rightly makes the following comment:
Others have tried to situate Wilson into a broader historical narrative that includes the likes of John Calhoun, Preston Brooks, and South Carolina’s own place in the story of secession, Civil War, and Massive Resistance. These narrative memes are so predictable, but ultimately tell us next to nothing about what motivated Joe Wilson’s outburst. Oh…I get it. Because Calhoun, Brooks, and Thurmond are so easily lumped together in some vague reactionary category we might as well throw good old Wilson in there.
But we know that nothing happens in a vacuum there is much more to good olde Joe Wilson than meets the eye. Over at Alternet.org there is an article about 14 things we should know about Joe, which include the following: He is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, served as an aide to Segregationist Presidential candidate and Senator Strom Thurmond and…
When Thurmond’s bi-racial daughter, fathered out of wedlock with an African-American teenage girl, came forward in 2003 — after Thurmond’s death — Wilson castigated Thurmond’s daughter, saying he did not believe her story. Essie Mae Washington-Williams was conceived of a union Thurmond had with his family’s 16-year-old maid. Thurmond was 22 at the time. “It’s a smear on the image that [Thurmond] has as a person of high integrity who has been so loyal to the people of South Carolina,” Wilson said, according to TPM. Wilson later apologized to Washington-Williams.
Wilosn is also well known in South Carolina for being one of seven state senators who voted against taking down the confederate flag from the statehouse dome back in 2000.
Republican Steve King of Iowa says: “He is an officer and a gentleman and everyone who knows him knows that…being a son of the South puts you in a different position when it comes to the Confederate flag. It means something entirely different to the people who have ancestors who fought in the Civil War on the south side of the Mason-Dixon line. So I think Maureen Dowd is trying to whip this up and I also know she’s trying to put race into it. I didn’t know what race she was talking about when I first read her line on that.” Source
So, with friends like this who apparently don’t care how others in the south or in other parts of the country feel about the confederate flag, I am sure Joe Wilson will continue to raise more and more money for his 2010 campaign. But it is the parts that make up the whole and speak volumes to us about who Joe Wilson really is. And contrary to what Kevin Levin says we should lump Wilson in with others like Calhoun, Brooks and Thurmond. Wilson’s “racism” is not the racism that we are used to seeing, the blatant KKK, Nazi-Skinhead racism of the 1980’s or the anti-civil rights racism of the 1960’s. This new breed of racism is an altogether new beast.
This new breed of racism is much more mainstream and much harder to detect. It is not, nor has it really ever been, only in the south but it has much origins in common with the south. It is deeply rooted in the “honoring” of the old confederacy and the old south. The racism is hidden from plain site and even infiltrates groups without their knowing. The SCV is the most obvious example of this new type of racism. Not everyone in the SCV or who flies the confederate flag is a racist, but racism has found a convenient hiding place. You know the old addage…where better to hide a tree than in a forest.
In south carolina…Things Never Really Change
September 12, 2009
Boy, Oh, Boy WASHINGTON- The normally nonchalant Barack Obama looked nonplussed, as Nancy Pelosi glowered behind. Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t. But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!
The outburst was unexpected from a milquetoast Republican backbencher from South Carolina who had attracted little media attention. Now it has made him an overnight right-wing hero, inspiring “You lie!” bumper stickers and T-shirts. The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president.
Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber. I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race. I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.
But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it. “A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson. “In South Carolina politics, I learned that the olive branch works very seldom,” he said. “You have to come at these things from a position of strength. My father used to say, ‘Son, always remember that silence gives consent.’ ”
Barry Obama of the post-’60s Hawaiian ’hood did not live through the major racial struggles in American history. Maybe he had a problem relating to his white basketball coach or catching a cab in New York, but he never got beaten up for being black. Now he’s at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension. Even if he and the coterie of white male advisers around him don’t choose to openly acknowledge it, this president is the ultimate civil rights figure — a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.
For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both. The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to “break” the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson. “A good many people in South Carolina really reject the notion that we’re part of the union,” said Don Fowler, the former Democratic Party chief who teaches politics at the University of South Carolina. He observed that when slavery was destroyed by outside forces and segregation was undone by civil rights leaders and Congress, it bred xenophobia.
