tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/charleston-18026/articlesCharleston – The Conversation2023-07-17T12:25:03Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1999512023-07-17T12:25:03Z2023-07-17T12:25:03ZInternational African American Museum in Charleston, S.C., pays new respect to the enslaved Africans who landed on its docks<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537383/original/file-20230713-21-9njk23.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">One of the exhibits of notable Black people on display at International African American Museum.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.world-architects.com/en/architecture-news/headlines/iaam-in-pictures">courtesy of v2com/International African American Museum</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Before Congress <a href="https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/slave-trade.html">ended the transatlantic slave trade</a> in 1808, the Port of Charleston was <a href="https://www.postandcourier.com/news/special_reports/slavery-in-charleston-a-chronicle-of-human-bondage-in-the-holy-city/article_54334e04-4834-50b7-990b-f81fa3c2804a.html">the nation’s epicenter</a> of human trafficking. </p>
<p>Almost half of the estimated 400,000 African people imported into what became the United States were brought to that Southern city, and <a href="https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/africanpassageslowcountryadapt/sectionii_introduction">a substantial number</a> took their first steps on American soil at <a href="https://www.preservationsociety.org/locations/gadsdens-wharf/">Gadsden’s Wharf</a> on the Cooper River.</p>
<p>That location of once utter degradation is now the hallowed site of the <a href="https://iaamuseum.org/">International African American Museum</a>. Pronounced “I Am” and <a href="https://www.postandcourier.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-charleston-celebrates-a-new-museum-a-new-day/article_316fd1e0-0fad-11ee-a08a-7b6f11f64bdc.html">opened in June 2023</a>, the US$120 million project financed by state and local funds and private donations was 25 years in the making and is a memorial to not only those enslaved but also those whose lives as free Black Americans affected U.S. history and society through their fight for full citizenship rights. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://asalh.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/BIOGRAPHY-POWERS.pdf">a historian</a> and founding director of the College of Charleston’s <a href="https://studyslaverycharleston.cofc.edu/">Center for the Study of Slavery</a> in Charleston, I served as the museum’s interim executive director and know firsthand how difficult the road has been to build a museum focused on African American history. </p>
<p>The museum’s mission is to honor the untold stories of the African American journey and, by virtue of its location and landscape design, pay reverence to the ground on which it sits.</p>
<h2>America’s widespread historical illiteracy</h2>
<p>Many Americans don’t know much about the nation or its history. </p>
<p>In the 2022 “<a href="https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/civics/2022/">Nation’s Report Card</a>,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed ongoing deficiencies in <a href="https://www.axios.com/2023/05/03/history-civic-test-results-covid-schools">eighth grade students’ knowledge</a> of U.S. history and civics. </p>
<p>Only 20% of test-takers scored proficient or above in civics, and, for American history, only 13% achieved proficiency.</p>
<p>The adult population shows similar deficits. </p>
<p>A 2018 <a href="https://woodrow.org/news/american-history-report/">Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation</a> survey shockingly revealed only <a href="https://citizensandscholars.org/resource/national-survey-finds-just-1-in-3-americans-would-pass-citizenship-test/">36% of people who were born in the U.S.</a> knew enough basic American history and government to pass the citizenship test.</p>
<p>And <a href="https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/politics/woke-2024-gop-primary/67-ad81efcb-860c-4663-b04c-a06452961284">conservative political candidates</a> are working to prevent current students from learning key information about the country’s founding and development by mischaracterizing the teaching of slavery and civil rights as <a href="https://www.edweek.org/leadership/what-is-critical-race-theory-and-why-is-it-under-attack/2021/05">critical race theory</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A small advertisement with large black letters gives the details on the sale of 25 Black people." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536689/original/file-20230710-29-mw77lw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536689/original/file-20230710-29-mw77lw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536689/original/file-20230710-29-mw77lw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536689/original/file-20230710-29-mw77lw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536689/original/file-20230710-29-mw77lw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=572&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536689/original/file-20230710-29-mw77lw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=572&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536689/original/file-20230710-29-mw77lw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=572&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An advertisement details the auction sale of 25 enslaved Black people at Ryan’s Mart in Charleston, S.C., on Sept. 25, 1852.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/broadside-by-louis-de-saussure-of-a-sale-of-25-enslaved-sea-news-photo/1457493575?adppopup=true">Kean Collection/Archive Photos/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Though critical race theory is typically taught in graduate and law schools, <a href="https://www.chalkbeat.org/22525983/map-critical-race-theory-legislation-teaching-racism">at least 36</a> states had banned or tried to ban lessons on Black history from public K-12 classrooms. </p>
<p>In this highly politicized environment, efforts to restrict how race can be discussed in public schools have led to <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/US/authors-color-speak-efforts-ban-books-race/story?id=81491208">widespread calls from parents and politicians</a> for the censorship of certain books on race. </p>
<p>These new restrictions have had an impact on public education, according to the <a href="https://ncheteach.org/post/How-do-we-Navigate-the-Culture-Wars-in-History-Classrooms-this-Year">National Council for History Education</a>. </p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-3.html">2022 survey of teachers</a> conducted by the <a href="https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-7.html">Rand Corp.</a> showed the restrictions “influenced their choice of curriculum materials or instructional practices,” as many “chose to or were directed to omit the use of certain materials” deemed “controversial or potentially offensive.”</p>
<h2>South Carolinians’ overlooked national impact</h2>
<p>One of the first things visitors see at the museum is an <a href="https://iaamuseum.org/building-and-garden/">African Ancestors Memorial Garden</a>, which includes a graphic stone relief depicting <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p277.html">captive Africans during the Middle Passage</a>.</p>
<p>But the museum is not just a memorial site of enslavement. </p>
<p>Exhibits show how the lives of Black people and their resistance to enslavement helped shape state, national and international affairs.</p>
<p>For example, South Carolina’s 1739 <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p284.html">Stono Rebellion</a>, in which fugitive slaves attempted to escape to Spanish Florida, precipitated conflict between Spain and Great Britain. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="An image of a black man is shown near docks on a river." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537401/original/file-20230713-25-t9p97g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537401/original/file-20230713-25-t9p97g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537401/original/file-20230713-25-t9p97g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537401/original/file-20230713-25-t9p97g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537401/original/file-20230713-25-t9p97g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537401/original/file-20230713-25-t9p97g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537401/original/file-20230713-25-t9p97g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An exhibit detailing African people’s migration around the Atlantic.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://iaamuseum.org/news/surface-mag-the-long-awaited-international-african-american-museum/">courtesy of v2com/International African American Museum</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many Americans know about white abolitionist <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/john-browns-raid.htm">John Brown’s 1859 attack</a> against the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, which led to the Civil War. </p>
<p>But few know that <a href="https://nyupress.org/9781479802753/the-untold-story-of-shields-green/">Shields Green</a>, a South Carolina fugitive slave, assisted in the planning and execution of the fateful attack.</p>
<p>Even fewer know of <a href="https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2cxx8zq">South Carolina’s role</a> in the Civil Rights Movement.</p>
<p>Many know the name Rosa Parks, but it was Charleston’s educator and activist <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/clark-septima-poinsette">Septima Clark</a> who inspired Parks and led the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern educational and voting rights initiatives. </p>
<p>In fact, King <a href="https://avery.cofc.edu/the-legacy-of-septima-p-clark-by-kangkang-kovacs/">once called Clark</a> “the mother of the movement” and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/09612029900200193">considered her to be</a> a “community teacher, an intuitive fighter for human rights and leader of her unlettered and disillusioned people.”</p>
<h2>A monument to freedom</h2>
<p>The museum’s educational goals are ambitious. </p>
<p>It is an interdisciplinary history museum, where educators plan to work with teachers and administrators around the world to make sure students in American schools – and everyone who lives in the U.S. today and in the future – learns about South Carolina’s significant role in U.S. history. </p>
<p>In my view, that collaboration will likely be challenging, given the efforts to sanitize the nation’s racial history and teachers’ apprehensions about teaching supposedly controversial subjects. </p>
<p>“This is a site of trauma,” Tonya Matthews, CEO and president of the museum, <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/international-african-american-museum-charleston-south-carolina-trauma-triumph/">told CBS News</a>. “But look who’s standing here now. That’s what makes it a site of joy, and triumph.”</p>
<p>Indeed, the International African American museum is, by design, a monument to freedom – and an honest engagement with America’s troubled racial past.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/199951/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bernard Powers is a board member of the International African American Museum. </span></em></p>The new museum opened at a time when the teaching of Black history is under attack by conservative politicians.Bernard Powers, Professor of History Emeritus, College of CharlestonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1625872021-06-23T12:26:20Z2021-06-23T12:26:20ZFor flood-prone cities, seawalls raise as many questions as they answer<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407732/original/file-20210622-23-juxm6u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1957%2C1305&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Flooding caused by high tides in a Miami neighborhood on June 19, 2019.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/FloridaFloodingRisks/3d2ecc80f0094fd091d094a965c5eaa8/photo">AP Photo/Ellis Rua</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The oceans are rising at <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2020.01.016">an accelerating rate</a>, and millions of people are in the way. Rising tides are already affecting cities along low-lying shorelines, such as the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts, where <a href="https://coast.noaa.gov/states/fast-facts/recurrent-tidal-flooding.html">sunny-day flooding has become common</a> during high tides. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.usace.army.mil/">U.S. Army Corps of Engineers</a>, whose mission includes maintaining waterways and reducing disaster risks, has proposed building large and expensive seawalls to protect a number of U.S. cities, neighborhoods and shorelines from coastal storms and rising seas. <a href="https://www.coastalconservationleague.org/projects/charleston-peninsula-coastal-flood-risk-management-study-by-the-us-army-corps-of-engineers/">Charleston</a>, <a href="https://www.nan.usace.army.mil/Missions/Civil-Works/Projects-in-New-York/New-York-New-Jersey-Harbor-Tributaries-Focus-Area-Feasibility-Study/">New York City</a> and <a href="https://www.swg.usace.army.mil/Business-With-Us/Planning-Environmental-Branch/Documents-for-Public-Review/">the Houston-Galveston metro area</a> are currently considering proposals to build barriers in response to hurricane surges and sea level rise, and the Corps recently published a draft proposal for a seawall for <a href="https://www.saj.usace.army.mil/MiamiDadeBackBayCSRMFeasibilityStudy/">Miami</a>.</p>
<p>As a scientist who studies the <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=PCczXC0AAAAJ&hl=en">evolution and development of coastlines and the impacts of sea level rise</a>, I believe that large-scale seawall proposals raise important long-term questions that residents, urban leaders and elected officials at all levels of government need to consider carefully before they invest billions of dollars. In my view, this approach is almost certainly a short-term strategy that will protect only a few cities, and will protect only selected portions of those cities effectively.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZzZdqQ11tiI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Cities like Charleston, South Carolina, that are experiencing increasingly frequent tidal flooding need strategies for adapting to rising seas.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Coastal flooding is here</h2>
<p>The extent of high tide flooding in low-elevation Atlantic coastal cities is <a href="https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/publications/Techrpt_092_2019_State_of_US_High_Tide_Flooding_with_a_2020_Outlook_30June2020.pdf">well documented</a>, and so are <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/">future trends</a>. In a 2017 study, the Union of Concerned Scientists assessed chronic flooding risks in 52 large coastal cities and found that by 2030, the 30 cities most at risk can expect <a href="https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/when-rising-seas-hit-home">at least two dozen tidal floods yearly on average</a>. The study defined tidal flooding as seawater encroaching into at least 10% of a city. </p>
<p>These cities include New Haven, Connecticut; Boston; Philadelphia;, Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Wilmington, Delaware; Norfolk, Virginia; Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; Jacksonville, Florida; and Miami. Cumulatively, they are home to about 6 million people. The study projected that by 2045, most of them will experience over 100 days of flooding annually.</p>
<p>This flooding won’t just become more frequent – it also will become deeper, extend farther inland and last longer as sea levels continue to rise. Greater encroachment will cause increasing harm to infrastructure, development and property. </p>
<p>The Army Corps of Engineers’ recent proposals include building an 8-mile (12.8-kilometer) seawall around Charleston at a cost of <a href="https://www.coastalconservationleague.org/projects/charleston-peninsula-coastal-flood-risk-management-study-by-the-us-army-corps-of-engineers/">nearly US$2 billion</a>; a 1-mile (1.6-kilometer) wall for Miami-Dade, with a price tag of <a href="https://www.coastalnewstoday.com/post/fl-miamis-4-billion-plan-to-combat-sea-level-rise-has-radical-urban-ideas">nearly $4.6 billion</a>; and a 6-mile (9.6-kilometer) barrier to shield portions of New York City and New Jersey, at an estimated cost of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/nyregion/sea-wall-nyc.html">$119 billion</a>. None of these investments would protect other Atlantic coastal cities <a href="https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/publications/Techrpt_092_2019_State_of_US_High_Tide_Flooding_with_a_2020_Outlook_30June2020.pdf">already experiencing high tide flooding</a>.</p>
<p>While these proposed projects differ slightly, they each involve major barriers or seawalls along the shoreline, or just offshore in the case of New York and New Jersey. The structures are intended to protect these areas from hurricanes and storm surges, and from some uncertain level of future sea level rise. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407734/original/file-20210622-19-1y2oizn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Graphic of proposed flood-control system for Galveston Bay" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407734/original/file-20210622-19-1y2oizn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/407734/original/file-20210622-19-1y2oizn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=281&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407734/original/file-20210622-19-1y2oizn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=281&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407734/original/file-20210622-19-1y2oizn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=281&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407734/original/file-20210622-19-1y2oizn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407734/original/file-20210622-19-1y2oizn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/407734/original/file-20210622-19-1y2oizn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=353&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The proposed ‘Ike Dike’ to protect Galveston Bay and the Houston ship channel from flooding includes storm surge gates, seawalls along the shore and dunes and beaches engineered to absorb floodwaters.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://coastal-texas-hub-usace-swg.hub.arcgis.com/">USACE</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Coverage and costs</h2>
<p>There are a number of key issues that I believe any city considering a major seawall proposal should consider. Here are some of the most critical questions: </p>
<p>– Who and what will be protected by these large walls, and at what cost? With so many U.S. cities already experiencing coastal flooding, and current proposals focusing on very large metropolitan areas, there are important questions about which portions of cities would be surrounded by walls and how much to spend. For example, New York City has a <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-nw-nyt-new-york-flooding-sea-wall-20200117-fsiy5kf2mzaz3czzl7w453lzne-story.html">520-mile coastline</a>, but seawall proposals there focus only on protecting lower Manhattan.</p>
<p>– How many years of protection might these barriers provide, and are they just short-term solutions? Flooding can result from short-term extreme events, such as hurricanes, and also from long-term sea level rise. What time frame should these projects be designed to address?</p>
<p>– Who selects which cities or areas to protect? To date, proposals have come from the Army Corps of Engineers. Which officials and local, state or federal agencies should be involved in making these decisions and establishing policies that will guide responses to future sea level rise? </p>
<p>– Do people really want to live behind walls? In New York, Miami and elsewhere, residents have objected to <a href="https://miami-grid.com/2021/03/01/sea-wall/">flood walls that would block views</a>.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1400528750417125376"}"></div></p>
<p>– Who will pay for the walls? Proposing multibillion-dollar walls is one thing, but where will the funds come from to actually construct and maintain these massive structures? In Texas, where the proposed “Ike Dike” across Galveston Bay is projected to cost some $26 billion, the Legislature is considering <a href="https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Bill-to-create-taxing-entity-to-pay-for-Ike-16197375.php">creating a special flood-control district</a> with the power to levy property taxes within its boundaries to raise the state’s share.</p>
<p>– Would these structures encourage additional development behind the walls? Typically, providing flood control encourages new construction in the now-protected area, which increases future liabilities and losses when walls are overtopped or fail.</p>
<p>– What other long-term options should be considered? Boston recently considered flood barriers for either its outer or inner harbor, but rejected these options in favor of softer options like <a href="https://www.wbur.org/earthwhile/2021/01/04/bpda-climate-resilient-zoning-plan-boston-flooding">climate-resilient zoning</a> with special requirements for new projects in flood-prone areas.</p>
<p>– Can cities that reject seawalls agree on thresholds or trigger points for taking other steps, such as using some combination of incentives and mandates to move people out of high-risk areas? Norfolk, one of the most flood-prone cities on the Atlantic coast, has developed a plan that prioritizes development in less-vulnerable zones, which it calls “<a href="https://www.norfolk.gov/DocumentCenter/View/27768/Vision-2100---FINAL?bidId=">neighborhoods of the future</a>.”</p>
<p>Such decisions will affect coastal communities, infrastructure and residents for decades into the future, and I believe it is time to meet this crisis head-on. Sea level rise is a complex problem with no easy or inexpensive solution, but the sooner the science is understood and accepted, and everyone who is affected has an opportunity to get involved, the sooner cities can make plans. In the long run, there is no way to hold back the Atlantic Ocean.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/162587/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gary Griggs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Many coastal US cities are contending with increasingly frequent and severe tidal flooding as sea levels rise. Some are considering building seawalls, but this strategy is not simple or cheap.Gary Griggs, Director, Institute of Marine Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences, University of California, Santa CruzLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1409172020-06-26T12:32:27Z2020-06-26T12:32:27ZAuthorities are yanking the legacy of slaveholder John C. Calhoun from public sphere, but his bigotry remains embedded in American society<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343843/original/file-20200624-132982-1jd1ctm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Construction workers extracted a Calhoun statue in Charleston, South Carolina on June 24, 2020.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/workers-use-a-cherry-picker-to-access-the-statue-of-john-c-news-photo/1222328146?adppopup=true">Sean Rayford/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When I toured the <a href="https://www.scgovernorsmansion.org/">South Carolina Governor’s Mansion</a> in 2019, I noticed the multi-volume <a href="https://www.archives.gov/nhprc/projects/catalog/john-calhoun">papers of John C. Calhoun</a> on display. It struck me as remarkable that Calhoun’s ideas would be featured so prominently given his vigorous defense of slavery and his role in laying the groundwork for the Civil War.</p>
<p>But the reality is <a href="https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/calhoun-john-caldwell/">Calhoun’s legacy</a> until now has been quite prominent in American society – and not just in the South.</p>
<p>His statue stands between the two chambers of the House and Senate in the South Carolina Statehouse. However, a separate statue in Charleston has been <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/24/882681085/crews-begin-removal-of-john-c-calhoun-statue-in-south-carolina">removed</a> from the town square following nationwide protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd during an encounter with police. The statue had stood for 124 years just a block from <a href="https://motheremanuel.com/">Mother Emanuel Church</a>, site of the <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/16/charleston-church-shooting-mother-emanuel-five-years/3193054001/">horrific shooting massacre in 2015</a> of nine Black worshipers by an avowed white supremacist. The church is also located on Calhoun Street. </p>
<p>Despite his historic prominence, Calhoun’s days as a revered icon in the public sphere are gradually coming to an end.</p>
<h2>Calhoun is all around us</h2>
<p>Numerous cities and counties, streets and roads, schools and other public places are named for Calhoun, a <a href="https://www.clemson.edu/about/history/properties/fort-hill/african-americans.html">slaveholder</a> who served as <a href="https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/calhoun-john-caldwell">secretary of state</a>, <a href="https://history.army.mil/books/Sw-SA/Calhoun.htm">secretary of war</a>, <a href="https://www.senate.gov/senators/FeaturedBios/Featured_Bio_Calhoun.htm">a U.S. senator</a>, and two terms as <a href="https://www.senate.gov/about/officers-staff/vice-president/VP_John_Calhoun.htm">vice president</a>.</p>
<p>For instance, the <a href="https://www.historiccolumbia.org/tour-locations/john-c-calhoun-state-office-building">Calhoun State Office Building</a> sits in the capitol complex in Columbia, South Carolina’s state capital city.</p>
<p>There are counties named for him in his <a href="https://calhouncounty.sc.gov">home state</a>, as well as <a href="https://www.calhouncounty.org">Alabama</a>, <a href="https://calhouncounty.arkansas.gov">Arkansas</a>, <a href="http://calhouncountyga.com">Georgia</a> and elsewhere in the South. There is even a <a href="https://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/story/news/2020/06/12/calhoun-county-named-white-supremacist-slavery-michigan-john-c-calhoun/5334260002/">Calhoun County in Michigan</a> named for him. </p>
<p>Major streets in Columbia and Charleston, still bear his name.</p>
<h2>Colleges and universities</h2>
<p>Despite his prominence elsewhere, Calhoun is about to become less prominent on the landscape of American higher education.</p>
<p>The board of trustees at Clemson University, a public university, <a href="https://newsstand.clemson.edu/mediarelations/clemson-trustees-approve-honors-college-name-change-request-authority-to-restore-original-name-of-tillman-hall/">announced</a> on June 12 that its Honors College would no longer be named after Calhoun.</p>
<p>South Carolina’s “<a href="https://www.scstatehouse.gov/sess113_1999-2000/bills/4895.htm">Heritage Act</a>” prevents renaming of buildings without legislative approval, but the honors college is an organizational unit, not a building.</p>
<p>This is a particularly significant development given that Clemson University sits on what was once <a href="https://www.clemson.edu/about/history/properties/fort-hill/">Calhoun’s plantation</a>, which his daughter and her husband, Thomas Clemson, inherited.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343845/original/file-20200624-132982-q7mtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343845/original/file-20200624-132982-q7mtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343845/original/file-20200624-132982-q7mtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343845/original/file-20200624-132982-q7mtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343845/original/file-20200624-132982-q7mtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343845/original/file-20200624-132982-q7mtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343845/original/file-20200624-132982-q7mtzy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Football players at Clemson University lead the March for Change on their campus on June 13, 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/clemson-university-football-players-lead-a-march-for-change-news-photo/1249471210?adppopup=true">Maddie Meyer/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>While public memorials of Calhoun appear to be on the decline, what I find more significant – and more troublesome – is the way that Calhoun’s ideology has been ingrained in the American culture and psyche – thanks in large part to the way his ideas were embraced in U.S. institutions of higher learning long after his death.</p>
