"The series of fires – some of them suspicious and possible hate crimes — came in the week following a murderous rampage by a white supremacist who shot and killed nine people at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C.
The fires also occurred at a time when there is increasing public pressure to remove the Confederate flag – one of the last hallmarks of white superiority — from government buildings and public places as well as banning assorted Confederate flag merchandise sold in retails stores and online."
-Southern Poverty Law Center
This doesn't frighten me. It makes me angry but a whole lot less angry than determined. We've seen this before. And we're going to see it more if we keep going forward into #BlackLivesMatter, the forefront of a New Civil Rights Movement.
If taking the confederate flag down is making these white racists fly out of the woodwork liked the winged rats they are, imagine what some real pressure to end systemic racism in this country will do.
And you know what else? The more often I compare what Germany did to De-nazi-fy, such as giving people x years worth of jail time for flying a flag or presenting any symbol having to do with the Nazis, the angrier I get at just how much our letting those low-lifes hold onto that symbol of hate has damaged us all.
I do believe I've found at least a light correlation between where that flag flies free and unarmed deaths of black people by cop.
It doesn't appear particularly scientific, but THE GUARDIAN has a website up that is counting the number of people killed by police this year. Their database can be adjusted by state, race, and gender as well as other criteria like "unarmed."
I don't think the site has every black person in the system as it appears the Guardian is collecting data via newspaper reports. But by my count, with the exception of the Month of May, near 60% of unarmed black people that wound up dead at the hands of police were killed in the South. And with the exception of New York and Maryland, the other unarmed black people dead at the hands of police were rather scattered across the nation.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database
While one of these churches located in formerly confederate states may have been set a blaze by a lightening strike, most of the rest are likely arson.
These church burnings started simultaneously with a run on confederate flag merchandise at multiple stores, such as Amazon and Sears, that announced that they are planning to do away with confederate merchandise -- *a similar run on merchandise that did not take place (or didn't take place for long) after WWII because the Germans eventually attached a prison sentence to the Nazi's favorite symbols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a
Now, I hear that Germany is not a party for anybody not-white to this day. But I also don't hear that unarmed Jewish people are being hunted down and killed with the weapon of choice in that country either.
Again, burning churches doesn't make me scared. It makes me determined. And I am determined to see us take a small step while looking ahead to the next one.
We need to make hate more of a crime than it is now. And we need expand what "hate crime" means to include symbols like that flag. White racists know that symbols are important. That's why they are gathering them. We need to know the same thing. We need to get that confederate flag down in South Carolina and off all government property in that state.
Bree Newsome took the South Carolina confederate flag down just yesterday. And South Carolina, the first state to leave the union, had black workers put the flag back up yesterday too. If you don't think who South Carolina had put that flag back up wasn't symbolic too, your brain might be asleep at the wheel.
Other southern states like Alabama have already started taking confederate flags down. We need to keep the pressure on the state where nine died at the hands of the coddled, white terrorist that police officers took to Burger King before they took him to jail.
That anti-patriotic KKK symbol needs to come down. And while it's only a rumor that President Obama wants to force that domestic terrorist group to name the names on their membership roles, I think that's a great next step.
A black man, President Obama is interested in this personally. However, he only represents our interests. And he represents us best when we tell him what our interests are. So we need to choose a next step and start petitioning, marching for it. The President needs to hear us.
Like the President Obama I've been waiting for said himself in his eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, we cannot slip back into complacency.
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