“We have a lot of people who really think that the world’s against us,” Fowler said, “so when things don’t happen the way we like them to, we blame outsiders.” He said a state legislator not long ago tried to pass a bill to nullify any federal legislation with which South Carolinians didn’t agree. Shades of John C. Calhoun!
It may be President Obama’s very air of elegance and erudition that raises hackles in some. “My father used to say to me, ‘Boy, don’t get above your raising,’ ” Fowler said. “Some people are prejudiced anyway, and then they look at his education and mannerisms and get more angry at him.” Clyburn had a warning for Obama advisers who want to forgive Wilson, ignore the ignorant outbursts and move on: “They’re going to have to develop ways in this White House to deal with things and not let them fester out there. Otherwise, they’ll see numbers moving in the wrong direction.”
A Modern Day Preston Brooks?
September 11, 2009
Wilson raises more than $200,000 after outburst
CNN
(CNN) – Less than a day after Rep. Joe Wilson formally apologized to President Obama over his “you lie” outburst, a campaign aide confirms that the South Carolina Republican has raised “more than $200,000″ in the wake of the now-infamous moment.
News of that cash haul comes after Wilson directly asked in a Web video for campaign cash to fend off attacks from political opponents and said he’s standing by his opposition to Democratic efforts at health care reform.
“On these issues, I will not be muzzled, I will speak up and speak loudly against this risky plan,” Wilson said in a YouTube video released Thursday evening. “The supporters of the government takeover of health care and the liberals who want to give health care to illegals are using my opposition as an excuse to distract from the critical questions being raised about this poorly conceived plan.”
The congressman disbursed the video via Twitter and asked his followers to “please watch and pass on.”
“[Democrats] want to silence anyone who speaks out against it,” Wilson also says in the video. “They made it clear they want to defeat me and pass the plan. I need your help now. … Contribute to my effort to defeat the proponents of government-run health care.”
Wilson also sent a fundraising appeal via e-mail, saying he is confident that “my voice is serving as the voice for Americans across the country who are tired of irresponsible government programs that have only worsened our situation.”
The appeal for cash came as Wilson’s Democratic opponent in next year’s congressional race, Rob Miller, reported raking in $750,000 as a result of the outburst during President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress.
Miller ran against Wilson last year, losing by 8 percentage points. It was Wilson’s smallest margin of victory in his five elections for Congress.
In an e-mail to supporters Thursday night, Miller said he is aiming to top over $1 million in the next 24 hours, a total that dwarfs the $67,000 he has took in during the entire first half of the year.
Rush, Obama, Lincoln, History & Memory!
December 23, 2008
Earlier today I had to run up town to the Post Office to mail some letters to of all places South Carolina. As I drove home I happened to catch a bit of Rush Limbaugh’s show where he was talking about Obama’suse of Lincoln during his campaign and now with the announcement that Obama would use the Lincoln Bible during the Inauguration. Obama’s Inauguration will be the first since 1861-64 to use the Lincoln Bible and Rush seems to think that this is just another way in which Obama is trying to make himself look like a new Lincoln…and according to el Rushbo…the next FDR…but that is beyond my focus here.
What I think Rush my not be taking into account here is the historical connection between Lincoln and Obama. Not that the two men are related or that their politics are the same but how they are connected through the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Had it not be for Lincoln, Obama could not be in the situation in which he now finds himself…as President Elect. Maybe, just maybe, Obama’suse of the Lincoln Bible is not to associate himself with Lincoln on the political basis, but on a historically significant basis. One that includes an understanding of the Civil War from the Emancipationist viewpoint.
With Obama being our President during the at least the early part of the 150th Anniversary of The War of the Rebellion we may finally see the war placed in its proper context…and finally out from under the shadow of the myth of the Lost Cause.
Where Was the SCV for These Descendents of “Black Confederates”?
July 27, 2008
There has been a great deal written and discussed recently in the civil war blogosphere about black confederates. I have mentioned before that one of the reasons I don’t think the story of black confederates in the south jive is due to the treatment of freed African Americans in the south following the war or duing the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. What I want to know is where was the compassion of the SCV and southerners when the events in the above photos were taken?
Oh yeah…nevermind!!
Billy Yank