<p>I make this observation as a historian and author of a chapter for the book “<a href="https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/P/Persistence-through-Peril">Persistence Through Peril: Episodes of College Life and Academic Endurance in the Civil War South</a>.”</p>
<h2>Who was he?</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.clemson.edu/about/history/bios/john-c-calhoun.html">Calhoun</a>, who was born in 1782 and died a decade before the Civil War began, in 1850, was not only a <a href="https://www.clemson.edu/about/history/properties/fort-hill/african-americans.html">slaveholder</a> and an ardent defender of slavery, but a chief architect of the political system that allowed slavery to persist.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343848/original/file-20200624-133002-8soap2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/343848/original/file-20200624-133002-8soap2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343848/original/file-20200624-133002-8soap2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343848/original/file-20200624-133002-8soap2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=746&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343848/original/file-20200624-133002-8soap2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343848/original/file-20200624-133002-8soap2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/343848/original/file-20200624-133002-8soap2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=937&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Engraved portrait of John C. Calhoun.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/engraved-portrait-of-american-politician-former-us-vice-news-photo/164287442?adppopup=true">Stock Montage/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More enduring than the effects of his political career – which included the <a href="https://www.tsl.texas.gov/exhibits/annexation/part4/page2.html">annexation of Texas</a> to expand the number of slaveholding states – are the repercussions of his political ideology. </p>
<p>As a political theorist, Calhoun is best known for two ideas: “<a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2210719.pdf">concurrent majority</a>” and “nullification.” A concurrent majority is the notion that a minority of the electorate – namely, one with money and property – can veto a political majority.</p>
<p>This idea is related to his belief in <a href="https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/nullification/">nullification</a> theory, which is the idea that a state can void federal laws. Nullification made the idea of South Carolina seceding from the nation – and the creation of the Confederacy – a political possibility and then a reality. </p>
<p>Calhoun laid out his arguments for these ideas in his treatise “<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/disquisition-on-government-and-a-discourse-on-the-constitution-and-government-of-the-united-states/oclc/1308732">A Disquisition on Government</a>.”</p>
<p>While some Americans defended slavery as a “<a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/necessary-evil-slavery-and-the-debate-over-the-constitution/oclc/32092358">necessary evil</a>” Calhoun viewed slavery as “<a href="https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/slavery-a-positive-good/">a positive good</a>.”</p>
<p>He held <a href="https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/conquest-of-mexico/">paternalistic views of Blacks as well as other non-whites</a>, declaring: “We make a great mistake when we suppose that all people are capable of self-government.”</p>
<h2>The Calhoun curriculum</h2>
<p>Calhoun’s political doctrines were taught explicitly in college classrooms for decades after his death. There are still <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/06/09/defeat-systemic-racism-institutions-must-fully-integrate-truly-diverse-subject">remnants</a> in the curriculum.</p>
<p>His own views on nullification theory, states’ rights and secession were formed when he studied at Yale University where the college’s president, <a href="https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/12/resources/3810">Timothy Dwight</a>, introduced to him the espoused the idea that New England could leave the young nation and become a separate country. Yale named a residential college in his honor in 1931. It <a href="https://news.yale.edu/2017/02/11/yale-change-calhoun-college-s-name-honor-grace-murray-hopper-0">renamed it in 2017</a> after the intense pressure from students and alumni that followed the Charleston massacre at the Mother Emanuel Church.</p>
<p>In the chapter that I am writing for “Persistence through Peril,” I am explaining how Calhoun’s ideologies permeated Southern institutions of higher education. His views were taught at the Military Academy of South Carolina, before, during and after the Civil War. When those cadets studied the U.S. Constitution, their professors and texts emphasized Calhoun’s interpretation of it.</p>
<p><a href="https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/thomasmull/id/33/">John Peyre Thomas</a>, a Citadel graduate and Confederate Army colonel who served as professor, superintendent and later trustee at The Citadel, heaped praise upon Calhoun, having served as editor for <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/07015660/">The Carolina Tribute to Calhoun</a> in 1857.</p>
<p>In a speech given at Clemson University on June 22, 1897, Thomas declared, “It is conceded that Calhoun’s standard in the science of government is so lofty as in some respects to be unattainable in our day and generation.”</p>
<h2>The road ahead</h2>
<p>Decades of teaching a particular doctrine do not fade easily or quickly. The United States is now witnessing another <a href="https://theconversation.com/minneapolis-long-hot-summer-of-67-and-the-parallels-to-todays-protests-over-police-brutality-139814">racial awakening</a> with protests for social justice. Symbols of racism and white supremacy are being removed from higher education. </p>
<p>On June 17, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees <a href="https://www.unc.edu/posts/2020/06/17/unc-trustees-lift-moratorium/">reversed</a> its <a href="https://www.greensboro.com/z-no-digital/unc-cant-rename-buildings-with-racist-history-professors-are-trying-to-change-that/article_946e5b6d-c2db-54f3-b21e-496f9c9412ad.html">16-year moratorium</a> on renaming buildings, put in place after the statue known as “<a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/02/12/805250903/judge-voids-uncs-controversial-settlement-over-confederate-statue-silent-sam">Silent Sam</a>” was torn down in 2018.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.onlineathens.com/news/20200618/university-system-of-georgia-to-review-names-of-buildings-uga-ready-to-rsquoassist-and-supportrsquo-says-morehead">University System of Georgia</a>, which includes the University of Georgia, also moved in June 2020 to review the names of its buildings. This would include the University of Georgia’s Grady School of Journalism, which is named after Henry Grady, an <a href="https://www.ajc.com/blog/get-schooled/opinion-has-moment-come-strip-grady-name-from-atlanta-high-school-and-uga-college/A8ks9IdMLwdHvE14SGdb1N/">avowed white supremacist</a>.</p>
<p>After Calhoun’s death in 1850, his colleague in the Senate, <a href="https://www.historynet.com/john-c-calhoun-the-man-who-started-the-civil-war.htm">Thomas Hart Benton</a> of Missouri, remarked about him: “He is not dead. There may be no vitality in his body, but there is in his doctrines.” He was prophetic in his words. </p>
<p>Calhoun’s ideologies <a href="https://www.historynet.com/john-c-calhoun-the-man-who-started-the-civil-war.htm">fueled the Civil War</a>, gave comfort to those who believed in the “<a href="https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/lost_cause_the">Lost Cause</a>” (that is, to show the Civil War in the best light possible from the Confederate point of view) and perpetuated the teaching of racist and white supremacist attitudes.</p>
<p>Because the ideas he espoused have flourished, I believe that dismantling his legacy will take much more than just removing statues of his likeness or renaming buildings, streets and other public places named in his honor.</p>
<p>[<em>You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=youresmart">You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/140917/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christian K. Anderson receives funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct a summer seminar for school teachers on Black lawmakers during Reconstruction. </span></em></p>Despite his defense of slavery, the former vice president and US senator from South Carolina has been honored with statues and streets, schools and counties. That’s finally changing.Christian K. Anderson, Associate Professor of Higher Education, University of South CarolinaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/609122016-06-16T09:56:44Z2016-06-16T09:56:44ZHow will we remember black women on the anniversary of the Charleston shooting?<p>The men and women of a Bible study at Charleston, South Carolina’s <a href="http://www.emanuelamechurch.org/index.php">Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church</a> welcomed Dylann Roof into their circle on June 17, 2015. Then, after an hour of discussion and prayer, the 21-year-old white supremacist took out a gun and opened fire on them. Declaring his hatred of African-Americans, Roof methodically murdered one unsuspecting person after another. </p>
<p>Of the nine people killed, six were black women: Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton and Myra Thompson. </p>
<p>As we mark the one-year anniversary of the Charleston massacre, the place of African-American women in the tragedy and its aftermath continues to demand attention.</p>
<p>How did the shooting impact black women? This was one of the many questions that inspired me to start the hashtag <a href="http://www.aaihs.org/resources/charlestonsyllabus/">#CharlestonSyllabus</a> on Twitter following the shooting. Now a <a href="http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/charleston_syllabus/">book</a> co-edited with professors <a href="http://clas.wayne.edu/kidada-williams">Kidada Williams</a> and <a href="http://clas.uiowa.edu/history/people/keisha-n-blain">Keisha Blain</a>, the goal of #CharlestonSyllabus is to provide a historical context for understanding the shooting and explore themes and issues that the media and politicians have misconstrued or ignored altogether.</p>
<p>One such issue is that black women, without due recognition, continue to endure the pain and carry the trauma of America’s legacy of racial violence. The Charleston shooting also revealed the central role black female activists have played in struggles for racial and gender equality, and their importance as pillars of black religious communities.</p>
<h2>Acknowledging violence against black women</h2>
<p>In discussions of racial violence in U.S. history, the image most often invoked is that of the black male, from the <a href="http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html">slave narrative of Frederick Douglass</a>, to <a href="http://withoutsanctuary.org/main.html">images of lynching</a>, to martyred civil rights era leaders like <a href="http://www.uapress.com/dd-product/medgar-evers/">Medgar Evers</a> and <a href="http://www.basicbooks.com/full-details?isbn=9780465012862">Martin Luther King Jr.</a>, to more recent figures like <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/opinion/charles-blow-michael-brown-and-black-men.html">Michael Brown</a>. Black men, as representatives of the race, have functioned as the archetype of violence inflicted upon African-Americans as a whole.</p>
<p>Mainstream coverage of the Charleston shooting followed this pattern. Much of the media’s focus centered on the death of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/26/us/clementa-pinckney-felt-called-to-spiritual-and-political-service.html">Reverend Clementa Pickney</a>, a South Carolina state senator and the pastor of Emanuel A.M.E. Lacking Pickney’s public visibility, the female victims received comparatively less attention.</p>
<p>This type of marginalization reminds us of the need to recognize America’s long history of violence toward black women. Enslaved black women, as seen in the narratives of <a href="http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html">Harriet Jacobs</a>, <a href="http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/prince/prince.html">Mary Prince</a> and others, faced the constant threat of sexual violation and physical abuse at the hands of their masters and mistresses. During Reconstruction and throughout the Jim Crow era, lynch mobs and white terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan <a href="http://nyupress.org/books/9780814795361/">regularly targeted black women</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/126776/original/image-20160615-14035-1f50xng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/126776/original/image-20160615-14035-1f50xng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/126776/original/image-20160615-14035-1f50xng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126776/original/image-20160615-14035-1f50xng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126776/original/image-20160615-14035-1f50xng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126776/original/image-20160615-14035-1f50xng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1200&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126776/original/image-20160615-14035-1f50xng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1200&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/126776/original/image-20160615-14035-1f50xng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1200&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fannie Lou Hamer at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Library of Congress/Warren K. Leffler</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As black women like <a href="http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/sayitplain/flhamer.html">Fannie Lou Hamer</a> stood on the front lines during the civil rights movement, they constantly endured the violent reprisals of white law enforcement and vigilantes. And today, social media and hashtags like <a href="http://www.aapf.org/sayhername/">#SayHerName</a> bring awareness to the deaths of Tanisha Anderson, Natasha McKenna, Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland and other black women who have lost their lives at the hands of police.</p>
<p>The Charleston massacre marked yet another moment of violence against black women and its traumatic effects.</p>
<p>By methodically executing six black women, Roof demonstrated no regard for their race, class, gender or age. The oldest victim, Susie Jackson, was 87. The three survivors, Polly Sheppard, Felecia Sanders and her 11-year-old granddaughter who played dead, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/3-survivors-of-the-charleston-church-shooting-grapple-with-grief/2015/06/24/0ba48c26-19f2-11e5-93b7-5eddc056ad8a_story.html">were left to suffer through the horror of what they witnessed</a> and carry those memories with them for the rest of their lives. It is essential to acknowledge the unique toll the shooting took on these women and others.</p>
<h2>Changing history as leaders and activists</h2>
<p>At the same time, we must not view black women solely as victims. </p>
<p>Throughout U.S. history and up to the present, African-American women have been the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=FES5klacj0AC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">backbone of the black church</a>. This is certainly true for Emanuel A.M.E.</p>
<p>The resilience of the Emanuel A.M.E. community in coping with tragedy over the past year is due in large part to the collective strength and faith of its female congregants and leaders. In January of 2016 <a href="http://fusion.net/story/272005/meet-betty-deas-clark-mother-emanuel-pastor/">Reverend Betty Deas Clark</a> became the church’s first female pastor.</p>
<p>African-American women were also instrumental in demanding justice and historical reckoning in the shooting’s aftermath. While South Carolina’s politicians may congratulate themselves for removing the Confederate flag from the grounds of the State Capitol, it was in fact a black woman, <a href="http://www.breenewsome.com/">Bree Newsome</a>, who determined that the stars and bars would fly no more. </p>
<p>On the morning of June 27, 2015, Newsome, a longtime activist, scaled the 30-foot pole in front of the Capitol, removed the flag and declared,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the name of Jesus, this flag has to come down. You come against me with hatred and oppression and violence. I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How we choose to remember the Charleston shooting matters. Black women – those tragically lost, those who survived and those who continue to fight – must be at the center of our remembrance. By not doing so, we will fail to fully understand the historical significance of what took place at Emanuel A.M.E. on the night of June 17, 2015.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/60912/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chad Williams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Six of the nine people who died were black women. One year later, a Brandeis professor examines how black women have endured a legacy of racial violence in the U.S.Chad Williams, Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies, Brandeis UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/453512015-08-12T10:18:07Z2015-08-12T10:18:07ZWhy historically black colleges and universities matter in today’s America<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91485/original/image-20150811-11101-absev2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Black colleges and universities exemplify the American ideals of civil rights and equality. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/bamakodaker/16704335209/in/photolist-82BswR-7EsE7K-7Ewn1y-7EwxhL-82BsFp-tvsZ1W-aHqDdH-ekUZAR-azaPFH-rs75Tt-fo3syA-fnNmLM-66u27S-66pHYt-66pJHB-66pJkt-66u2xJ-7EsxTK-82EBQs-82EC3E-ekUZi4-ekUZi8-ekUZg2-rGgNbo-nw87ii-nNyKKm-nNjGdB-nNsevU">LloydGallman</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.change.org/p/prosecute-the-killer-of-our-son-17-year-old-trayvon-martin">Trayvon Martin</a>. <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/the-cop">Michael Brown</a>. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/nyregion/eric-garner-police-chokehold-staten-island.html?_r=0">Eric Garner</a>. <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/7/20/9002747/sandra-bland-arrest-video">Sandra Bland</a>. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/debbie-hines/renisha-mcbride-black-wom_b_6630968.html">Renisha McBride</a>. <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/martese-johnson-university-of-virginia-student-in-bloody-arrest-makes-first-court-appearance/">Martese Johnson</a>. And now <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33856887">Tyrone Harris</a>.</p>
<p>All these names remind us how precarious black lives can be. Martin, Brown and Garner were killed in their own neighborhoods. And that’s not all. Even religious settings seem to offer little protection. As we know, nine black people were murdered while attending services at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. </p>
<p>Through the years, predominantly black spaces such as historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have sheltered black people. More than that, they provide an important space for the fight for civil rights, equality, and black liberation. </p>
<p>Despite this connection, many wonder what the role is of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) today. I have been researching HBCUs to understand how education and its pursuit by black Americans represent a constant affront to white supremacy. </p>
<p>Historically, educating the formerly enslaved and their descendants represented a truly radical act. And today, as black Americans choosing to attend these schools know (and confirmed by researchers), these campuses are <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/review_of_higher_education/v025/25.3fries-britt.html">psychologically</a> and <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/review_of_higher_education/v025/25.3outcalt.html">socially more liberating</a> than the predominantly white ones. </p>
<p>This is but one reason we still need HBCUs. Their historic role in the pursuit of freedom is yet another.</p>
<h2>Key role played by black schools</h2>
<p>HBCUs have always been the vehicles for liberty and equality in the journey toward black liberation within America. </p>
<p>Black Americans have long understood the relationship between education and democracy. Following the Civil War, learning the rules of the American and southern political economy was <a href="http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=382">necessary</a> to take full advantage of one’s citizenship rights. </p>
<p>However, at the time, not only did most people believe the formerly enslaved had no desire for education, they also thought black Americans did not possess the <a href="http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=382">mental capacity to pursue it</a>. </p>
<p>The fervent efforts of the formerly enslaved to establish colleges in the post-bellum South ran counter to these beliefs, although the founding of <a href="http://www.lincoln.edu">Lincoln University</a> in Pennsylvania in 1854, even prior to the Civil War’s conclusion, proved beyond doubt that black Americans were keen to seek education.</p>
<p>The point is, HBCUs played a crucial role in transforming how America was to understand and envision what it meant to be black following the Civil War. And throughout the years, these schools have served as incubators for future generations of freedom fighters. </p>
<p>It was HBCUs, for example, where the carefully crafted educational strategies that birthed the mass protests and civil unrest of the 1950s and 1960s <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo5939918.html">emerged</a>, a fact that many people today may fail to appreciate adequately. </p>
<h2>Contributions of black colleges</h2>
<p>HBCUs influenced the character of the black liberation struggle. They trained the leaders and served as key sites of exchange where ideals about the best paths toward freedom took shape. </p>
<p>Take <a href="https://www2.howard.edu/about/history">Howard University</a>, an HBCU founded in 1867, as an example. Without this school, our understanding of equality and access would be quite different. </p>
<p>It was Howard graduates who would use the law to challenge the idea that separate educational facilities could ever produce equal outcomes for black Americans. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91487/original/image-20150811-14995-vxbnyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91487/original/image-20150811-14995-vxbnyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91487/original/image-20150811-14995-vxbnyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91487/original/image-20150811-14995-vxbnyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91487/original/image-20150811-14995-vxbnyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91487/original/image-20150811-14995-vxbnyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/91487/original/image-20150811-14995-vxbnyi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Thurgood Marshall trained in a black university environment.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/chicagobart/12707881243/in/photolist-kmXdmK-9ayLg-4RoeCR-4RoeSk-6vgUjD-avMUjn-avMUKZ-avMUSH-avQyZ9-avMR6R-avQx13-avMSoK-avMSSt-avMUcB-avMQTk-avMWVz-avQvJN-avQwmN-avMUZ6-avMUrk-avMUEp-avQxvG-avMRHT-avQytm-avQwyf-avMV7t-avQuVJ-8JHbcR-8JLdSh-8JHb28-sDsSPU-8JLdWJ-8JHaQg-8JLdsb-8JHawt-8JHaqz-8JHb6i-8JLe15-8JLdEd-ivaVq5-6vsPN7-89cnjY-4PrBRu-6vsPfm-6voCnv-9axYf-41zpBG-tgY3M8-avMRuF-avQv7o">PROBart Heird</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Charles Hamilton Houston, vice dean of Howard Law School, viewed the school as a laboratory that would <a href="http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?id=7834">“create the select and talented corps of lawyers who would work to fulfill constitutional promises.”</a> </p>
<p>So it did. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.biography.com/people/thurgood-marshall-9400241">Thurgood Marshall</a>, the lawyer who would argue the Brown v Board of Topeka case and later became a Supreme Court justice, emerged from this environment. He came up with a brilliantly constructed critique of racially segregated education that persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down the system. </p>
<h2>Past and present challenges</h2>
<p>Predictably, black schools faced many challenges. From the start, defenders of white supremacy have understood HBCUs as spaces intricately connected to the fight for civil rights and black liberation. </p>
<p>To impede these schools’ ability to become training grounds for equality, political foes did all they could to make sure HBCUs <a href="http://www.sunypress.edu/p-6086-in-the-face-of-inequality.aspx">remained underfunded, underresourced and understaffed</a>. </p>
<p>For instance, southern state legislative bodies routinely diverted money away from HBCUs, leaving the schools to operate on <a href="http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1004277916909">razor-thin budgets</a>. </p>
<p>In the 1920s, foundations urged the schools <a href="http://upress.missouri.edu/product/Dangerous-Donations,434.aspx">to limit their curriculum</a> to politically neutral yet economically relevant subjects such as domestic service and agriculture, which were not likely to inspire students to challenge a system that denied their humanity. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, some of these challenges continue to this day. </p>
<p>Data from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities indicate, for example, that between 2010 and 2012, the state legislature underfunded South Carolina State University by more than <a href="http://diverseeducation.com/article/69727/">US$6 million</a>. </p>
<h2>Impact of black colleges</h2>
<p>Questioning the contemporary relevance of HBCUs is the modern-day equivalent of such efforts.</p>
<p>It is true that only about <a href="http://hbcu-levers.blogspot.com/p/frequently-asked-questions-faqs-about.html">9%</a> of all blacks enrolled in college attend HBCUs. And I can agree that if we understand the role of HBCUs only in terms of the numbers educated, then these schools are not as relevant to the majority of black Americans as they once were. </p>
<p>However, if we are to understand the role of HBCUs as vehicles of freedom and black liberation, then they still have an important role within our society.</p>
<p>In fact, when compared to predominantly white colleges, HBCUs continue to have a disproportionate impact on the production of college-educated black Americans. They may account for approximately 3% of all colleges and universities, <a href="http://www.uncf.org/sections/MemberColleges/SS_AboutHBCUs/about.hbcu.asp">but well over 20% of black Americans</a> continue to earn their degrees at these schools. </p>
<p>And about 25% of black Americans earning STEM degrees do so at HBCUs. </p>
<h2>Why we need black colleges today</h2>
<p>So, I find it troubling when people question their contemporary necessity. </p>
<p>Also, doubts about these schools’ continued relevance underestimate the relationship between HBCUs and the struggle for black liberation within America that continues to this day.</p>
<p>Students of these schools have been at the forefront of peaceful protests. Learning from past efforts that <a href="http://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=2980#.VcoprHh7B94">used art as a tool</a> for black liberation, students at Morgan State University created a <a href="http://news.morgan.edu/morgan-students-look-from-the-inside-out-to-show-the-value-of-black-lives/#.VaUteZNViko">large-scale photo installation</a> around the theme of “Black Lives Matter.” </p>
<p>Students from Howard University gathered in front of the White House to protest the <a href="http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/11/26/hbcu-students-unite-protest-ferguson-grand-jury-decision/">grand jury decision</a> in the Michael Brown case. Likewise, Morehouse College students staged a march and, in conjunction with students from nearby Clark Atlanta University and Spelman College, also held a peace rally protesting the decision.</p>
