Translated from GegenStandpunkt 3-2015

The fight against racism in the USA relentlessly continues:
A Confederate flag is lowered

1.

A young white American shoots and kills nine black people after attending Bible study in one of the oldest black churches in the country. He is caught, and it turns out, unsurprisingly, that he did it because they were black. It is viewed as an act of racist extremism unlike anything seen in the USA for decades, and official America agrees that this attack could not have come at a worse time. Ever since a black teenager was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri – although this is widely agreed not to be extremism, but rather routine in the multi-ethnic melting pot of America – its representatives have continually stressed that the attitude with which such acts are committed never, ever comes from the society in which it obviously continues to miraculously thrive.

They see their dogma confirmed by the fact that the young anti-black racist once proudly had his picture taken in front of the Confederate flag – and the state of South Carolina promptly reacts. It takes down its local logo, which dates back to the Civil War and which it has been raising since 1961 – in opposition to the civil rights movement back then – in order to show that the official anti-racist standpoint also applies in this part of the United States.

2.

The link between photographic self-portrayal and bloody deed is certainly no big secret: for anti-African-American Muricans, the Confederate flag is not simply a nostalgic symbol of better times in the past when things were still alright in the world, that is, when blacks were slaves and whites were their owners. In fact, the young man proves in his person the completely contemporary nature of this attitude, whose supporters do not even claim for themselves the status of owners of plantations and slaves. They see themselves rather as proud activists of the American “pursuit of happiness,” which consists of a universal competition and, for most of the competitors, amounts to a lifetime of service to other peoples’ property. They see the parallel activities of their black fellow citizens, indeed their very existence as equals, not just as vexing or insulting, but as a practical challenge: this type of white racist thinks of participation in the economic struggle for survival in free competition as a God-granted privilege reserved exclusively for members of the true American people – and in their staunch opinion, the descendants of black former slaves simply do not belong to this chosen people. It is therefore clear that blacks, if they think they are allowed to behave like Americans, are only causing problems and ruining God’s Own Country and its happiness, which forces the real, decent, white America to act in self-defense; the evidence for this is provided by all the acts of violence and indeed all the forms of crime that are to be found aplenty in the predominantly poor black communities.

From this standpoint, the Charleston assassin comes out of American history in the first place. In the manifesto that he has also left behind, he sets forth the clear meaning that it reveals to him: American history is the history of the violent self-defense of the real America, the history of the – increasingly unsuccessful – attempt to keep blacks away from the unhindered pursuit of the decent American way of life, which is not there for them and for which they were not created. Fittingly, he and his like-minded comrades have chosen the old Confederate flag as the symbol of their current struggle for an America without equal rights for those who, in their view, by nature do not deserve them.

3.

But the rival version of American patriotism insists on turning the thing upside down: anti-racist American patriots, determined to morally exclude the racism which flourishes in modern US society and periodically leads to corresponding acts of bloodshed, find the argument they are looking for in the Charleston assassin’s photographically documented attachment to the flag of the long-defeated Confederate States of America: that hatred toward African Americans can only be energized out of a behind-the-times affection for long-overcome progenitors to their own history. And because they – like the assassin – are so deeply moved by their own patriotic morality that they can’t distinguish between the substance and the sensorily tangible symbol of this morality, in all seriousness worship their flag and even dedicate an annual holiday to it, they also aren’t aware that this difference applies to the object of their hostility. Consequently, they focus their opposition against this attitude, which they attribute to the past, on the fight against its fabric symbol: for them, the fight against racism in 2015 means condemning the flag of this racism which, according to Wikipedia, officially surrendered 150 years ago.

4.

The truly responsible representatives of the true American community, who also feel responsible for upholding its anti-racist ideals, enthusiastically embrace this turn of events: the US president and other politicians, both black and white, are demanding that the Confederate flag be banished to museums, adding that America owes this to the victims of the attack and their surviving relatives. This gives the equation anti-racism = fight against the Confederate flag its official and rather interesting interpretation:

The official declaration, expressed in the lowering of the evil flag, that the fight against racism in the USA is a state purpose and duty of all decent people, is an admission as to how things in this nation really stand on the issue of racial hatred. But it should be taken in exactly the opposite way: in committing itself to the challenge of this fight, this nation wants to be morally ennobled. And at the same time, it makes clear exactly why it deserves these moral accolades for an exemplary anti-racism: essentially, because it gives victims of normal racism and its excesses the respect they deserve. With this official condemnation of racism as an anti-American anachronism, performed with the flag and dedicated to the latest dead people, it is certain that the perpetrators of the dead people who are expected in the future will have nothing to do with the modern, i.e., real, i.e., good America.

*

The fact that racism, in its more or less bloody form, is part and parcel of the modern USA with its exemplary egalitarian market economy and democratic constitution requires no proof, even and especially when it is repeatedly denied by the real and imagined movers and shakers of this exemplary nation. Why and how the two fit together is, of course, not answered by this statement. But that doesn’t matter, because the article Racism in the USA – where it comes from and why it won't go away does just that.

See also:

On the racism of a freedom-based, egalitarian state power