<p>The contemporary <a href="http://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/RacialWealthGap_1.pdf">economic</a>, <a href="http://www.brennancenter.org/analysis/voting-rights-act-resource-page">political</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing-black-men.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1">social precariousness</a> of black life in America indicates that we need more settings like HBCUs, not fewer. </p>
<p>If we as a society come to recognize that black lives matter, then we must do the same for the venues that cultivate and nurture these lives as well.</p>
<p>In fact, no set of institutions better exemplifies the American ideals of civil rights and equality than historically black colleges and universities.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45351/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Melissa E Wooten does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Historically black colleges account for only 3% of all colleges and universities. But, even today, 20% of black Americans earn their degrees at these schools.Melissa E Wooten, Associate Professor of Sociology, UMass AmherstLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/454802015-08-10T19:52:35Z2015-08-10T19:52:35ZWhy the silence of moderate conservatives is dangerous for race relations<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/91197/original/image-20150807-27587-9ptaa7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Letter from a Birmingham Jail - 1963
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Freedom_quote_from_Martin_Luther_King,_Jr%27s_Letter_from_a_Birmingham_Jail.jpg">Jason C Tillmann</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The past two years of racial turmoil have removed any and all doubt about the continuing significance of race in the United States. </p>
<p>Both whites and blacks <a href="http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/A_Politics/_Today_Stories_Teases/130724-July-NBC-WSJ-poll.pdf">have exhibited</a> increasingly negative views on race relations since 2011. A recent <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/05/us/05poll-doc.html">New York Times/CBS News poll</a> finds that Americans’ perceptions of racial progress have drastically deteriorated over the last year. </p>
<p>The current racial environment stands in stark contrast to 2008, when numerous commentators mused about <a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=geQxhys4rf8C&oi=fnd&pg=PR5&dq=post+racial+america&ots=t_Y7laDbI4&sig=CNt14M4XHXdUp-eKPMUXXAUXF_g#v=onepage&q=post%20racial%20america&f=false">a post-racial America. </a></p>
<p>We believe the post-racial narrative began to lose substantial support after George Zimmerman eluded incarceration for the murder of Trayvon Martin, reached a flashpoint with the shooting of unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson by a police officer, continued to loose steam with the high-profile killings of blacks such as <a href="http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/freddie-gray/">Freddie Gray</a> and <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-cop-verdict-servin-edit-0423-20150422-story.html">Rekia Boyd</a> and was permanently disabled after <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-charleston-43821">the grisly massacre </a>of nine black church members in Charleston, South Carolina. </p>
<p>Beyond such headline-grabbing events, race also affects the likelihood of obtaining a <a href="http://www.cepr.net/documents/black-coll-grads-2014-05.pdf">job</a>, how one is treated at every stage in the <a href="http://www.nyclu.org/content/stop-and-frisk-data">criminal justice system</a> and even <a href="http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301395">health outcomes</a>. </p>
<p>Why does race continue to haunt us, 150 years after the Civil War, 50 years after the landmark civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s, and six years into the Obama presidency?</p>
<p>The persistence of racism, we argue, rests in no small part on the inability of moderate conservatives – from politicians like Speaker of the House John Boehner to columnists like The New York Times’ David Brooks – to recognize the ways in which it continues to affect the life chances of blacks. </p>
<p>We have been here before. </p>
<p>As social scientists well-versed in <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/american-government-politics-and-policy/civil-rights-and-making-modern-american-state">the history of the civil rights era</a> and the <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9083.html">backlash against it,</a> we see a direct parallel between today’s conservative moderates and those of the Jim Crow South to whom Martin Luther King Jr addressed his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963. </p>
<h2>The Birmingham Campaign</h2>
<p>“If you win in Birmingham, as Birmingham goes, so goes the nation.” </p>
<p>These were the words that longtime activist Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth used to encourage King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to come to Birmingham and take part in nonviolent direct action protests against segregation. </p>
<p>When they arrived, King, Shuttlesworth and the SCLC launched a formal campaign called <a href="http://crdl.usg.edu/events/birmingham_demonstrations/?Welcome">Project C</a> (C for confrontation) in which – through sit-ins at lunch counters and marches on City Hall – nonviolent protesters let Birmingham and the rest of the nation know that the city’s days of treating blacks as second-class citizens needed to end. </p>
<p>Attempting to quell the momentum, Birmingham issued an injunction barring further protests in the city. Two days later, on Good Friday, April 12 1963, King and a group of Birmingham Campaign supporters were arrested after they openly defied the injunction. </p>
<p>While in jail, King reflected on the slow pace of racial progress and placed the dire situation squarely at the feet of white moderates.</p>
<h2>Southern white moderates: a sacred middle ground</h2>
<p><a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/letter-birmingham-jail">Letter from Birmingham Jail</a> was written in response to a <a href="http://www.massresistance.org/docs/gen/09a/mlk_day/statement.html">Call For Unity</a>, a public statement by eight white clergymen who acknowledged that American racism was wrong but argued that direct action – protest in the streets – was too extreme. </p>
<p>They favored a less confrontational strategy – one that took place in the courts, an approach they hoped would avoid inciting further hatred and violence on the part of white reactionaries. </p>
<p>King’s letter does a skillful job in unmasking this type of lukewarm moderate support for civil rights and recasts it as shortsighted, condescending and ultimately dangerous to the black freedom movement. </p>
<p>King is particularly critical of white moderates who disapprove of black anger while turning a blind eye to the circumstances responsible for the anger. He explains:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Expressing grave disappointment, King ultimately concludes, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Finally, the letter calls into question the tired refrain of “wait” for change, as moderates often believed blacks were impatient about the pace of progress. </p>
<p>In one of the most cited passages, King writes, “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’”</p>
<p>Moderates occupied a sacred middle ground between the progressives and the reactionaries in the South, and King wanted their support.</p>
<p>He would not get it. </p>
<p>Southern reactionaries, led by Eugene (Bull) Connor, commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, feeling the ground shake beneath them, did not flinch in their defense of white supremacy.</p>
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<p>Aided by the silence of southern moderates, the reactionary white establishment felt it had a green light to inflict harm on the black community. </p>
<p>With the world watching, they turned <a href="http://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/activism/civil-rights-demonstrations/birmingham-demonstrations">high-pressure fire hoses on black students</a>, allowed police dogs to attack demonstrators and arrested over 1,000 nonviolent protesters. </p>
<p>The violent events in Birmingham were instrumental in showing an international and a domestic audience the ugly side of American racism. </p>
<p>Soon after, moderate whites beyond the South <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo5939918.html">became a key force </a> in drumming up support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.</p>
<h2>2015: moderate conservatives are still key</h2>
<p>Fast forwarding to today, the racial climate is eerily similar to what we observed more than 50 years ago. </p>
<p>However, now it’s the entire country, not just the South, that is riven with racial violence. </p>
<p>This time around, as one of us together with Matt A Barreto show in our book <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9954.html">Change They Can’t Believe In</a>, it’s the Tea Party pushing a reactionary agenda. And, much like their forebears during Jim Crow, moderate conservatives, who are relatively progressive on race, refuse to assert themselves where race is concerned.</p>
<p>If David Brooks, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/opinion/05brooks.html?_r=0">who has castigated the Tea Party</a> for their refusal to compromise and for having “no sense of moral decency,” represents the sentiments of moderate conservatives, it’s easy to see why race remains a problem in America. </p>
<p>Consider the following. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.electionstudies.org/studypages/anes_timeseries_2012/anes_timeseries_2012.htm">We analyzed data</a> from the American National Election Study (2012) to investigate the distribution of reactionary relative to establishment conservatives among self-identified conservatives in the American electorate. </p>
<p>Our analysis indicates that approximately 22% of all conservatives identify strongly with the Tea Party. This means that approximately 78% of all conservatives are at least moderate.</p>
<p>But what do they say on race? </p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/opinion/listening-to-ta-nehisi-coates-while-white.html?_r=0">his recent review</a> of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book, <a href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/220290/between-the-world-and-me-by-ta-nehisi-coates/">Between the World and Me</a>, in The New York Times, Brooks essentially rejects the notion that the racial animus that results in violence remains a problem when he writes,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think you [Coates] distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s…a Harlem Children’s Zone for every KKK – and usually vastly more than one. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The effects of racism, in other words, at least these days, are mitigated by the opportunities this great country provides everyone. One way to read Brooks is that he is saying that race and racism are not as bad as Coates, and by extension, black folk, believe it is. </p>
<p>Similarly, John Boehner, speaker of the house and part of the conservative leadership, has downplayed racism – most recently <a href="http://www.politicususa.com/2015/07/12/spineless-coward-john-boehner-refuses-condemn-donald-trumps-racism.html">in his response</a> to Donald Trump’s inflammatory comments about Mexicans. </p>
<p>And while far too many moderate conservatives sit by, it is the reactionaries who commandeer the racial agenda with, for instance, <a href="https://www.irehr.org/issue-areas/tea-party-nationalism/tea-party-news-and-analysis/504-trayvon-tea-party-racism">their lionizing of George Zimmerman</a> and <a href="https://www.irehr.org/issue-areas/race-racism-and-white-nationalism/574-national-socialists-militia-klan-and-tea-parties-respond-to-murder-of-michael-brown">their dismissal</a> of protesters in Ferguson as “blacks out of control” and “aboriginals.” </p>
<p>We believe this nation is, as it was in the 1960s during the Birmingham Campaign, at a crossroads in race relations. </p>
<p>The reality on the ground is that blacks are dying at an <a href="https://theconversation.com/look-for-the-patterns-in-charleston-43593">alarming rate</a> at the hands of agents of the state (law enforcement) as well as individual white citizens like George Zimmerman and Dylann Roof. </p>
<p>Combating such injustice will require moderate conservatives to take a bold stand. </p>
<p>We agree with King: moderates must not shrink in the presence of vocal white reactionaries or hide behind lofty color-blind rhetoric. </p>
<p>As King affirmed over 50 years ago, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45480/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>One year on from Ferguson, the message of Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail could not be more relevant.Christopher Sebastian Parker, Associate Professor, Political Science , University of WashingtonMegan Ming Francis, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science , University of WashingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/446422015-07-27T10:03:36Z2015-07-27T10:03:36ZHow the legacy of slavery affects the mental health of black Americans today<p>On July 22, in announcing the federal indictment of Charleston killer Dylann Roof, Attorney General Loretta Lynch <a href="http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20150722/PC16/150729789">commented</a> that the expression of forgiveness offered by the victims’ families is “an incredible lesson and message for us all.” </p>
<p>Forgiveness and grace are, indeed, hallmarks of the Black Church. </p>
<p>Since slavery, the church has been a formidable force for the survival of blacks in an America still grappling with the residual effects of white supremacy. </p>
<p>This was eloquently illustrated in the aftermath of the Charleston church massacre. Americans rightly stood in awe of the bereaved families’ laudable demonstration of God’s grace in action. </p>
<p>But what about the psychic toll that these acts of forgiveness exact? </p>
<p>Events like Charleston put a spotlight on the growing body of literature that looks not only at the United States’ failure to have authentic conversations about slavery and its legacy but also at the mental health impact of forgiving
acts of white racism and repressing justifiable feelings of anger and outrage – whether these are <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/USA-Update/2015/0724/Why-is-Dylann-Roof-not-facing-charges-of-terrorism">horrific acts</a> of <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/terrorism/terrorism-definition">terrorism</a> or nuanced <a href="http://socialwork.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199975839.001.0001/acrefore-9780199975839-e-987">microaggressions.</a> </p>
<p>I am a social work educator and practitioner with 25 years of experience in the field of mental health. I teach at one of the nation’s leading schools of social work, committed to preparing its graduates to work with racially and ethnically diverse populations. It is time, I believe, to bring this new field of inquiry into the mainstream. </p>
<h2>The church as buffer</h2>
<p>In his seminal book, <a href="http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780195161793.do">Mighty Like A River, the Black Church and Social Reform</a>, sociologist <a href="http://ifs.sc.edu/facultystaff/billingsley.asp">Andrew Billingsley</a> asserts that the Black Church is the only African-American institution that has not been reenvisioned in the image of whites. </p>
<p>His research illuminates the role of religion in building the resilience that allows blacks as a people to overcome the various forms of terrorism and oppression endured over centuries that sustain doctrines of white supremacy. </p>
<p>Indeed, in <a href="http://books.simonandschuster.com/Climbing-Jacobs-Ladder/Andrew-Billingsley/9780671677091">his analysis</a> of the African-American family, Billingsley concludes that it is “amazingly strong, enduring, adaptive and highly resilient.”</p>
<p>But as we pay homage to church and family in buffering blacks against the full effects of white racism, we must not obscure or diminish racism’s impact on the mental health that few blacks – <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/books/excerpt-the-persistence-of-the-color-line.html?_r=0">irrespective of educational, social or economic status</a> – will escape. </p>
<p>There is increasing evidence that repressing feelings associated with acts of white racism may be psychologically damaging and lay the foundation for future mental health problems and behaviors symptomatic of post-traumatic stress syndrome.</p>
<h2>Evidence of racism’s impact on mental health</h2>
<p>Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint asked why suicide rates among black males doubled between 1980 and 1995. </p>
<p>In his co-authored book, <a href="http://www.beacon.org/Lay-My-Burden-Down-P155.aspx">Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African-Americans</a>, which takes its title from a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LbzGjGUgGU">Negro spiritual</a> describing the hardships of the slave system, he argues that one of the reasons for this increase is that African-American young men may see the afterlife as a better place. </p>
<p><a href="http://terriewilliams.com/portfolio/home/terrie-williams-author/">Terrie M Williams</a> is a clinical social worker in New York. In her book, <a href="http://books.simonandschuster.com/Black-Pain/Terrie-M-Williams/9780743298834">Black Pain: It Just Looks Like We’re Not Hurting</a>, she uses powerful personal narratives of blacks from all walks of life to illustrate the high toll of hiding the pain associated with the black experience on mental health. </p>
<p>Joy DeGruy, Portland State University researcher and scholar, has developed “<a href="http://joydegruy.com/resources-2/post-traumatic-slave-syndrome/">post-traumatic slave syndrome</a>” as a theory for explaining the effects of unresolved trauma on the behaviors of blacks that is transmitted from generation to generation. </p>
<p>DeGruy’s argument may be <a href="http://www.essence.com/2005/01/12/breaking-the-chains">controversial</a>, but the questions she asked are surely relevant as we try to make sense, for example, of <a href="http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2293169">research</a> released this July that shows suicide rates among black elementary school pupils significantly increasing between 1993 and 2012. </p>
<h2>Moving to the mainstream…slowly</h2>
<p>The fact is that from my perspective at New York University’s Silver School of Social Work, these publications have yet to move into mainstream literature. They have low visibility in the curricula and training programs for mental health professionals. </p>
<p>Nor have the questions these scholars and practitioners raised led to the kind of research that is <a href="https://www.omh.ny.gov/omhweb/cultural_competence/resources.html">needed</a> to support race-conscious and culturally appropriate practices for the mental health programs and agencies working with African-American families. </p>
<p>At the same time, however, the original thinking of authors like Poussaint and DeGruy is very much in sync with the new emphasis on <a href="http://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/exc_012014.shtml">trauma-informed care</a> in social work across all fields of practice. </p>
<p>As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded in a May 2014 <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/findings.html">research report</a>, undiagnosed childhood neglect or trauma is widespread among American adults and is the root cause of mental health and behavioral problems in adulthood. </p>
<p>Indeed, it is now the recommendation of the <a href="http://www.thenationalcouncil.org/topics/trauma-informed-care/">National Council for Behavioral Health</a> that trauma-informed care be integrated into all assessment and treatment procedures. </p>
<p>This emphasis on trauma provides a new lens for developing research into the impact of slavery - and its legacy of structural and institutional racism - on black mental health today.</p>
<h2>A difficult topic of conversation</h2>
<p>The problem is, no one likes to talk about slavery.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89694/original/image-20150724-8468-1jac4aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89694/original/image-20150724-8468-1jac4aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=994&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89694/original/image-20150724-8468-1jac4aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=994&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89694/original/image-20150724-8468-1jac4aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=994&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89694/original/image-20150724-8468-1jac4aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1249&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89694/original/image-20150724-8468-1jac4aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1249&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89694/original/image-20150724-8468-1jac4aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1249&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The trauma of slavery.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Cicatrices_de_flagellation_sur_un_esclave.jpg">National Archives and Records</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For blacks descended from slaves, the subject evokes feelings of shame and embarrassment associated with the degradations of slavery. For whites whose ancestry makes them complicit, there are feelings of guilt about a system that is incongruent with the democratic ideals on which this country was founded. </p>
<p>Cloaked in a veil of silence or portrayed as a benevolent system that was in the best interest of blacks, slavery – much like mental illness – has become shrouded in secrecy and stigma. </p>
<p>Associated emotions are pushed away. </p>
<p>Anger, however, is a healthy emotion, as even the Scriptures acknowledge. </p>
<p>The God of the Old Testament is angry and vengeful. In the New Testament, Jesus vents his anger in driving the money changers from the Temple. </p>
<p>As research (including <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/community-mental-health-challenges-for-the-21st-century-second-edition/oclc/845253880">my own</a>) has shown, when anger is internalized and driven deep into the unconscious, contaminated by unresolved pain, it becomes problematic. </p>
<p>So what happens to the anger felt by people discriminated against and, in extreme cases, physically targeted because of their race? </p>
<p>Not enough is known about the relationship between clinical depression and race. But there are extensive findings (including reports by the <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK44243/">Surgeon General</a>) that attribute racial disparities in mental health outcomes for African Americans and whites to clinician bias, socioeconomic status and environmental stressors (such as high rates of crime and poor housing). And there is <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/community-mental-health-challenges-for-the-21st-century-second-edition/oclc/845253880">evidence</a> of a link between perceived racism and adverse psychological outcomes such as increased levels of anxiety, depression and other psychiatric symptoms.</p>
<p>The numbers tell a story. According to the <a href="http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/african-american-mental-health">Minority Health Office </a>of the Department of Health and Human Services, black adults are 20% more likely to report serious psychological distress than white adults and are more likely to have feelings of sadness, hopelessness and worthlessness than do their white counterparts.</p>
<p>And yet there continues to be reluctance to forthrightly confront the impact of racism on mental health. Some of my colleagues, for example, say that content on race and racism is the most challenging content for them to teach. Authentic dialogue on race is constrained by the fear of being “political incorrect.” It takes less effort to promote the more inclusive liberal view that we live in a “color-blind society.” </p>
<p>It may be easier to allow everyone to remain in their comfort zone. But today as the US faces what would appear to be an epidemic of race-based attacks committed by whites, it is time to examine how our history of racism affects the mental health of African Americans as well as that of whites.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/44642/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alma Carten does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Forgiveness, as we have seen in the aftermath of the Charleston killings, is a hallmark of the Black Church. But what psychic toll do these acts of forgiveness exact?Alma Carten, Associate Professor of Social Work; McSilver Faculty Fellow, New York UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/441272015-07-07T09:00:47Z2015-07-07T09:00:47ZWill the Charleston tragedy serve as an inflection point for race relations?<p>On June 17, in Charleston, South Carolina, it was once again proven that – to some, at least – black lives <em>don’t</em> matter. But this time it wasn’t under color of authority. This time, it was in a church, and at the hands of a person who’s clearly and unambiguously <a href="http://lastrhodesian.com/data/documents/rtf88.txt">racist.</a> </p>
<p>What’s happened in the wake of the tragedy is as shocking in scope as it is in its swiftness. President Obama used it as an opportunity to remind us of the racism that continues to plague the nation. Further, the <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/take-down-the-confederate-flag-now/396290/%20http:/www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/take-down-the-confederate-flag-now/396290/">suspect’s affinity for the Confederate battle flag</a> led to Governor Nikki Haley’s call for its removal from the State Capitol and on <a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-confederate-flag-south-carolina-20150706-story.html#page=1">Monday July 6</a> the South Carolina Senate voted 37 to 3 to do just that. People of all racial hues took to the streets to protest the killings and their basis in racism.</p>
<p>All of this has led <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/is-charleston-a-turning-point-for-america-on-race_b_7666608.html">some to believe</a> that what’s happening in South Carolina represents an inflection point when it comes to race: an opportunity to hit the “reset button” where racism is concerned in America. </p>
<p>Before we embrace this conclusion lock, stock and barrel, however, we need to take a closer look. </p>
<p>My experience writing on <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10354.html">race, social movements</a> and the <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9083.html">postwar South</a> suggests that we must look to the past for clues about the likelihood Charleston serving as a game changer. </p>
<h2>The role of both domestic and international opinion</h2>
<p>Whether we define racial progress in symbolic or substantive ways, history suggests that when whites use violence against blacks, it sometimes backfires, resulting in racial progress. </p>
<p>However, the conditions under which it happens are very specific. </p>
<p>Typically, there are at least two audiences – third parties, if you will – to which forces of change appeal: one domestic, the other international. </p>
<p>The sympathy of the domestic audience (generally non-Southern) has – for much of the past 60 years – resided with the progressive forces as they witnessed scenes in which peaceful black protesters, who simply wished to be treated in accordance with the law of the land, were brutalized by white southerners. Such scenes evoked moral revulsion and emotional shock.</p>
<p>The international audience was no less important.</p>
<p>In the context of the Cold War, during which the United States was engaged in a global ideological struggle with the Soviet Union, race and racism were crucial elements.</p>
<p>To the extent that both superpowers were in a competition for international influence, and the United States often advertised itself as a beacon for freedom and democracy, the continued oppression of 10% of its population rendered such a claim dubious at best. </p>
<p>Further, to the degree that much of the competition for strategic access and alliances, by the 1950s, took place among nations in which people of color were in the majority, Jim Crow – and African diplomats being <a href="http://www.indiana.edu/%7Epsource/PDF/Archive%20Articles/Spring2012/2012%20-%20Spring%20-%208%20-%20Murray%20Vachon,%20Nicholas.pdf">kicked out</a> of diners – didn’t play too well. </p>
<p>Of course, the Soviets took advantage of every act of violence and repression that took place in the South, denouncing such blatant hypocrisy to worldwide audiences. The violence associated with the Freedom Rides serves as one example of this. “Scenes of bloodshed in Montgomery are,” <a href="http://www.crmvet.org/riders/ns6107_world.pdf">said Radio Moscow</a>, “the worst examples of savagery…taking place in a country which has the boldness to declare that its way of life is…an example for other people.” </p>
<p>With these caveats in mind, let’s now consider the relationship between violence and racial progress, beginning with the civil rights legislation of 1957 and 1960. </p>
<h2>Violence and racial progress</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87540/original/image-20150706-973-crobj2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87540/original/image-20150706-973-crobj2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=628&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87540/original/image-20150706-973-crobj2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=628&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87540/original/image-20150706-973-crobj2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=628&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87540/original/image-20150706-973-crobj2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=789&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87540/original/image-20150706-973-crobj2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=789&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87540/original/image-20150706-973-crobj2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=789&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Emmett Till was 14 when he was killed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:14EmmettTillBefore_(2534273093).jpg">ImageEditor</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It was close on the heels of the<a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-death-of-emmett-till"> murder of Emmett Till</a> (1955) and the attempt to integrate Central High School in <a>Little Rock, Arkansas</a> (1957) that civil rights bills were ratified with the intention of improving access to voting for black southerners. </p>
<p>Ultimately, however, both <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Black_Ballots.html?id=RqFOuIhndtYC">fell far short</a> of the stated goal. For instance, as of 1958, <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/1952827?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">only Tennessee</a> could boast that more than 40% of its black eligible voters were actually registered. </p>
<p>What happened? </p>
<p>In the aftermath of Emmett Till’s murder and, especially the white resistance at Little Rock, the Eisenhower Administration was moved to <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9560.html">push for civil rights legislation</a> as a means of blunting continuing <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/40023174?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">Soviet assaults</a> on the “American way of life.” As the president <a href="http://faculty.nwacc.edu/dvinzant/documents/LaytonIntlPressureandLRCrisis.pdf">himself said</a>, after ordering the deployment of federal troops to protect the new black students at Little Rock’s Central High School:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[I]t would be difficult to exaggerate the harm being done to the prestige and influence, and indeed to the safety, of our nation and the world. Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our whole nation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On the domestic side, however, the audience was limited to white southerners, because civil rights failed to register on the national agenda in the 1950s. And since southern reactionaries and their representatives weren’t too keen on displacing white supremacy, it is hardly surprising that the civil rights legislation of 1957 and 1960 failed to achieve its goals.</p>
<p>Now go forward four years. </p>
<p>The racial progress achieved with the legislation of 1964 and 1965 also took place in the shadow of the Cold War. </p>
<p>These were the days of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. But the domestic audience also played an important role here – and this time it was nationwide. </p>
<p>The attacks on Freedom Riders and sit-in participants, the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in which four young girls were murdered, the spectacle during which fire hoses and dogs were turned loose on women and children protesters, and the “Bloody Sunday” march from Montgomery to Selma: this violence was extensively covered by the <a href="http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/march-7-1965-civil-rights-marchers-attacked-in-selma/comment-page-1/">national media</a> with shocking photographs like that of protester Amelia Boynton lying unconscious on the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Selma. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87541/original/image-20150706-1000-myavff.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87541/original/image-20150706-1000-myavff.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87541/original/image-20150706-1000-myavff.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87541/original/image-20150706-1000-myavff.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87541/original/image-20150706-1000-myavff.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87541/original/image-20150706-1000-myavff.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87541/original/image-20150706-1000-myavff.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alabama police attack on Bloody Sunday.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bloody_Sunday-Alabama_police_attack.jpeg">FBI</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Civil rights catapulted to the top of the American social and political agenda. </p>
<p>Many Americans were <a href="http://www.history.com/news/selmas-bloody-sunday-50-years-ago">outraged</a> at the behavior of many southern whites, law enforcement included. Ultimately, this outrage resulted in legislation that outlawed discrimination on the basis of race (among other factors), segregation, and expedited the implementation of the Brown decision. </p>
<p>Let us now return to the tragedy in Charleston.</p>
<h2>Who is watching Charleston?</h2>
<p>The domestic audience is certainly paying attention to South Carolina, as any glance at today’s media shows. What’s missing, however, is the international audience. This, in my judgment, is critical. </p>
<p>In the absence of an external existential threat to keep America honest, the impetus for racial progress lies squarely in the domestic sphere. </p>
<p>And this means that change is at the mercy of reactionary conservatives, people who, as my <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10354.html">research and that of Matt Barreto </a>into the Tea Party has shown, are fervent, disdainful of compromise and fearful of an existential threat to an American way of life in which mainly white Christians are the chosen group. </p>
<p>As I’ve argued <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9083.html">elsewhere</a>, these sentiments can be traced to the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, in which the return of the “New Negro” from World War I represented a threat to the existing racial order. </p>
<p>Dylann Roof is an outlier in terms of his actions, but his resentments are more widespread than may be generally acknowledged. Research I conducted in 2010 makes the case that the suspect isn’t the only one who harbors such sentiments; disdain for blacks is quite prevalent among contemporary <a href="http://depts.washington.edu/uwiser/mssrp_table.pdf">reactionaries.</a>.</p>
<p>When it was discovered that Roof has an affinity for the Confederate battle flag, it further confirmed what many blacks have come to believe: that the Confederate flag <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/06/22/416548613/the-complicated-political-history-of-the-confederate-flag">represents the continued oppression of blacks. </a> </p>
<p>This, then, is what needs to be kept in mind as we witness South Carolina’s lawmakers <a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-confederate-flag-south-carolina-20150706-story.html#page=1">debate </a>Governor Haley’s call to remove the flag from the State Capitol. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fWlh5CdQTRI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">South Carolina’s Senate debates - now comes the House.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yes, white-on-black violence, as it appears to prick the conscious of sympathetic whites, has resulted in adjustments in the past, and it may do so again. </p>
<p>However, we must remain mindful of the fact that more enduring progress has taken place when domestic sympathy was reinforced by the political pragmatism associated with the presence of an international pressure. </p>
<p>If we’re talking about a <em>global</em> military and ideological threat that has the capacity to threaten the existence of the United States or, at the very least, that claims to be interested in black lives, we’re fresh out of those at the moment: Islamist terrorism fails to meet either criteria. </p>
<p>What is more, as my own research confirms, the <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/06/04-tea-party-future-political-movement-parker">reactionary right</a> only continues to grow. Today’s Republican Party has been forced to adopt positions on, say, comprehensive immigration reform that are at odds with the moderate wing of the party. </p>
<p>The fact is that GOP moderates and reactionaries significantly <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10354.html">part ways</a> on issues related to race. For instance, only 10% of reactionaries believed coverage of the George Zimmerman trial “raised important issues about race” warranting further discussion, compared to 40% of GOP moderates. In another example, when asked to evaluate the persistence of racial discrimination when it comes to voting in the wake of the 2013 Supreme Court <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html?_r=0">rollback of voting rights</a> for blacks, 50% of GOP moderates believe this to be true versus 37% of GOP reactionaries. </p>
<p>I for one, remain to be convinced that the popular outrage we see now will result in real change.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/44127/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher Sebastian Parker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>On July 6, the South Carolina Senate voted to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds. In the past white-on-black violence has led to real change - but under specific conditions.Christopher Sebastian Parker, Associate Professor, Political Science , University of WashingtonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/441222015-07-02T10:20:36Z2015-07-02T10:20:36ZThe political work of the Confederate flag<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87022/original/image-20150701-27106-a513vh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ninian_reid/16606208892/in/photolist-riramq-3dqCuR-6GSWiZ-8nS2G2-8TdmPC-dVEJ7L-8EbD6v-2ScYW-4LUTxz-jB1Rqp-4GZ4ss-o83Kna-dD7AnH-o6iGiG-5kKkDK-jB2SF6-3aQB11-nQTAW4-o6UWe3-nLy8Kc-nBk3GW-8ZnzAB-7c8Gg2-9oQQLB-7iG4Ei-nPmDCT-jL2ESp-jL4gir-jL4NBC-jL6ee1-jL3xJc-jL3Fun-jL2dnR-jL4UGn-jL5uB7-jL37HT-jL4hPk-jL4d4i-jL3ZoD-jL4DU6-jL46ww-jL6TUC-jL5VuU-jL2uFT-jL4bQh-jL374V-jL4CA5-jL2yXg-jL334T-jL3kJT">Ninian Reed flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Confederate flag may soon be gone with the wind. </p>
<p>It is a remarkable reversal of fortunes for one of America’s most divisive but enduring symbols. </p>
<p>In 2001, Mississippians <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/18/us/mississippi-votes-wide-margin-keep-state-flag-that-includes-confederate-emblem.html">voted two-to-one</a> in favor of keeping the flag. </p>
<p>The year before, flag defenders in South Carolina <a href="http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2000/05/24/south-carolina-gov-signs-confederate-flag-compromise">worked out a deal</a> that removed the flag from above the State Capitol dome, but placed it in an arguably more prominent position, atop a Confederate memorial in front of the Capitol. </p>
<p>Now, 14 years later, in the wake of the murder of nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston by a flag-waving white supremacist, South Carolina’s most prominent Republican politicians advocate removing the flag altogether. </p>
<p>High-ranking Republicans <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/charleston-church-shooting/tide-turning-mississippi-gop-leader-says-banish-confederate-flag-n380066">in Mississippi</a> have issued similar calls to remove the emblem from the Mississippi state flag. A number of other southern states have already taken steps to sever ties with the embattled banner.</p>
<p>Public opinion on the flag has seemed to shift with lightning speed, and yet it is a wonder how, in our modern multiracial democracy, a symbol of a rebellious slave-holding regime from the 19th century has held on as long as it has. </p>
<p>The answer, at least in large part, is that the flag has persisted because it has performed important cultural and political work for the Democratic and Republican parties alike. </p>
<h2>The South shifts</h2>
<p>It is impossible to separate the history of the flag from the historic partisan shift in southern politics since the 1960s. </p>
<p>Abraham Lincoln, in his <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html">second inaugural address</a>, said that everyone knew that slavery was “somehow the cause” of the Civil War. </p>
<p>Today, most people acknowledge that race was somehow the cause of the Republican takeover in the South. </p>
<p>The pithiest and most enduring summation of the process is often attributed to Lyndon Johnson, whose path to national prominence lay in his ability to reconcile the southern segregationist wing of the party with labor and liberal groups. </p>
<p>In 1964 conservative Republicans like Barry Goldwater were making in roads among states rights Democrats. Many crossed party lines to vote for the anti-government Republican. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87054/original/image-20150701-27151-12wjwfo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87054/original/image-20150701-27151-12wjwfo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87054/original/image-20150701-27151-12wjwfo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87054/original/image-20150701-27151-12wjwfo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87054/original/image-20150701-27151-12wjwfo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87054/original/image-20150701-27151-12wjwfo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87054/original/image-20150701-27151-12wjwfo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr after the signing of the Voting Rights Act.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndon_B._Johnson#/media/File:Lyndon_Johnson_and_Martin_Luther_King,_Jr._-_Voting_Rights_Act.jpg">Yoichi Okamoto - Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. Image Serial Number: A1030-17a.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Johnson <a href="http://capitalresearch.org/2014/10/we-have-lost-the-south-for-a-generation-what-lyndon-johnson-said-or-would-have-said-if-only-he-had-said-it/">reportedly lamented </a>to an aide that he had just given over the South to the Republicans for the next generation, although some have questioned the veracity of the quote. </p>
<p>Regardless of whether Johnson actually said it, what’s clear is that Republican ascendancy in the South was slower and more contested than this bit of folklore allows. </p>
<p>Despite Barry Goldwater’s victory in five Deep South states in 1964, for decades afterwards, Democrats kept tight control over almost every southern state. </p>
<p>As thousands of new black voters entered politics thanks to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, astute young Democratic candidates moved to the middle and built powerful biracial political coalitions. These were the New South Democrats. </p>
<p>They were genuine southern boys, raised in the rural South who had seen the error of the region’s ways. They embodied the moral awakening that the region and the nation had undergone, and two of them, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, ended up riding that compelling political narrative all the way to the White House.</p>
<p>But the New South narrative was always a fragile thing, because these men operated in a schizophrenic southern Democratic Party undergoing massive changes. </p>
<p>Old-time Dixiecrats mixed with new black voters, at least for a while. Gaining a foothold required no small amount of political juggling, as evidenced by the still <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-riddle-of-jimmy-carter-20110201">whispered reports</a> of Jimmy Carter’s 1970 gubernatorial primary.</p>
<p>Republicans running against such candidates faced a tall order. They had no entree to the black vote given Democratic dominance on civil rights and their own anti-federal government ideology. To win they had to amass an overwhelming majority of the white vote.</p>
<p>Their trouble was not only electoral but cultural. This is where the Confederate flag and other symbols of the southern past proved so useful for Republicans. </p>
<h2>Appealing to southern nationalism</h2>
<p>Modern GOP organizations in the South were started by college-educated white-collar professionals, a large number of whom were recent migrants to the region who came as contributors to the South’s booming economy. </p>
<p>Party leaders in South Carolina had plenty of money, thanks to conservative businessmen such as <a href="https://www.scgop.com/2009/12/14/great-things-are-happening/">Roger Milliken</a>, who was also a key contributor to the National Review in its early years, but they had little political experience. </p>
<p>They were alienated economically and culturally from the working-class whites and <a href="http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Lost_Cause_The">Lost Cause</a> enthusiasts who were most disenchanted with the civil rights policies of the national Democratic Party – and who were most likely to join the Republicans. </p>
<p>In South Carolina, the GOP got a boost in 1964 when <a href="http://us.macmillan.com/stromthurmondsamerica/josephcrespino">Strom Thurmond</a>, the former Dixiecrat presidential candidate, switched parties. In 1966, the first time Thurmond ran as a Republican, the GOP state convention opened under a huge Confederate banner. </p>
<p>A number of African Americans had attended previous Republican conventions in the state, a vestige of the historic tie between the GOP and black voters that dated back to emancipation, but none was present in 1966.</p>
<p>Yet throughout the 1970s, Republican appeals to southern nationalism had an ersatz quality to it. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87055/original/image-20150701-27109-12jv9ry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87055/original/image-20150701-27109-12jv9ry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87055/original/image-20150701-27109-12jv9ry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87055/original/image-20150701-27109-12jv9ry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87055/original/image-20150701-27109-12jv9ry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=736&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87055/original/image-20150701-27109-12jv9ry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=736&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87055/original/image-20150701-27109-12jv9ry.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=736&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ninian_reid/16606208892/in/photolist-riramq-3dqCuR-6GSWiZ-8nS2G2-8TdmPC-dVEJ7L-8EbD6v-2ScYW-4LUTxz-jB1Rqp-4GZ4ss-o83Kna-dD7AnH-o6iGiG-5kKkDK-jB2SF6-3aQB11-nQTAW4-o6UWe3-nLy8Kc-nBk3GW-8ZnzAB-7c8Gg2-9oQQLB-7iG4Ei-nPmDCT-jL2ESp-jL4gir-jL4NBC-jL6ee1-jL3xJc-jL3Fun-jL2dnR-jL4UGn-jL5uB7-jL37HT-jL4hPk-jL4d4i-jL3ZoD-jL4DU6-jL46ww-jL6TUC-jL5VuU-jL2uFT-jL4bQh-jL374V-jL4CA5-jL2yXg-jL334T-jL3kJT">Ninian Reed flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The real candidate of southern nationalists was Alabama governor George Wallace, who ran both as a Democrat and as an independent candidate. Confederate flags were common at his rallies across the nation that turned out thousands of disaffected Democrats in the late 1960s and early 1970s. </p>
<p>Richard Nixon was obsessed with the Wallace vote in both of his campaigns, and GOP operatives throughout the South understood it as key to Republican success in the region. </p>
<p>It was in tone-deaf pursuit of Wallace voters that Ronald Reagan delivered perhaps <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/opinion/13herbert.html">the most infamous</a> <a href="http://neshobademocrat.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=297&ArticleID=15599">speech</a> of his career. </p>
<p>In 1980, in Neshoba County, Mississippi, where only 16 years earlier three civil rights workers had been murdered, Reagan linked his conservative agenda with the states’ rights cause that had driven generations of southern segregationists. </p>
<p>The 1980s was the decade of real partisan transition that occurred in southern politics. </p>
<p>Reagan brought over the last of the remaining Dixiecrats as well as a younger generation of conservative southern Democrats. </p>
<p>There were still one-off instances of southern Democratic identification with the flag, such as a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/06/22/what-those-clinton-gore-confederate-flag-buttons-say-about-politics-in-2015/">Clinton-Gore campaign button </a>that circulated in 1992, but leading southern Democrats, Clinton foremost among them, <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/24/the-clinton-confederate-flag-conspiracy-theory-is-a-new-low.html">made clear</a> their opposition to the Confederate flag. </p>
<p>Not so for the Republicans. The trick then and now for national Republican candidates is how to tap this visceral core of conservative voters without alienating moderate supporters from outside the region. </p>
<p>It has led Republican presidential candidates to twist themselves into all sorts of compromising positions, particularly since the 1980s, when South Carolina positioned itself as one of the earliest and most important primary states, the bellwether for the region that any GOP candidate would have to dominate if they were to win a national election. </p>
<h2>Race v religion</h2>
<p>The success of the Republican Party for the last 50 years, in both the South and throughout the country, has been rooted in its ability to hold together an inherently unstable union between economic elites and working-class whites.</p>
<p>They have managed this in largest part by appealing to a range of cultural issues. Race has been one of those cultural touchstones since the earliest days of the southern Republican takeover. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87057/original/image-20150701-27138-12i9yki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/87057/original/image-20150701-27138-12i9yki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87057/original/image-20150701-27138-12i9yki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87057/original/image-20150701-27138-12i9yki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87057/original/image-20150701-27138-12i9yki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87057/original/image-20150701-27138-12i9yki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/87057/original/image-20150701-27138-12i9yki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A billboard in Alabama.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0f/Go_to_church....jpg/640px-Go_to_church....jpg">PugFather</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Since the late 1970s, however, so too has religion, when conservative GOP activists made a concerted effort to politicize and recruit <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133.html#.VZRNCEgRL1E">evangelical and fundamentalist voters</a> who had previously remained on the margins of American politics.</p>
<p>Dylann Roof’s evil actions in Charleston have managed to pit against each other the two most important cultural constituencies in the southern Republican Party. </p>
<p>It is no coincidence that almost all of the Republican officials who have called for the flag’s removal have invoked their Christian faith as motivation for their efforts. </p>
<p>Chances are, a lot more southern Republicans have attended a Wednesday Bible study – the scene of Dylann Roof’s evil act – than have ever attended a Confederate memorial service. </p>
<p>But just because the flag goes away doesn’t mean that the hard-core racist right will. Ugly displays of <a href="http://race2012pbs.org/">racist animus</a> have been regular parts of Tea Party gatherings since Barack Obama’s election.</p>
<p>Regardless of what happens with the flag, the GOP will continue to struggle with immigration issues and recruitment of minority voters. </p>
<p>If conservative evangelical Republicans manage to purge southern states of the Confederate flag, the real victors will not be Republicans but southerners themselves, white and black.</p>
<p>Whatever political and cultural work the flag might have performed in the past, it is time for it to end.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/44122/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joseph Crespino does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Public opinion on the flag may have shifted with lightning speed, but how did it hold on as long as it did? The answer has to do with how it served both Democratic and Republican parties alike.Joseph Crespino, Professor of History, Emory UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/440502015-07-01T10:07:04Z2015-07-01T10:07:04ZBree Newsome’s Superwoman-style, Confederate flag pole climb was an artistic statement<p>On June 28, in the early hours of the morning, 30-year-old helmeted activist Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole at the South Carolina State House and cut down the controversial Confederate flag, which was first raised there <a href="http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/jun/22/eugene-robinson/confederate-flag-wasnt-flown-south-carolina-state-/">in 1961</a>, almost 100 years after the Civil War. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gr-mt1P94cQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Bree Newsome takes down the Confederate flag at the South Carolina State House.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It’s easy to dismiss Newsome’s actions as a social media stunt. Many have ridiculed it as pointless (or worse, harmful) theatrics that might derail legal action to take down the flag permanently. For example, The Baltimore Sun <a href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/howard/columbia/bs-md-bree-newsome-20150627-story.html">quoted</a> two South Carolina lawmakers – Democratic State Senator Marlon Kimpson and Republican State Senator Shane Massey – who called the action counterproductive:</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"614776631371124736"}"></div></p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"614775831739564032"}"></div></p>
<p>Yes, Newsome was arrested and the flag went right back up. </p>
<p>But Newsome’s climb can be viewed as a significant piece of socially engaged performance art that brought attention to the flag issue. And in the long run, it <em>will</em> work to get it removed, while encouraging people to think about what the flag means, particularly to African Americans. </p>
<h2>Two types of socially engaged art</h2>
<p>Let’s take a closer look at why this is the case.</p>
<p>Socially engaged art can be divided into two categories: symbolic practice and actual practice. (Newsome’s climb is the latter.) </p>
<p>The ideas of symbolic and actual practice are key concepts in artist and performer Pablo Helguera’s book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Education-Socially-Engaged-Art-Techniques/dp/1934978590">Education for Socially Engaged Art</a>. Helguera, who’s also the curator of public programming for New York City's Museum of Modern Art, sees symbolic practice as socially motivated representations of ideas or issues in an artwork. </p>
<p>An example of symbolic practice would be artist Sonya Clark’s timely pieces “Unraveled” and “Unraveling,” which went on display at New York’s Mixed Greens gallery just days before the Charleston murders occurred. </p>
<p>In the work, Clark presents two Confederate flags. With volunteers, Clark completely unraveled one during performances in the space, with the threads bundled into separate piles of red, white and blue. The other is partially unraveled. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3YSpbtHo88A?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Sonya Clark: Unraveling the Confederate flag.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As the website Mother Jones <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/06/sonya-clark-unraveling-confederate-flag">pointed out</a>, Clark uses the flag unraveling “to evoke the slow, patient work of unraveling racism.” Her work encourages contemplation and calls attention to what the Confederate flag represents. </p>
<p>Actual practice projects, on the other hand, involve direct action that can have an impact outside of gallery walls. For example, Rick Lowe’s <a href="http://projectrowhouses.org/">Project Row Houses</a> preserved and revitalized an historic Houston neighborhood. Meanwhile, Tania Bruguera’s <a href="http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/486-0-Immigrant+Movement+International.htm">Immigrant Movement International</a> provides public workshops, events, actions and partnerships with immigrant and social service organizations in Queens, New York.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86904/original/image-20150630-5846-o1h0jv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86904/original/image-20150630-5846-o1h0jv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86904/original/image-20150630-5846-o1h0jv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86904/original/image-20150630-5846-o1h0jv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86904/original/image-20150630-5846-o1h0jv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86904/original/image-20150630-5846-o1h0jv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86904/original/image-20150630-5846-o1h0jv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rick Lowe walks in front of his Project Row Houses.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Lowe_2014_hi-res-download_2.jpg">John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These projects are large in scale, and are grounded in art and aesthetics. They provide actual social and community services in addition to gallery, performance and gathering spaces. </p>
<h2>Public expression promotes change</h2>
<p>In his book, Helguera highlights the importance of both types of practice. He also looks at Jürgen Habermas’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Communicative_Action">Theory of Communicative Action</a>, which proposes that social change can happen after individuals engage in public conversations that are rationally argumentative in nature. In other words, people need to “duke it out” publicly in civil disagreement. </p>
<p>Helguera notes that communicative action “can have a lasting effect on the spheres of politics and culture as a true emancipatory force.” It’s more than just talk.</p>
<p>Activist artists like Favianna Rodriguez, whose work is grounded in empowering people around issues of inequality and racism, point out that artists and other cultural workers are essential to creating significant and lasting social change. They do this by changing hearts and minds through culture, and by eventually shifting power in communities. Rodriguez sees legislative and policy change as a two-step process, and <a href="http://creativemornings.com/talks/favianna-rodriguez/2">insists that</a> “before you change politics, you have to change culture.”</p>
<p>In the case of the Charleston shooting, connecting the Confederate flag’s symbolism with the killer of nine black people at Bible study in their church provides an opportunity for this kind of national conversation. </p>
<p>So here’s why Newsome’s climb was a work of performance art: even though it happened in real life and in real time, it acted as a metaphor for the dismantling of institutionalized racism. Her Superwoman-styled action added a collective exclamation point to the demands to remove the Confederate flag, while tapping into the deeply rooted American mythology of <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=jmizUitWGNQC&pg=PA54&lpg=PA54&dq=lone+heroes+in+popular+culture&source=bl&ots=nAj9nRhIV9&sig=toT1T10MgIsL3b-eCZHC7RtD_Dg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=cOaSVbbVHcH3-QGf6ZzABg&ved=0CC4Q6AEwBTgK#v=onepage&q=lone%20heroes%20in%20popular%20culture&f=false">individual heroism</a>. </p>
<p>Individuals <em>can</em> galvanize large groups of people, leading to permanent change – that part of the myth is true. Newsome’s actions spoke to people who are tired of waiting for racial justice, and reenergized them for the rest of the battle.</p>
<p>Though her act of cutting down the divisive flag from the South Carolina State Capitol failed to permanently remove it, it drew waves of continued media attention to the issue. She performed an action movie gesture as a vicarious and thrilling experience for anyone who wanted this symbol of the Confederacy – synonymous with racism for so many people – removed, even for a brief time.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/44050/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Colette Gaiter does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Newsome’s actions can be thought of as a significant piece of performance art.Colette Gaiter, Associate Professor, Department of Art and Design, University of DelawareLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/440762015-06-30T20:10:53Z2015-06-30T20:10:53ZObama’s Amazing Grace shows how music can lift oratory high<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86798/original/image-20150630-2063-1dgaxp0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">When the President of the United States burst into song on the weekend, music amplified the emotional force of his words.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Richard Ellis</span></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>Where words leave off, so music begins – Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
<br>
<br>
Amazing grace, amazing grace … (trailing off). Amazing grace, how sweet the sound (now singing) – Barack Obama, 2015.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Barely a week after Donald Trump’s presidential campaign launch provided a <a href="https://theconversation.com/donald-trump-and-neil-young-what-that-song-communicates-43531">problematic example</a> of music in the political sphere, Barack Obama’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9IGyidtfGI">eulogy</a> at the Reverend Clementa Pinckney’s funeral in Charleston, South Carolina provided the polar opposite; an example of how music can propel oratory into regions of meaning and impact that most politicians can only dream of.</p>
<p>To be sure, the two events are categorically distinct on many levels; Trump’s campaign launch (likely attended by <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/stage/donald-trump-paid-actors-50-to-cheer-for-him-at-his-presidential-announcement-20150618-ghr9wr.html">paid actors</a>) sits firmly in the political sphere (or the <a href="http://twitchy.com/2015/06/17/clown-runs-for-prez-ny-daily-news-taunts-donald-trump-with-brutal-cover/">commedia dell’arte</a> sphere, depending on your viewpoint), whereas a funeral, even one freighted with political issues, connects with music more readily through the raw and exposed emotional nerve endings of the people in attendance.</p>
<p>Yet music played a fascinating role at both events, and in each case, context was everything. Unlike the Trump campaign launch, however, Obama’s most recent public musical moment (there have been <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8Qu8nThJ5w">others</a>) has reverberated positively around the world.</p>
<p>Only a hard heart could fail to respond on some emotional level when the President of the United States of America, eulogising at one of the most emotionally and racially charged funerals in US history, started singing Amazing Grace. </p>
<p>Only blindness could deny the power of witnessing the US’s first president of colour break into song, powerfully illustrating his connection to one of the most musically rich religious communities on Earth (the African American Church generally), galvanising an entire nation into finding strength in a time of great need.</p>
<p>Obama’s words alone that day would have been enough to inspire awe. His performance approached the emotional intensity of a sermon, and subsequent speakers were compelled to anoint him “Reverend President”.</p>
<p>Compared to the anodyne and anaemic cultural engagement leaders of most Western neo-liberal democracies exhibit, it was hard not to be transported back to the heady days of Obama’s election win in 2008 by the centred charisma he showed onstage.</p>
<h2>The power of the moment</h2>
<p>Near the end of an almost 40-minute eulogy, after a perfectly-judged rhetorical crescendo, Obama paused, bowed his head, and gently launched into a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN05jVNBs64">rendition</a> of the first verse of Amazing Grace: </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IN05jVNBs64?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Obama sings Amazing Grace.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A re-reading of the names of the shooting victims follows, and the climax of the eulogy is reached. Many news stories that feature video of the event cut into the moment a split-second before Obama sings, and only some include the subsequent reading of names.</p>
<p>But to fully understand the power of the moment, it’s worth going further back into <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/06/26/transcript-obama-delivers-eulogy-for-charleston-pastor-the-rev-clementa-pinckney/">the text</a> of the eulogy. </p>
<p>The theme of grace, God’s grace here, was threaded throughout. And like a great symphonist embarking on a lengthy musical journey, Obama drops his theme right at the beginning: the first thing he’d noticed upon meeting Rev. Pinckney had been his “graciousness”.</p>
<h2>Obama builds his theme</h2>
<p>After beautifully describing the Reverend’s biographical embodiment of graciousness, Obama pivots from the personal to the general. </p>
<p>As Pastor at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Pinckney was profoundly connected to the history of African American religious culture. The references to history open the door to a political dimension, which comes a bit later.</p>
<p>He then twice describes the alleged killer as “blinded” by hatred, saying “he would not see the grace” of the people he would soon murder. Obama was clearly building his rhetoric around the last line of the first verse of Amazing Grace: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>was blind, but now I see.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Obama then explicitly refers to grace as the central theme of the eulogy:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This whole week, I’ve been reflecting on this idea of grace. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>He quotes lines from Amazing Grace, described the local community’s reaction as graceful, and referred to the grace shown by the victims’ relatives upon facing the alleged killer.</p>
<p>Pondering the opportunity grace provides further, Obama again uses blindness to bring up a list of acutely painful issues for American society: blindness to the pain cause by the Confederate flag, to the role of past injustice in present-day problems, to poverty, to endemic problems in education and employment, to the criminal justice system, to recent problems with law enforcement, and to voting issues.</p>
<p>Ultimately though, it is gun violence that Obama settles on. He implores Americans to approach the issue with open hearts, to find “reservoirs of goodness” that will allow grace to emerge.</p>
<p>He then says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If we can tap that grace, everything can change. Amazing grace, amazing grace. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>He trails off. Then he pauses.</p>
<p>The pause generates electricity, it suggests something is about to happen, and it makes people listen. Like musicians who don’t begin a performance until an audience has fully settled, Obama wants silence in the space before music.</p>
<p>In lesser hands, this moment could have been a corny disaster, and as an artistic moment, people are free to find it such. Critical discussion in most of the press, however, seems to have judged it a success – testament to Obama’s consummate skill as a political performer.</p>
<p>Don’t forget, Obama had just spoken the words “amazing grace” twice, and trailed off. When he then started singing Amazing Grace, he was literally re-creating Heine’s philosophical perspective on music’s post-linguistic status. Adding melody on the third repetition was not only a great segue, but at a fundamental dramatic, theatrical, and philosophical level, pretty clever. </p>
<p>Many things then happen in quick succession. The church leaders behind him spontaneously beam, voice their pleasure at what is happening, and stand to join in. The congregation, surprised to find itself feeling so good about what is happening (it is a funeral after all) doesn’t cheer so much as collectively smile audibly, then sings too. The musicians figure out what key he is in and improvise an accompaniment (almost certainly unscripted). </p>
<p>Of course there are some who may have reacted negatively. </p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazing_Grace">Amazing Grace</a> is so ubiquitous as to almost warrant cliché status. The 18th-century English slave-owner turned abolitionist John Newton penned the words, and the melody we know today has been associated with those words since the 1830s and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Great_Awakening">Second Great Awakening</a>. Used ever since in countless different contexts, especially since the 1950s, Amazing Grace is in danger of losing its power thanks to over-familiarity.</p>
<p>For the purposes of this eulogy, however, the singing of Amazing Grace was a perfect tool to take the political message into stratospheric emotional territory.</p>
<h2>Three classic notes</h2>
<p>The opening three notes outline the most ubiquitous structure in post-1600 Western music – the major triad. But they are arranged in a particular way: the first note, sung to “ah-”, is not the strongest of the three notes, but it leads into the most structurally stable, sung to “-maz-”.</p>
<p>The rhythmically longer “-maaaaz-” mirrors the way we speak the word when we want to emphasise it – as in, “wasn’t that speech amaaazing”.</p>
<p>By the third note on “zing”, we certainly know which song we’re hearing. These three notes resonate on deeper levels for anyone familiar with American music of the past. Just one example: Aaron Copland’s seminal <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJYVH_kZkOk">Appalachian Spring</a> (1944) is built on the same material, derived in turn from the opening figure to the traditional Shaker song <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLAnuG1340g">Simple Gifts</a>. </p>
<p>These three notes, outlining what’s called a second-inversion triad, create a beautiful, open sound. It’s this open sound that Copland uses throughout Appalachian Spring to depict the vast openness of possibility represented by the story of young pioneer love in the original ballet, and it’s the same open sound that gives Amazing Grace the open heartedness that Obama was campaigning for in his words about gun violence.</p>
<p>Back to Obama’s singing: another thing happens on “zing” – Obama sings a bit flat. Naturally, as a singer without formal training, who has had certain other things to attend to recent years, he may have just not have the best singing technique. Intonation insecurity and dubiously executed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melisma">melismata</a> were balanced by an undeniable connection to African American musical culture. That flatness was very likely Obama channelling the blues.</p>
<p>These observations pale in comparison to the overall impact this part of the eulogy delivers. It is thanks to the way music lifts the words about grace out of the quotidian, that Obama can then ride a wave of emotion to the end of the eulogy. </p>
<p>He goes through the names of the dead again, appending “found that grace” to each name, in a full and passionate voice. The soaring effect he creates builds on the music we just heard. “That grace” is a grace that’s had new and deeper meaning conferred upon it by the song.</p>
<p>His reading of each name is a righteous call, in full sermon mode, and the audience responds each time in a cathartic final acknowledgement of the victims. The musicians continue to riff, accompanying the whole antiphonal interaction, commenting on Obama’s words right to the end. </p>
<p>This subtle musical background ensures the emotional vibration continues and elevates the final moments of the eulogy.</p>
<p>By this stage Obama has carried the congregation into the realm of truly powerful communication, underpinned by a musically-accessed emotional state.</p>
<p>The way in which the Obama let music take over where “words left off” demonstrates music’s capacity for consolation in a profoundly important way. And it is salutary to consider that only a culture that understands music, that knows music, that values music, and that realises it needs music, will be able to benefit from it in this way.</p>
<p>If people were moved by Barack Obama’s eulogy, it was ultimately music, as much as God’s grace, that made them see.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/44076/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Liam Viney does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Only a hard heart could fail to respond on some emotional level when Barack Obama, eulogising at one of the most emotionally and racially charged funerals in US history, started singing Amazing Grace.Liam Viney, Piano Performance Fellow , The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/436012015-06-26T10:07:22Z2015-06-26T10:07:22ZEmanuel AME has long been a target for hate – as well as place of hope<p>It is not happenstance that the June 17 2015 racial assault on black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, took place at the Emanuel <a href="http://www.ame-church.com">African Methodist Episcopal </a>(AME) Church. </p>
<p>Just as it has a reputation among many Charleston residents as a beacon of help, hope and healing for disenfranchised people, Emanuel AME conjures up hate and fear in the hearts of others for these same reasons. </p>
<p>For me, a researcher of religion as an agent of social change, the history of the AME Church represents a preeminent case of collective action in the name of social justice and of how forces of intolerance have continually attempted to silence its voices. </p>
<h2>A social champion from the beginning</h2>
<p>To protest continued discrimination and indignities, in 1787 the Reverend Richard Allen, a freed slave, political activist and Christian moralist, led a contingent of blacks out of the St George Methodist Church in Philadelphia. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86442/original/image-20150625-29076-u1gwdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86442/original/image-20150625-29076-u1gwdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86442/original/image-20150625-29076-u1gwdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=736&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86442/original/image-20150625-29076-u1gwdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=736&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86442/original/image-20150625-29076-u1gwdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=736&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86442/original/image-20150625-29076-u1gwdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86442/original/image-20150625-29076-u1gwdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86442/original/image-20150625-29076-u1gwdc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=925&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Richard Allen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Allen_crop.jpg">Frontispiece of History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1891)</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>They formed the Bethel AME Church in 1794, and with it provided the foundation for the political activism that churches like Emanuel later emulated. As Allen’s biographer Richard S Newman <a href="http://nyupress.org/books/9780814758571/">writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>At the heart of Allen’s moral vision was an evangelical religion - Methodism - that promised equality to all believers in Christ. Indeed, one of Allen’s best claims […] was his attempt to merge faith and racial politics […] Allen’s vision of a moral republic had a secular corollary: the Declaration of Independence. That document, he believed, was a covenant binding Americans of all races, classes, and religions into a nation of equal citizens […] of course, most White founders vehemently disagreed […yet] Allen certainly wanted to remind Black reformers about their moral obligations to love their enemies. </p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/allen/menu.html">Reverend Allen’s </a>vision of a multiracial democracy required both whites and blacks to adhere to the beliefs found in the Bible and the Declaration of Independence. </p>
<p>Twenty-two years later, 17 black churches in the Northeast selected Reverend Allen as their bishop and formed the African Methodist Episcopal Church denomination. These congregations reflected the spirit of the Free African Society <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=EwtmVHovepUC&pg=PR4&lpg=PR4&dq=Billingsley,+Andrew.+1999.+Mighty+Like+a+River:+The+Black+Church+and+Social+Reform.++New+York:+Oxford+University+Press.&source=bl&ots=CJvjKH1rPs&sig=XC6juhHCiHsCabWaZW5pkXVUzf8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rXOLVdC2BtCiyAS9wpvgCA&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Billingsley%2C%20Andrew.%201999.%20Mighty%20Like%20a%20River%3A%20The%20Black%20Church%20and%20Social%20Reform.%20%20New%20York%3A%20Oxford%20University%20Press.&f=false">from which they evolved </a>to foster “socioeconomic cooperation in the form of savings, mutual aid, [and] education.” </p>
<p>Secular events such as political mobilization, feeding programs, job programs, schools and other social services were extensions of religious commitment. </p>
<h2>Charleston follows suit</h2>
<p>It was in 1816, under the leadership of successful shoe and bootmaker Reverend Morris Brown, that a group of black Christians left the segregated Charleston Methodist Episcopal Church and formed several black congregations, including Emanuel AME. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86446/original/image-20150625-29053-c5mg8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86446/original/image-20150625-29053-c5mg8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=638&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86446/original/image-20150625-29053-c5mg8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=638&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86446/original/image-20150625-29053-c5mg8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=638&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86446/original/image-20150625-29053-c5mg8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86446/original/image-20150625-29053-c5mg8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86446/original/image-20150625-29053-c5mg8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Rev Morris Brown.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The oldest AME church in the South, “Mother Emanuel,” as the church is affectionately called, has a long history of serving community members. <a href="http://www.case.edu/artsci/soci/documents/PriestlyandPropheticInfluencesonBlackChurchSocialServices.pdf">Like many black churches</a> nationwide, Emanuel AME cultivates a space where blacks are validated by God to engage in social service as well as upward mobility via education, hard work, delayed gratification and thrift. </p>
<p>Its present-day prominence in the community reflects the continued importance of Christianity and church involvement among blacks in the United States, despite the decline in religious affiliation among white evangelicals and mainstream churches. </p>
<p>For example, according to <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/2009/01/30/a-religious-portrait-of-african-americans/">a 2009 Pew Research report</a>, 56% of US adults overall consider religion to be very important in their lives: 80% of blacks espouse this view. Thirty-nine percent of all Americans attend religious services at least once a week: 53% of blacks do. Moreover, about 58% of Americans pray at least once a day: 76% of blacks do so.</p>
<p>Emanuel AME and its pastors <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/18/magazine/before-charlestons-church-shooting-a-long-history-of-attacks.html?emc=eta1.">have been well-known</a> for political activism. From the very beginning, Reverend Brown sacrificed creature comforts as a staunch Abolitionist. <a href="http://tcr-online.blogspot.com/">Brown</a> was imprisoned for helping slaves purchase their freedom. Decades later, Reverend Clementa Pinckney established himself as a pastor and state senator committed to social justice. </p>
<h2>Troubling times and social action</h2>
<p>In both the South and North, AME churchgoers have been motivated by a biblical understanding that Christianity is best exhibited outside church walls to bring about equality for all women and men. </p>
<p>To them, segregation and discrimination in every form contradict God’s love for all of humanity, particularly the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=TVcELbYdqbEC&pg=PT207&lpg=PT207&dq=.+Black+Megachurch+Culture:+Models+for+Education+and+Empowerment.+New+York:++Peter+Lang+Press.&source=bl&ots=GBTecIDEcu&sig=lI-mRgOCY1H7_AOr5YpllhCiFdo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=enWLVYHPM5WyyATwspjoDQ&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=.%20Black%20Megachurch%20Culture%3A%20Models%20for%20Education%20and%20Empowerment.%20New%20York%3A%20%20Peter%20Lang%20Press.&f=false">“least of these.</a>” </p>
<p>For these beliefs in equality, social justice and racial uplift, AME churches in the North and South were targeted by white Methodist leaders, businessmen and vigilantes who believed that blacks were “forgetting their place.” </p>
<p>Here are just a few examples of the assaults that took place on Emanuel AME and other churches over the years: white raids; black church services being made <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Mighty_Like_a_River.html?id=S5QGaCGn1OkC">illegal</a> in Charleston between 1834 and 1865; the <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Mighty_Like_a_River.html?id=S5QGaCGn1OkC">burning </a>of Emanuel AME after the slave rebellion lead by Denmark Vessey; the police harassment of civil rights protesters at Emanuel AME <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Mighty_Like_a_River.html?id=S5QGaCGn1OkC">in the 1960s.</a> </p>
<p>And yet, despite lynching, segregation, and other inequities, black Christians continued to embrace the belief that they would one day experience equality. </p>
<p>For example, in the early 1800s, even if they were not educated themselves, they already had a clear perception of <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/The-Black-Church-in-the-African-American-Experience">what education would mean </a>to the interests of the church and to the advancement of the African people then held in abject slavery: AME pastors were encouraged by their congregations to organize schools in their communities as part of their ministry. </p>
<p>Colleges and universities such as <a href="https://www.wilberforce.edu/">Wilberforce</a> in Ohio, <a href="http://www.morrisbrown.edu/">Morris Brown</a> in Georgia and <a href="http://www.pqc.edu/">Paul Quinn</a> in Texas stand as testament to this focus. </p>
<p>The AME Church also participated in the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2944.html">Underground Railroad</a>, established ties with Haiti, the world’s oldest black republic, and developed an international network stretching to Canada and Africa. </p>
<p>These beliefs and this activity attracted members. In the late 1800s, for example, Charleston <a href="http://fordhampress.com/index.php/live-long-and-prosper-paperback.html">already had what one would refer today as a black megachurch</a>, an AME congregation with average weekly attendance exceeding 2,000 people. </p>
<h2>The AME today</h2>
<p>In 2012, <a href="http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0077.pdf">13%</a> of black churches nationwide were affiliated with the AME denomination.
Today the AME Church has well over 2.5 million members in 39 countries and on five continents. In 2012 it had <a href="http://www.ame-church.com">an annual budget </a>of over US$57 million. </p>
<p>In South Carolina alone there are at least 25 AME churches – more than in Tennessee and Kentucky <a href="http://tcr-online.blogspot.com/">combined.</a> </p>
<p>Most importantly, a prophetic understanding of Christianity that connects salvation to community service and political action remains at the core of the church’s teachings. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, however, it is these values that fueled the fear and bigotry – as they did in the past – that resulted in the murders of the “Charleston Nine.” </p>
<h2>After the prayer vigils and the funerals, what next?</h2>
<p>America will lose an opportunity for change on both the national and local level if the recent atrocity in Charleston is considered an isolated incident rather than a systemic problem. </p>
<p>Given the shooter’s profile, we must look at the increasing tensions among politically conservative poor and working-class white males who are having difficulty adjusting to life in a multicultural, global society and to the election of the first black US president. </p>
<p>In addition to challenging <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-White-Racial-Frame-Counter-Framing/dp/041599439X">systemic racism</a> and intolerance, we must proactively and directly respond to blatant discriminatory acts that are increasingly common. </p>
<p>Bishop Richard Allen <a href="http://nyupress.org/books/9780814758571/">sought a vision</a> in which people of all races and ethnicities could live together peaceably in American culture. </p>
<p>We cannot ignore the numerous times Emanuel AME Church has been violated by local whites when blacks were considered too uppity or “moving too fast” toward a vision of equality and social justice. </p>
<p>Even when daring to be better and experience the American Dream, blacks are considered dangerous. </p>
<p>Such was the case in Charleston. </p>
<p>Change is needed across multiple arenas in society, not least in white churches – despite the reticence to mix religion and politics. </p>
<p>Without concerted efforts to change society systemically, it is likely that travesties like the Charleston massacre will continue – followed by more perfunctory sound bites, news reports, prayers and vigils. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86447/original/image-20150625-29076-1qy9dw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86447/original/image-20150625-29076-1qy9dw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86447/original/image-20150625-29076-1qy9dw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86447/original/image-20150625-29076-1qy9dw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86447/original/image-20150625-29076-1qy9dw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86447/original/image-20150625-29076-1qy9dw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86447/original/image-20150625-29076-1qy9dw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Civil War reenactment at Kennekuk County Park, near Danville, Illinois.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Civil_war_reenactment_1.jpg">Daniel Schwen/Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For all the public debate, the Confederate flag is still looming large over public buildings. Thousands of Americans across the country regularly engage in Civil War <a href="http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/the-strange-sustaining-power-of-civil-war-reenactments-61902">reenactments </a>on the Confederate side. Such signs make it difficult for some people to expect real change. </p>
<p>Perhaps I have become pessimistic. Perhaps, like Bishop Allen, I am beginning to lose faith and hope in the ability of America to truly live out her creed. Like other blacks who may feel similarly, there is need for renewed hope and healing. </p>
<p>Perhaps I should go to church.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43601/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sandra L Barnes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The history of the AME Church represents a preeminent case of collective action in the name of social justice.Sandra L Barnes, Professor, Department of Human and Organizational Development, Peabody College, and the Divinity School, Vanderbilt UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/438142015-06-25T05:18:11Z2015-06-25T05:18:11ZFrom South Carolina to Northern Ireland: why the flags we fly matter<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86298/original/image-20150624-31522-qxdtth.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Some things belong in the past.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/dwmoran/4942550621/in/photolist-8wKS72-8wNnMm-8wKvLB-8wLUDG-8wLd9Q-8wKrnc-8wMJRS-8wMqrf-8wMpS5-8wJuh4-8wHfvP-8wNY41-8wNTUY-8wN337-8wMzi7-8wMWMA-8wHQdN-8wMVLY-8wHPja-8wJiS2-8wHWzS-8wMPVJ-8wEYv6-8wHo36-8wGNcn-8wNtyd-8wNYXC-8wNTaN-8wHHYv-8wGbNx-8wK6qa-8wKPHC-8wJE4x-8wJWDu-8wNWfJ-8wHnmr-8wG2gH-8wKxbB-8wM2UQ-8wNUVS-8wKR6a-8wKLov-8wHqtM-8wLacA-8wKyNX-8wHNp8-8wGNWi-8wG4Yv-8wKf5n-8wNKKy">Darryl Moran</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Following the <a href="https://theconversation.com/hate-violence-and-the-tragedy-of-the-charleston-shootings-43579">tragic shooting</a> of nine black worshippers at a church in Charleston, the national focus in the US has turned to a debate about whether <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-the-confederate-flag-unconstitutional-43760">the Confederate flag</a> – the symbol of the Southern slave states who lost the American Civil War – should fly atop the South Carolina State House. </p>
<p>It may seem strange to some that in a country wracked by <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-us-gun-control-compares-to-the-rest-of-the-world-43590">gun violence</a>, race inequalities and hate crime, the discussion has become one about symbolism.</p>
<p>But symbols matter. Flags, emblems, lapel badges, car stickers and the like are all ways of expressing belonging, of conveying what is important to us and the groups with which we identify. They can be used to both communicate and construct identity. </p>
<p>In settings where identity and territory are linked, such as the American South or Northern Ireland, symbols come to mark cultural boundaries. Symbols therefore look inward and outward at the same time; inward to define how we see ourselves and outward to how we see others. </p>
<p>This is how symbols can so easily become wrapped up with enmity. A flag can be part of national rituals but it can also be used to marginalise other groups. A Union Jack takes on a different meaning at the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/proms/11095087/BBC-Proms-2014-Last-Night-of-the-Proms-review-soaringly-carried-away.html">Last Night of the Proms</a> compared to a <a href="http://www.itv.com/news/anglia/story/2015-06-24/britain-first-march-planned-for-luton/">Britain First rally</a>. </p>
<p>Whenever we want to distinguish ourselves from others in settings of conflict, flags are very effective in discriminating between insiders and outsiders. We therefore cloak ourselves in them – sometimes literally – for the purpose of using them as cultural weapons. </p>
<h2>New beginnings</h2>
<p>Managing cultural symbols in post-conflict settings requires the opposite dynamic. Symbols must be designed in this setting to convey reconciliation, integration and accommodation. Sometimes this can mean new symbols to signify to citizens that the peace process is at once an ending of the old conflict, and a beginning of a new post-conflict society. </p>
<p>This happens most often where partition or new nations emerge from peace settlements, such as in the new states that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. New cultural symbols are used as part of the nation-building project. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86299/original/image-20150624-31507-1xz88fe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86299/original/image-20150624-31507-1xz88fe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86299/original/image-20150624-31507-1xz88fe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86299/original/image-20150624-31507-1xz88fe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86299/original/image-20150624-31507-1xz88fe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86299/original/image-20150624-31507-1xz88fe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86299/original/image-20150624-31507-1xz88fe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=481&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bosnian flags old and new fly in Sarajevo.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina#/media/File:Bosnian_flags_in_Sarajevo.jpg">Sabri76</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is rare for new cultural symbols to emerge in peace processes where the territory remains intact – when what emerges is a different regime rather than a new state. Post-apartheid South Africa’s new national symbols represent the best example. The flag of South Africa was adopted in 1994 at the time of the first free election to represent the new democracy. </p>
<p>Three of the colours – black, green and yellow – are found in the banner of the African National Congress. The other three – red, white and blue – are displayed on the old <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_South_African_flags#/media/File:Flag_of_Transvaal.svg">Transvaal vierkleur</a>, the Dutch tricolour and the British Union flag.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86304/original/image-20150624-31522-1otkwng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86304/original/image-20150624-31522-1otkwng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86304/original/image-20150624-31522-1otkwng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86304/original/image-20150624-31522-1otkwng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86304/original/image-20150624-31522-1otkwng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86304/original/image-20150624-31522-1otkwng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86304/original/image-20150624-31522-1otkwng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bill Clinton receives one of South Africa’s brand new flags in 1994.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_South_African_flag_unveiling.jpg">United States Federal Government.</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It’s worth noting, of course, that Charleston shooter Dylann Roof has been <a href="http://time.com/3926593/charleston-killer-flags/">pictured wearing</a> both the apartheid-era South African and the Rhodesian flags pinned to his jacket. </p>
<h2>Civil wars</h2>
<p>In the case of a civil war, new cultural symbols rarely mark its conclusion, for while the ending of civil wars represent a closure on the conflict, they do not always involve a new beginning. Indeed in civil wars social transformation rarely follows on from the conflict, so symbols remain contested because there is no opening up to a different future, merely the ending of the violence of the past. </p>
<p>The ending of the US Civil War is a good example. For while the war ended, very little else changed with respect to race relations. This allowed citizens to maintain allegiance to the cultural symbols of the old Confederacy. The absence of social transformation allowed the old cultural symbols to survive to this day as markers of what some felt was an unfinished conflict. </p>
<p>Northern Ireland represents another example. Tensions over flags continue and they remain as cultural weapons. Loyalists protest nightly in <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-24388338">Twaddell Avenue</a> now their flag <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-20651163">no longer flies daily above Belfast City Hall</a>, and a Republican councillor <a href="http://www.colerainetimes.co.uk/news/local-news/dup-members-call-for-investigation-1-6814324">unfurls the Irish Tricolour</a> at an inaugural meeting of a new council. Contested identities seem to require public expressions of support for the cultural symbols that embody this conflict. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86306/original/image-20150624-31518-1p8u9x0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86306/original/image-20150624-31518-1p8u9x0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=700&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86306/original/image-20150624-31518-1p8u9x0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=700&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86306/original/image-20150624-31518-1p8u9x0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=700&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86306/original/image-20150624-31518-1p8u9x0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=880&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86306/original/image-20150624-31518-1p8u9x0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=880&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86306/original/image-20150624-31518-1p8u9x0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=880&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">City Hall Belfast.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is because Northern Ireland has witnessed the end of war but not the beginning of a shared society. Cultural symbols are used to hang onto the past, not create a new future. </p>
<p>The Confederate flag is the past and it seems dysfunctional that it should fly on US public buildings still. <a href="https://theconversation.com/nikki-haleys-call-to-take-down-confederate-flag-reveals-ongoing-shift-in-gop-strategy-43744">Some politicians</a> have agreed it should do so no longer.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43814/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Brewer receives funding from the ESRC and the Leverhulme Trust</span></em></p>Symbols matter – and there’s no stronger symbol than a flag in a post-conflict society.John Brewer, Professor of Post Conflict Studies, Queen's University BelfastLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/437972015-06-25T05:17:37Z2015-06-25T05:17:37ZHate violence is a global problem – and a crime against humanity<p>The <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/charleston">shootings in Charleston, South Carolina</a> have drawn the world’s attention to the problem of violence motivated by hate. And while the spotlight will inevitably move on, the daily reality of hate violence around the world will continue unabated.</p>
<p>In most instances, of course, “hate” as a sentiment isn’t as starkly conveyed as in the Charleston murders. But “hate violence” has become a catch-all label for acts impelled or accompanied by prejudice, bias or bigotry.</p>
<p>Hate violence is violence in which some aspect of the victim’s social identity – their “race”, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender or gender identity, or a disability – plays some role in the reason for their victimisation. While the immediate impulses for the perpetrators vary, the violence is nested in a common denominator: a widespread denigration of social identities to one degree or another across nations and communities which permits discrimination, oppression and violence. </p>
<p>Some involves fatal and other severe acts fuelled by extremist ideology, as in the case of the Charleston racist murders. But most involves non-fatal violence, harassment and abuse committed not by dedicated hatemongers, but by otherwise very ordinary people.</p>
<p>When we look at the scale of hate violence worldwide, and the particular harms and consequences inflicted, we can’t ignore the stark truth: this is a global public health crisis. </p>
<h2>Discriminatory violence</h2>
<p>In European nations alone, the 2008 <a href="http://fra.europa.eu/en/project/2011/eu-midis-european-union-minorities-and-discrimination-survey">European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey</a> revealed a disturbing picture of criminal victimisation of minority ethnic, refugee and migrant communities. Roma/Gypsy communities reported the highest levels of racist victimisation. Almost a fifth (18%) of Roma/Gypsy respondents in the survey reported at least one incident of personal racist criminal victimisation including assaults, threats and serious harassment in the previous 12 months. </p>
<p>A more recent <a href="http://fra.europa.eu/en/press-release/2013/eu-agency-fundamental-rights-fra-presents-its-annual-report">survey</a> by the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency in 2012 of the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people showed that just over one in 20 respondents said that they had been attacked or threatened with violence at least once in the previous 12 months, partly or completely because of their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. Almost one-fifth said that they had been victims of harassment targeted on the same basis in the previous 12 months. </p>
<p>A 2012 survey of <a href="http://fra.europa.eu/en/survey/2012/fra-survey-jewish-peoples-experiences-and-perceptions-discrimination-and-hate-crime">discrimination and hate crime against Jews</a> in EU Member States, also carried out by the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency, showed that almost one in 20 respondents had experienced antisemitic violence or threats in the previous year, while more than a quarter had experienced antisemitic harassment.</p>
<p>When looking beyond Europe, religious bigotry is possibly the foremost force behind hate violence in the 21st century. Theologically driven hate underpins many of the atrocities committed by radical groups such as <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/islamic-state">Islamic State</a>; elsewhere, intercommunal or sectarian hatreds fuel violence between <a href="http://www.cfr.org/peace-conflict-and-human-rights/sunni-shia-divide/p33176#!/">Sunni and Shia Muslims in Pakistan</a>, Buddhists and Muslims in <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-1839578">Myanmar</a>, and Hindu Jat and Muslim communities in the Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts of <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/uttar-pradesh-rocked-hindumuslim-violence-eruptsas-indias-electoral-battle-looms-8831374.html">Uttar Pradesh</a> in India. </p>
<p>In Europe, meanwhile, Muslim communities are <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/07/uk-report-anti-muslim-hate-crime-rising-20147512135922796.html">victimised</a> because of their religious identity –- though these attacks are not necessarily theologically driven and often occur for other reasons, such as scapegoating for extremist Islamist terror attacks.</p>
<h2>Violence against women</h2>
<p>When we consider hate violence globally, one stark fact stands out: <a href="http://www.unwomen.org/en/what-we-do/ending-violence-against-women/facts-and-figures">violence against women</a>, most of it committed by intimate partners, is pervasive in all nations, cultures and communities. The scale of the problem cannot be exaggerated. The World Health Organisation <a href="http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2013/violence_against_women_20130620/en/">concluded</a> in 2013 that such violence is “a global health problem of epidemic proportions” requiring urgent action. </p>
<p>Violence against women is not simply a private matter between two people; it has a deep cultural basis, just like other forms of hate violence. It is incubated in endemic patriarchal attitudes and values about women’s place relative to men in social and personal relations. </p>
<p>These attitudes are pervasive across nation states and communities, although their precise dimensions and intensity differ according to particular local contexts.</p>
<h2>Public health</h2>
<p>Meanwhile, in violent conflicts motivated by ethnic and religious hatred, civilian populations are not just collateral damage; they are the deliberate target of violence. </p>
<p>While numerous types of violence can constitute crimes against humanity, hatred has featured prominently in such offences. This is not something confined to distant history: think of the genocide of Tutsi and moderate Hutu ethnic groups in <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13431486">Rwanda</a> in 1994, the massacre of Bosnian Muslim men and boys by elements of the Bosnian Serb army during the 1992-95 <a href="https://www.hmh.org/la_Genocide_Bosnia.shtml">Bosnian war</a>, or what’s happening now in <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-29026491">Iraq</a> and <a href="http://www.albawaba.com/loop/kurdish-fighters-statement-allegations-ethnic-cleansing-710462">Syria</a> (to name but a few).</p>
<p>Even in relatively socially stable societies, hate violence can be more harmful than other forms of violence. Most victims of violence suffer some post-victimisation impact – sometimes physical injury, sometimes behavioural changes and often emotional and psychological consequences. In the case of hate violence, however, there is evidence to show that the emotional and psychological harms inflicted <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/116463/hosb0612.pdf">can potentially be greater</a>. </p>
<p>The impact of hate violence can also extend well beyond the person who is on the immediate receiving end. It sends a terrifying message to everyone who shares the victim’s identity: this could be you.</p>
<p>In some nations, hate violence is specifically criminalised as “hate crime”. This is an important official denunciation of such violence and provides a structure for a criminal justice response, but it is no substitute for a society’s capacity to prevent hate violence and support victims. Ultimately, the causes of hate violence lie in the communities where it occurs. </p>
<p>In other countries, hate violence will only be tackled with a strengthening of basic social justice and democratic norms. And in some contexts, such as the conflict in Iraq and Syria, the world needs to call the hate violence what it is and prosecute its perpetrators for what they have committed: a crime against humanity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43797/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Iganski is carrying out research on hate speech as part of the Lancaster University ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science. He is co-author (with Jack Levin) of tHate Crime. A Global Perspective, published by Routledge.</span></em></p>Hate violence is as diverse and widespread as ever – and its effects are legion.Paul Iganski, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/437672015-06-24T15:45:05Z2015-06-24T15:45:05ZObama and the N-word<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86189/original/image-20150624-20047-1yod7dg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The president reacts to the news of the shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jonathan Ernst/Reuters</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The president <a href="http://potus.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_613_-_president_barack_obama/">said the N-word</a>, and it became a top news story. </p>
<p>Now, it wasn’t the first time a president said the word — recordings exist in which <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/21/books/on-the-way-with-lbj.html">Lyndon Johnson</a> and <a href="http://www.csdp.org/research/nixonpot.txt">Richard Nixon</a> use the term artfully and prolifically. </p>
<p>However, it was the first time in recent memory that we know that a president used the term and meant to be heard saying it publicly. And, of course, it is not lost on audiences that said president is black. </p>
<p>Since I am someone who studies how black politicians born after 1960 advocate for African American interests, this story definitely piqued my interest. </p>
<p>What does it mean for any president, much less a black one who used race-neutral campaign tactics, to use such a word? </p>
<p>And is our attention on this story a distraction, especially in light of real racial issues, like police brutality and the recent hate crime in Charleston?</p>
<h2>A proper use of language</h2>
<p>I think people are making a bigger deal about President Obama’s use of this word than is necessary. </p>
<p>Yes, it is rarely heard in polite company. But if one has to use the word, the way in which President Obama deployed it was entirely proper.</p>
<p>He was not using it as part of his Chris Rock or Richard Pryor impression. He was not calling out any person or group of people. He used the term in the context of talking about people who say that word. </p>
<p>And frankly, by using the actual word instead of resorting to the contrivance of saying “the N-word,” he was rhetorically effective.</p>
<p>The problem is our collective American tendency to be superficial.</p>
<p>When President Obama invoked the N-word, he was making an important point about structural racism and our moral responsibility to be vigilant against all remaining forms of racial discrimination. </p>
<p>He rightly pointed out that some people think that refraining from the use of racial slurs is the sum of eliminating racism. </p>
<p>He rightfully observed that removing those words from one’s vocabulary is but a small part of promoting racial equality. </p>
<p>Yes, we should modify our language to be respectful of all people, but one can racially profile, deny jobs, housing and equal pay, and provide substandard schooling to minorities without calling them a racial slur. Frankly, these things are materially more important.</p>
<p>In his own way, President Obama was trying to shock Americans into thinking more critically about racial issues.</p>
<h2>Starting a conversation about race</h2>
<p>There is a tendency in this country to avoid serious conversations about race. </p>
<p>We’d rather relegate racism to the 1950s or contend that it is a province of backwards southerners. </p>
<p>Then, when we are confronted with the facts of continuing inequality — like the fact that in New York, black and Latino youth were more likely to be <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/public_information/TR534_FINALCompiled.pdf">stopped and frisked by the police without cause</a> or that last year, the Pew Research Center found that <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealth-gaps-great-recession/">median white net worth was 13 times the median net worth of blacks</a> — we look for every other possible explanation and refuse to confront the ways that racism explains a lot of the disparity. </p>
<p>Americans’ tendency to not address an obvious cause of so much inequality and strife dooms us to repeat the same cycle of racial conflict and even violence over and over again.</p>
<p>Some people might argue that by resurrecting such a hurtful word, President Obama was creating another smokescreen for racial issues. </p>
<p>Instead of talking about healing Charleston, for instance, news programs are devoting airtime to deconstructing the president’s use of this word. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JZBKNtSRch8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Just one of the many media dissections of the president’s language.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hopefully, though, the president’s deployment of this term (and his larger argument for having deeper discussions about how to reduce racial inequality) will sink in because of the shock of having him speak so bluntly about the issue. </p>
<p>If by next week, we are talking about actual structural inequality and not about the fact that President Obama said the N-word (to be clear, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/search?q=confederate+flag">current debate</a> about the Confederate flag is an important one but a symbolic issue), then perhaps we can give him credit for having started a meaningful dialogue about race.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43767/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andra Gillespie currently supports her research through funding from Emory University. She has previously received fellowship support from the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation.</span></em></p>What does it mean for any president, much less a black one, to use such a word?Andra Gillespie, Associate Professor, Political Science , Emory UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/435902015-06-24T10:10:08Z2015-06-24T10:10:08ZHow US gun control compares to the rest of the world<p><em><strong>Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article first published on June 24, 2015</strong></em> </p>
<p>In June the Charleston killings renewed the sporadic debates over whether gun control might have prevented this terrible tragedy. Four months on, the massacre at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon has left nine dead. </p>
<p>And once again, as after Charleston, President Obama has spoken openly about his <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/18/politics/obama-south-carolina-church-shooting/">frustration</a> with the fact that “this kind of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.” </p>
<p>On October 1st he <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/10/01/watch-president-obamas-statement-shooting-oregon">put it this way</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings. Friends of ours, allies of ours – Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours. So we know there are ways to prevent it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So far, however, the US has not come up with “ways to prevent it.” The National Rifle Association (NRA), it seems, has so much power over politicians that even when <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/04/03/90-percent-of-americans-want-expanded-background-checks-on-guns-why-isnt-this-a-political-slam-dunk/">90% of Americans</a> (including a majority of NRA members) wanted universal background checks to be adopted following the Newtown killings of 2012, no federal action ensued. Certainly, the type of comprehensive response that has been effective in other countries is unlike to emerge in the United States. </p>
<p>The NRA stranglehold on appropriate anti-crime measures is only part of the problem, though. </p>
<p>The gun culture’s worship of the magical protective capacities of guns and their power to be wielded against perceived enemies – including the federal government – is a message that resonates with troubled individuals from the <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isla-vista-rampage">Santa Barbara killer</a>, who was seeking vengeance on women who had failed to perceive his greatness, to the Charleston killer who echoed the Tea Party mantra of taking back our country.</p>
<p>I’ve been researching gun violence – and what can be done to prevent it – in the US for 25 years. The fact is that if NRA claims about the efficacy of guns in reducing crime were true, the US would have the lowest homicide rate among industrialized nations instead of the highest homicide rate (by a wide margin). </p>
<p>The US is by far the world leader in the number of guns in civilian hands. The stricter gun laws of other “advanced countries” have restrained homicidal violence, suicides and gun accidents – even when, in some cases, laws were introduced over massive protests from their armed citizens.</p>
<h2>The state of gun control in the US</h2>
<p>Eighteen states in the US and a number of cities including Chicago, New York and San Francisco have tried to reduce the unlawful use of guns as well as gun accidents by adopting laws to keep guns <a href="https://www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/state-advocacy/Documents/Safe%20Storage.pdf">safely stored</a> when they are not in use. Safe storage is a <a href="http://www.loc.gov/law/help/firearms-control/comparative.php">common form of gun regulation</a> in nations with stricter gun regulations. </p>
<p>The NRA has been battling such laws for years. But that effort was dealt a blow earlier this month when the US Supreme Court – over a strident dissent by Justices Thomas and Scalia – <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/High-court-lets-stand-S-F-s-gun-control-law-6313731.php">refused to consider</a> the San Francisco law that required guns not in use be stored safely. This was undoubtedly a positive step because hundreds of thousands of guns are stolen every year, and good public policy must try to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children. </p>
<p>The dissenters, however, were alarmed by the thought that a gun stored in a safe would not be immediately available for use, but they seemed unaware of how unusual it is that a gun is helpful when someone is under attack. </p>
<p>For starters, only the tiniest fraction of victims of violent crime are able to use a gun in their defense. Over the period from 2007-2011, when roughly six million nonfatal violent crimes occurred each year, data from the National Crime Victimization Survey show that the victim did not defend with a gun <a href="http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fv9311.pdf">in 99.2% of these incidents</a> – this in a country with 300 million guns in civilian hands. </p>
<p>In fact, a study of 198 cases of unwanted entry into occupied single-family dwellings in Atlanta (not limited to night when the residents were sleeping) found that the invader was twice as likely to obtain the victim’s gun than to have the victim use a firearm in self-defense. </p>
<p>The author of the study, Arthur Kellerman, <a href="http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=388816">concluded in words</a> that Justice Thomas and Scalia might well heed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On average, the gun that represents the greatest threat is the one that is kept loaded and readily available in a bedside drawer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A loaded, unsecured gun in the home is like an insurance policy that fails to deliver at least 95% of the time you need it, but has the constant potential – particularly in the case of handguns that are more easily manipulated by children and more attractive for use in crime – to harm someone in the home or (via theft) the public at large. </p>
<h2>More guns won’t stop gun violence</h2>
<p>For years, the NRA mantra has been that allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns would reduce crime as they fought off or scared off the criminals. </p>
<p>Some early studies even purported to show that so-called right to carry laws (RTC) did just that, but a <a href="http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309091241">2004 report</a> from the National Research Council refuted that claim (saying it was not supported by “the scientific evidence”), while remaining uncertain about what the true impact of RTC laws was. </p>
<p>Ten years of additional data have allowed new research to get a better fix on this question, which is important since the NRA is pushing for a Supreme Court decision that would allow RTC as a matter of constitutional law. </p>
<p>The new research on this issue from my research team at Stanford University has given the most compelling evidence to date that RTC laws are associated with significant increases in violent crime – particularly for aggravated assault. Looking at Uniform Crime Reports data from 1979-2012, we find that, on average, the 33 states that adopted RTC laws over this period experienced violent crime rates that are 4%-19% higher after 10 years than if they had not adopted these laws. </p>
<p>This hardly makes a strong case for RTC as a constitutional right. At the very least more research is needed to estimate more precisely exactly how much violent crime such a decision would unleash in the states that have so far resisted the NRA-backed RTC laws. </p>
<p>In the meantime, can anything make American politicians listen to the preferences of the 90% on the wisdom of adopting universal background checks for gun purchases?</p>
<h2>Gun control around the world</h2>
<p>As an academic exercise, one might speculate whether law could play a constructive role in reducing the number or deadliness of mass shootings. </p>
<p>Most other advanced nations apparently think so, since they make it far harder for someone like the Charleston killer to get his hands on a Glock semiautomatic handgun or any other kind of firearm (universal background checks are common features of gun regulation in other developed countries).</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.loc.gov/law/help/firearms-control/germany.php#Current">Germany</a>: To buy a gun, anyone under the age of 25 has to pass a psychiatric evaluation (presumably 21-year-old Dylann Roof would have failed). </li>
<li><a href="http://yle.fi/uutiset/fewer_firearm_permits_granted_in_2013/7244157">Finland</a>: Handgun license applicants are only allowed to purchase firearms if they can prove they are active members of regulated shooting clubs. Before they can get a gun, applicants must pass an aptitude test, submit to a police interview, and show they have a proper gun storage unit.<br></li>
<li><a href="http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/italy">Italy</a>: To secure a gun permit, one must establish a genuine reason to possess a firearm and pass a background check considering both criminal and mental health records (again, presumably Dylann Roof would have failed). </li>
<li><a href="http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/france">France</a>: Firearms applicants must have no criminal record and pass a background check that considers the reason for the gun purchase and evaluates the criminal, mental, and health records of the applicant. (Dylann Roof would presumably have failed in this process).</li>
<li>United Kingdom and Japan: Handguns are illegal for private citizens. </li>
</ul>
<p>While mass shootings as well as gun homicides and suicides are not unknown in these countries, the overall rates are substantially higher in the United States than in these competitor nations.</p>
<p>While NRA supporters frequently challenge me on these statistics saying that this is only because “American blacks are so violent,” it is important to note that white murder rates in the US are well over twice as high as the murder rates in any of these other countries.</p>
<h2>Australia hasn’t had a mass shooting since 1996</h2>
<p>The story of Australia, which had <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2704353/">13 mass shootings</a> in the 18-year period from 1979 to 1996 but none in the succeeding 19 years, is worth examining. </p>
<p>The turning point was the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, in which a gunman killed 35 individuals using semiautomatic weapons. </p>
<p>In the wake of the massacre, the conservative federal government succeeded in implementing tough new <a href="http://www.loc.gov/law/help/firearms-control/australia.php">gun control laws</a> throughout the country. A large array of weapons were banned – including the Glock semiautomatic handgun used in the Charleston shootings. The government also imposed a mandatory gun buy back that substantially reduced gun possession in Australia. </p>
<p>The effect was that both gun suicides and homicides (as well as total suicides and homicides) <a href="http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/gunbuyback_panel.pdf">fell</a>. In addition, the 1996 legislation made it a crime to use firearms in self-defense. </p>
<p>When I mention this to disbelieving NRA supporters they insist that crime must now be rampant in Australia. In fact, the Australian murder rate has fallen to close <a href="http://www.aic.gov.au/dataTools/facts/vicViolentRate.html">one per 100,000</a> while the US rate, thankfully lower than in the early 1990s, is still roughly at <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/1tabledatadecoverviewpdf/table_1_crime_in_the_united_states_by_volume_and_rate_per_100000_inhabitants_1994-2013.xls">4.5 per 100,000</a> – over four times as high. Moreover, robberies in Australia occur at <a href="http://www.aic.gov.au/dataTools/facts/vicViolentRate.html">only about half</a> the <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/violent-crime/robbery-topic-page">rate of the US</a> (58 in Australia versus 113.1 per 100,000 in the US in 2012).</p>
<p>How did Australia do it? Politically, it took a brave prime minister to face the rage of Australian gun interests. </p>
<p>John Howard <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/anger-lingers-among-those-who-lost-their-firearms/2006/04/27/1145861489398.html">wore a bullet-proof vest</a> when he announced the proposed gun restrictions in June 1996. The deputy prime minister was <a href="http://www.latitudenews.com/story/i-was-hung-in-effigy-changing-a-countrys-gun-culture/">hung in effigy</a>. But Australia did not have a domestic gun industry to oppose the new measures so the will of the people was allowed to emerge. And today, support for the safer, gun-restricted Australia is so strong that going back <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/14/america-mass-murder-australia-gun-control-saves-lives">would not be tolerated</a> by the public. </p>
<p>That Australia hasn’t had a mass shooting since 1996 is likely more than merely the result of the considerable reduction in guns – it’s certainly not the case that guns have disappeared altogether. </p>
<p>I suspect that the country has also experienced a cultural shift between the shock of the Port Arthur massacre and the removal of guns from every day life as they are no longer available for self-defense and they are simply less present throughout the country. Troubled individuals, in other words, are not constantly being reminded that guns are a means to address their alleged grievances to the extent that they were in the past, or continue to be in the US. </p>
<h2>Lax gun control in one nation can create problems in another</h2>
<p>Of course, strict gun regulations cannot ensure that the danger of mass shootings or killings has been eliminated. </p>
<p>Norway has strong gun control and committed humane values. But they didn’t prevent Anders Breivik from opening fire on a youth camp on the island of Utoya in 2011? His clean criminal record and hunting license had allowed him to secure semiautomatic rifles, but Norway restricted his ability to get high-capacity clips for them. In his manifesto, Breivik wrote about his attempts to legally buy weapons, stating, “I envy our European American brothers as the gun laws in Europe sucks ass in comparison.” </p>
<p>In fact, in the same manifesto (“December and January – Rifle/gun accessories purchased”, Breivik <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/07/28/282174/breivik-gun-clips-united-states/">wrote</a> that it was from a US supplier that he purchased – and had mailed – ten 30-round ammunition magazines for the rifle he used in his attack. </p>
<p>In other words, even if a particular state chooses to make it harder for some would-be killers to get their weapons, these efforts can be undercut by the jurisdictions that hold out from these efforts. In the US, of course, gun control measures at the state and local level are often thwarted by the lax attitude to gun acquisition in other states.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43590/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Donohue does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Other ‘advanced nations’ make it far harder for someone like the Charleston killer to get his hands on a Glock semiautomatic handgun or any other kind of firearm.John Donohue, C Wendell and Edith M Carlsmith Professor of Law, Stanford UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/437392015-06-24T10:08:19Z2015-06-24T10:08:19ZLet’s talk race: a teacher tells students not to be ‘color-blind’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86138/original/image-20150623-19371-2jm7yv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">If you can't see it, does race not exist?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&autocomplete_id=143507156883316950000&search_tracking_id=AjelgxbkwTX3tWv0bDqE0w&searchterm=eyes%20coverec&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&page=1&inline=89337400">Woman image via www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Following the recent events featured in the media such as the riots in <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/baltimore-police-credible-evidence-of-gang-threat-to-officers/2015/04/27/68aca83a-ecf3-11e4-8666-a1d756d0218e_story.html">Baltimore</a> that came after the fatal shooting of Freddie Gray, <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/16/us/rachel-dolezal/">Rachel Dolezal</a> stepping down as the Spokane Washington NAACP president, and the tragic shootings in <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/17/white-gunman-sought-in-shooting-at-historic-charleston-african-ame-church/">Charleston, South Carolina</a>, public discussions have primarily focused on issues surrounding individual responsibility and mental illness.</p>
<p>I read these conversations with disappointment and frustration. </p>
<p>The dominant approach to understanding racial inequality in the US today is “color-blind racism.” This is the belief that racial inequality can be attributed only to issues considered to be <a href="http://www.miller3group.com/Articles/What_Does_It_Really_Mean.pdf">“race-neutral”</a>. In other words, because racial discrimination is now illegal, everyone is born with an <a href="http://ann.sagepub.com/content/634/1/190.full.pdf">equal opportunity</a> to achieve the “American Dream,” no matter their race.</p>
<p>In comparison to the overt and legal racism prior to the Civil Rights movement, this “new” transformed type of racism is seemingly invisible, making meaningful societal discussions near impossible, and in turn <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442220546/Racism-without-Racists-Color-Blind-Racism-and-the-Persistence-of-Racial-Inequality-in-America-Fourth-Edition">perpetuating</a> racial inequality, which then expresses itself, as we have seen, in these recent incidents. </p>
<h2>Conversations with students</h2>
<p>What about classrooms? Are adequate conversations around race taking place in that space? And how can scholars shape some of the discussions?</p>
<p>A clear example of “color-blind racism” unexpectedly arose my first year as an assistant professor of sociology at Birmingham-Southern College (BSC) in Birmingham, Alabama.</p>
<p>Being a “Yankee,” I was warned in advance that my students at BSC would be more politically and socially conservative than what I was used to (coming from the University of New Hampshire).</p>
<p>However, midway into my first semester, I found that the majority of my students were able to critically engage in potentially controversial topics such as LGBT rights, health care reform and the legalization of marijuana. We also discussed the class inequality between them as middle- or upper-class students living within the gated “hilltop” campus and the surrounding lower social class neighborhood immediately outside of the campus gates.</p>
<p>The real challenge arose when it came to discussing race in the classroom.</p>
<p>I struggled to get my students to address the “elephant in the room” – that the majority of the surrounding lower social class neighborhood comprised racial minorities, whereas the majority of my students and BSC professors, including myself, benefited from “<a href="http://ed-share.educ.msu.edu/scan/ead/renn/mcintosh.pdf">white privilege</a>,” the often unacknowledged advantages with which whites are born, based solely on the color of their skin. </p>
<h2>Challenges of talking about race</h2>
<p>I had incorrectly assumed that teaching in Birmingham, Alabama, with its rich social and <a href="http://www.arcadiapublishing.com/9781467110679/Civil-Rights-in-Birmingham">cultural history</a> of the Civil Rights movement and racial heterogeneity, would make discussing racial inequality one of the most engaging and meaningful discussions in the course.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86139/original/image-20150623-19411-c8xuuz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86139/original/image-20150623-19411-c8xuuz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86139/original/image-20150623-19411-c8xuuz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86139/original/image-20150623-19411-c8xuuz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86139/original/image-20150623-19411-c8xuuz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86139/original/image-20150623-19411-c8xuuz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86139/original/image-20150623-19411-c8xuuz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">How can students discuss race in classrooms?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/claremontcollegesdigitallibrary/5097239229/in/photolist-8LqFCZ-cEJChm-cEJrdJ-9sPbkW-4aadNf-nR3LCj-nEMQQK-nELLhN-22UAA8-ni3Aga-6hRRXf-cEHtUN-cEJLoJ-9wrdaK-bxHR3Q-9GNHEB-cEHqS1-9wucEC-9wrd9Z-cEJH2A-MdEE2-aM4MWP-qWSLKX-9GRAoW-9P6yte-nzfebX-k63mSD-k64FHd-9wuMSm-cEJ1Zs-8ETDVC-9PPW9U-82MUon-65BrWg-8phpkD-9wrd8D-cEJDC3-9Puh2K-6s7wWN-8ETDSC-noiki2-63trkz-65BWrb-7d9fg1-8aDAXc-ds1Rsy-cEHT61-nNXqJW-kyPYG-9PNMWA">Claremont Colleges Digital LIbrary</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>My students refused to discuss race beyond a superficial level.</p>
<p>I found the majority of my students, primarily from the South, have been “socialized” to not discuss race because “race doesn’t matter” and we are (or should be) a “color-blind” society.</p>
<p>This was illustrated by student responses such as “there is only one race: human” and “only racists see race” when asked in class whether race still matters. The responses were consistently given by students across my four classes. </p>
<p>Conversations with several of my faculty colleagues across disciplines also revealed that this was a common theme.</p>
<p>What I learned was that in order to get students to more effectively discuss issues of race, I needed to first address one of the most dangerous <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442220546/Racism-without-Racists-Color-Blind-Racism-and-the-Persistence-of-Racial-Inequality-in-America-Fourth-Edition">social myths</a> perpetuating <a href="http://ann.sagepub.com/content/634/1/190.full.pdf">racial inequality</a> in today’s society — that we are a “color-blind” society.</p>
<h2>How to teach race</h2>
<p>I have modified my lesson on race to begin, not end, with a discussion of “color-blind racism.” What I have found to be most critical to this discussion is challenging my students to apply their <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-sociological-imagination-9780195133738?cc=us&lang=en&">“sociological imaginations,” </a> which can enable them to look at underlying social issues behind some recent news events. </p>
<p>As good sociologists-in-training, my students are asked to consider the larger social structural concerns (eg, poverty, institutional racism, the criminal justice system) instead of focusing on individuals (eg, Baltimore police officers, Rachael Dolezal, Dylann Roof).</p>
<p>My experiences in the classroom are by no means an isolated incident. Research consistently indicates this “color-blind” ideology <a href="http://thenewpress.com/books/new-jim-crow">permeates</a> education, politics, the criminal justice system, the media, etc. </p>
<p>This “color-blind racism” is as dangerous as, if not more dangerous than, the overt racism during <a href="http://thenewpress.com/books/new-jim-crow">Jim Crow</a>. It is for the most part invisible and easily overlooked in public discussions on social issues and therefore very effectively perpetuates racial inequality. </p>
<p>If the majority of my college students believe it is wrong to even “see” race, how can they be expected to meaningfully discuss larger issues of institutional racism and inequality? How can we as a society expect more meaningful social discussions and solutions? </p>
<p>As scholars, we need to emphasize to our students that race is a real thing, with real consequences. As long as we as a society continue avoiding “seeing” or meaningfully discussing race, we will continue to have Baltimore riots and Charleston shootings.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43739/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Meghan L Mills has received funding from the National Science Foundation.</span></em></p>Do academics need to change the way they teach race? What is the impact of students having been socialized to believe that “race doesn’t matter”?Meghan L Mills, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Birmingham-Southern College Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/437602015-06-24T01:35:04Z2015-06-24T01:35:04ZIs the Confederate flag unconstitutional?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86172/original/image-20150623-19377-1z7gx8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">People in Columbia, SC speak out.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/pmcleod/19086487542/in/photolist-uTtjGN-uUd7XP-dr2Y9T-5vLVbZ-4HMRP8-uNE2BR-uNyy69-uNyzMA-v3PHSA-v5BeMq-uNDX3k-u9h76B-uNvEJy-v3LGcC-u95M1f-uNyciL-v6oUWM-v5AN5d-uNF81K-uNw92Q-u96bXJ-u95cU5-v69xNB-u9hWH6-u97kJE-v5A3VY-u988Vs-u964X1-uND7qk-v6pQjZ-v5A6UU-uBmSK3-uBmTrJ-tX6VTD-uRCmv5-uUd6vR-7x4Xds-7x1bWM-4bWhha-252DV7-EChpK-8eXoq4-a3ibwX-8f1F1s-8fj7kj-8f1EYQ-8eXonR-8eXoka-8iedAa-8X8G3H">Perry B McLeod</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The tragedy in Charleston has revived the movement to take the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds. </p>
<p>On Monday June 22 - five days after the shooting in the AME Emanuel Church - South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley called a press conference to announce that, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>it is time to remove the flag from our capitol grounds…This flag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/k6vFV0DbRpA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>This is a particularly sensitive issue because the flag is on state property. </p>
<p>The Confederate flag on public property leads many to ask: what message is the government sending? </p>
<h2>The case against flying the Confederate flag</h2>
<p>For those who want the flag to come down, the message is a reminder of white supremacy and the war fought to maintain slavery.</p>
<p>States have been taking Confederate flags and monuments down for years now, and refusing new requests to fly them. </p>
<p>Just this term the Supreme Court in <a href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-144_758b.pdf">Walker v Texas Sons of Confederate Veterans</a> permitted Texas to reject a specialty license plate proposed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans with a Confederate battle flag on it. </p>
<p>Justice Breyer concluded that what appears on the license plate is a form of government speech and that Texas could decide for itself what speech to permit. When Texas decided that it did not want to include the Confederate battle flag, Breyer concluded there was no first amendment right of members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans to require Texas to include the flag.</p>
<p>Integral to the conclusion that Texas can keep the Confederate battle flag off their license plates are the twin ideas that the government is speaking through the license plates and that Texas can control its own speech. </p>
<p>Such principles were used to justify the 2009 decision of Pleasant Grove City, Utah, to reject a monument from the Summum church for display on public property. </p>
<p>Writing for the majority in <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-665.ZS.html">City of Pleasant Grove v Summum</a>, Justice Alito said “the display of a permanent monument in a public park” is likely to be perceived as the government’s speech. </p>
<p>The city could reject a religious monument, because observers would think the government was endorsing that monument. </p>
<p>So far, so good: the state can (and many of us believe ought to) reject the display of the Confederate flag on government property.</p>
<p>Now look at the other side of this. </p>
<h2>What is the state saying by flying the Confederate battle flag?</h2>
<p>What happens when the state government decides to speak by putting a Confederate battle flag or a monument to the Confederacy on its property (or permitting others to do so)? </p>
<p>What message is the state sending? </p>
<p>While we’re working on that thought experiment, take, for instance, the Confederate monument in front of the Sussex County, Virginia Courthouse. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86173/original/image-20150623-19368-4amzqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86173/original/image-20150623-19368-4amzqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86173/original/image-20150623-19368-4amzqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86173/original/image-20150623-19368-4amzqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86173/original/image-20150623-19368-4amzqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86173/original/image-20150623-19368-4amzqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86173/original/image-20150623-19368-4amzqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86173/original/image-20150623-19368-4amzqz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">This is what is in front of the Sussex Courthouse in Virginia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2012/10/sussex-county-confederate-monument.html">Alfred Brophy</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Note the inscription: “The principles for which they fought live eternally.” </p>
<p>That makes me suspicious of the quality of justice that African Americans can receive inside that courthouse. </p>
<p>Indeed, many people now see the rise of the use of the Confederate flag <a href="http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7Eclass/am483_97/projects/sarratt/resurge.html">during the Civil Rights movement</a> as a response to the increasing claims of African Americans to equality.</p>
<p>And as Justice Alito recognized in the Summum case, monuments on public property will lead observers to “routinely—and reasonably—interpret them as conveying some message on the property owner’s behalf.”</p>
<h2>Violation of the 14th amendment?</h2>
<p>That leads to the question, then, of whether government speech that tells African Americans they are inferior – and perhaps that the era of slavery was right – violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. </p>
<p>This is a stretch of current equal protection doctrine, which is concerned with tangible questions like funding rather than speech. </p>
<p>However, if a state legislature passed a statute proclaiming African Americans are inferior I can imagine that such a bold and vicious statement might rise to the level of a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” </p>
<p>Now take a further step: does the Confederate battle flag or a monument to the Confederacy tell African American citizens that they are inferior? And if so, does that violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?</p>
<p>While the answer to the latter question may not be clearly yes, I don’t think it is clearly no, either.</p>
<p>Ultimately, this is really more a question of whether a state – and its politicians – want to continue to fly a flag that is so closely associated with a war begun to maintain slavery. </p>
<p>Many supporters of the flag say that the meaning for them is about southern heritage, not race hatred. And in this I am inclined to believe their statements about their motive. </p>
<p>But at this point in American history the flag has become closely associated in the minds of many with white supremacy, slavery, and Jim Crow segregation. Whatever its meaning once was – or still is in the minds of some – in the minds of many it is time to realize that this is a symbol that is sending the wrong message to US citizens.</p>
<p>Before this becomes a lawsuit, the Confederate flag should be taken down from in front of the South Carolina State House.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43760/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alfred L. Brophy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Does the Confederate flag tell African American citizens that they are inferior? And if so, does that violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?Alfred L. Brophy, Judge John J Parker Distinguished Professor of Law, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/437422015-06-23T20:22:36Z2015-06-23T20:22:36ZMirror, mirror: reflections on race and the visage of higher education in America<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86168/original/image-20150623-19427-1rgx3h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Do we see the diversity? </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source"> graduation day via shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>What’s going on? </p>
<p>Marvin Gaye’s plaintive question from decades ago echoes hauntingly today. With each new incidence of brown-skinned people being brutalized, it returns more bitterly to our lips, triggered by images from Ferguson to Tempe, Baltimore to Cleveland, Staten Island to Charleston…and the list goes painfully on.</p>
<p>The geography and frequency of these horrors is bewildering. We do not recognize ourselves as we search the mirror for the America we think we know: of e pluribus unum (out of many, one), equal rights, equal opportunity and the pursuit of happiness. </p>
<p>But we cannot bring ourselves to truly search our reflection. </p>
<p>If we could, we would see through our self-distortions, including the exceptionalism that masks our eerie resemblance to our many global homelands and infamous conflicts, from South Africa to Northern Ireland, across Europe to the Middle East, Asian Pacific, and South America.</p>
<p>You don’t have to be a social psychologist (as I am) to see that we continue to shrink from the ghosts of what North Carolina State University’s Rupert Nacoste describes poetically in his new book, <a href="https://www.prometheusbooks.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=2244">Taking on Diversity: How We Can Move From Anxiety to Respect</a>, as the “hibernating bigotry” of our times.</p>
<h2>Hiding behind diversity</h2>
<p>We desperately want to be <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2014/12/08/sharp-racial-divisions-in-reactions-to-brown-garner-decisions/">post-racial</a>, post-gender, indeed, post-difference. </p>
<p>Yet we fail to teach the next generation to exorcise the ghosts of what we tell ourselves is our past. So, we are shocked when a bus full of collegians <a href="http://www.collegian.com/2015/03/ou-expels-two-students-for-racist-chants-video/116664/">ardently shouts</a> a racist chant, even as Confederate flags continue to fly.</p>
<p>The paradox is stunning. </p>
<p>We quite literally hide behind the explosion of diversity, a quick-changing demographic map <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/research/books/2014/diversityexplosion">documented</a> by the Brookings Institution’s William Frey. As Frey <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/americas-getting-less-white-and-will-save-it-289862">wrote</a> in a recent article, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“America reached an important milestone in 2011. That occurred when, for the first time in the history of the country, more minority babies than white babies were born in a year. Soon, most children will be racial minorities: Hispanics, blacks, Asians, and other nonwhite races. And, in about three decades, whites will constitute a minority of all Americans.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>We soothe ourselves with the hope that so much fluid demographic and social change will settle the waters of racism, even as the ghosts of black and white come out from hibernation.</p>
<p>Why, you might ask, is a college president lecturing us on this? </p>
<p>As campus after campus chases the mantle of selectivity (highly valued by popular <a href="http://www.usnews.com/rankings">rankings systems</a>) over inclusivity, we knowingly turn our backs on the fastest-growing, first-generation, low income, largely black and brown talent pool in the communities right at our gates. </p>
<p>We continue to favor a “better prepared,” select, if not necessarily more resilient, student body deemed meritorious by narrow metrics of tests they prep for all of their lives.</p>
<p>How will we face down our ghosts if we can’t even commit to cultivating the talent in our midst? Aren’t we entrepreneurs and innovators who succeed by taking risks?</p>
<h2>Newark’s story</h2>
<p>In a city like Newark, New Jersey, where I live, educate and innovate as the Chancellor of Rutgers University - Newark, the choice to succumb to ghosts or engage the talent is clearly written in the statistics: <a href="http://gradnation.org/blog/newark-focuses-re-engaging-disconnected-youth">4,000 “disconnected youth”</a> are out of school, racing toward prison. </p>
<p>What’s going on? They could become “opportunity youth” if the <a href="http://www.nclc2025.org">Newark City of Learning Collaborative</a> succeeds <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-newark-the-next-brooklyn-39998">in its efforts</a> to increase college attainment in Newark to 25% by 2025.</p>
<p>Unbeknownst to most, Newark is a “college town” — 60,000 students, faculty and staff at Rutgers University — Newark, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Essex County College alone. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86169/original/image-20150623-19374-1qhy1uj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86169/original/image-20150623-19374-1qhy1uj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86169/original/image-20150623-19374-1qhy1uj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86169/original/image-20150623-19374-1qhy1uj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86169/original/image-20150623-19374-1qhy1uj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86169/original/image-20150623-19374-1qhy1uj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86169/original/image-20150623-19374-1qhy1uj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Newark, college town.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rutgers_Newark_aerial_view_of_campus_2008.jpg">Arthur Paxton, Office of Communications, Rutgers, Newark.</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many, perhaps most, represent the largely untapped talent pool of metropolitan America, with stories and struggles and dreams worthy of our city’s 350-year history as a place that welcomes those who left a homeland, whether in the Great Migration, South to North, or in the waves of immigration since, to find freedom and make life better for their children.</p>
<p>Yet those stories of hope and perseverance — which have inspired the launch of <a href="http://newestamericans.com/">Newest Americans</a>, a new digital magazine by the Rutgers–Newark community, VII photo agency, and nonprofit production company Talking Eyes that compellingly captures the stories emanating from our global campus and city — cannot exorcise our ghosts if we turn a blind eye to the talent that grows up “stuck in place,” as New York University sociologist <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo14365260.html">Patrick Sharkey reminds us</a>, all across America and certainly in Newark.</p>
<p>To do that, we have to change the map of inequality into a map of opportunity, both for those marginalized by decades of systemic prejudice in housing, employment, education, health care and law enforcement, and those dreamers with the very same aspirations for excellence. </p>
<p>We in higher education can start by looking at our own reflections in the mirror, facing down the ghosts of our ivory towers that are aided, abetted, and kept alive by the likes of US News and World Report rankings (despite such rankings coming under <a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/norc.html">increased scrutiny</a>). </p>
<p>Might we instead embrace the impact that we too can have as institutions anchored in communities, collaborating with respect and reciprocity with public and private partners to sustain change in our midst, as the many members of the <a href="http://www.margainc.com/initiatives/aitf/">Anchor Institutions Task Force</a> - chaired by the University of Pennsylvania’s Ira Harkavy and the global consulting firm Marga Inc’s David Maurrasse - are now doing? </p>
<p>Could we reward not just knowledge in the abstract but its grounded applications too, and open the doors to more of our next diverse generation of citizens, professionals and leaders?</p>
<p>Finding the courage to look at ourselves with such honesty and listen to each other’s stories is the only way to understand our differences, acknowledge our faults, heal, and move forward as communities and as a nation. </p>
<p>It all starts with learning to listen as Marvin Gaye urged us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Don’t punish me with brutality</p>
<p>C'mon talk to me</p>
<p>So you can see</p>
<p>What’s going on.”</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43742/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nancy Cantor is affiliated with the Anchor Institutions Task Force and Rutgers University - Newark, which coordinates the Newark City of Learning Collaborative.</span></em></p>If Americans are hiding behind the explosion of diversity to avoid looking at racism, what can universities do about it? A lot.Nancy Cantor, Chancellor, Rutgers University - NewarkLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/437442015-06-23T18:52:04Z2015-06-23T18:52:04ZNikki Haley’s call to take down Confederate flag reveals ongoing shift in GOP strategy<p>This week in a televised press conference, Republican South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley called for the removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds. </p>
<p>Before this week, Haley, like other Republican politicians, resisted calls for its removal. Now Haley joins prominent southern Republicans – Tennessee Senators Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander, along with 2016 presidential hopefuls Lindsey Graham and Jeb Bush – in calling for the flag to be taken down.</p>
<p>What accounts for this dramatic turnabout? Surely, the massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church last week was a decisive factor. But the abandonment of the symbol of the Confederacy reflects a slow – but definitive – shift away from the <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-12-04/birth-of-the-southern-strategy">Southern Strategy</a> that had long tied white, southern racial animus to national Republican goals. </p>
<p>Beginning in the mid-20th century, the campaigns of Republican presidential nominees exploited race to win over white Democrats, first in the South and then nationally. </p>
<p>In the 1964 presidential election, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater ran in opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. He won only five states outside his home state of Arizona – but all of them were in the Deep South. </p>
<p>Four years later, Richard Nixon sought to siphon votes from segregationist Alabama Governor George C Wallace by claiming to represent a silent majority of Americans who stood for “law and order” – those alarmed by the black protests sweeping through cities nationwide, and opposed to school desegregation via forced busing. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86144/original/image-20150623-19411-12ot21y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86144/original/image-20150623-19411-12ot21y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86144/original/image-20150623-19411-12ot21y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86144/original/image-20150623-19411-12ot21y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86144/original/image-20150623-19411-12ot21y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86144/original/image-20150623-19411-12ot21y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86144/original/image-20150623-19411-12ot21y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86144/original/image-20150623-19411-12ot21y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">During his 1968 campaign for the presidency, Richard Nixon appealed to ‘law and order’ (read: anti-black) voters.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/NIXONcampaigns.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Reagan opened his 1980 campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi (where civil rights workers James Cheney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman <a href="http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/slain-civil-rights-workers-found">were murdered in 1964</a>), telling voters, “I believe in states’ rights” – a euphemism for opposition to federal civil rights enforcement.</p>
<p>And eight years later, George H W Bush’s campaign strategist Lee Atwater race-baited Bush’s Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis though a series of ads featuring a convicted black rapist. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Io9KMSSEZ0Y?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Republican campaign strategist Lee Atwater’s infamous 1988 race-baiting attack ad.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Why, then, are Republicans now turning their backs on the symbol of white southern resistance it once depended on? </p>
<p>Political scientists have long debated when, why and how partisan political identities and interests change. They often point to dramatic events or the emergence of crucial new issues as critical junctures. </p>
<p>But we can also look at slower, more subtle changes in the ideas and commitments of political actors to understand how micropolitics produce broader shifts.</p>
<p>So what happened with the GOP and its relationship with race? </p>
<p>First, in the 1990s, the Democratic Party – which has its own <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dixiecrat-Revolt-Solid-South-1932-1968/dp/0807849103">historical issues with race</a> – would again exploit white fears for political gain. Bill Clinton, under the influence of the conservative, southern-based <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=2EsVAQAAIAAJ&dq=CPE+rejuvenation+of+the+Democratic+Party&lr=&as_brr=0&hl=pt-PT&cd=4">Democratic Leadership Council</a>, pushed through anti-crime legislation that’s largely responsible for creating the current prison-industrial complex (where blacks are <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing-black-men.html?abt=0002&abg=1">overwhelmingly represented</a>). He also dismantled welfare through instituting lifetime limits for recipients, reducing benefits and enforcing work requirements. </p>
<p>Second, with the absence of a strong black freedom struggle, a new generation of Republicans sought to interpret the legacy of the civil rights movement for their own gain. </p>
<p>These leaders included George W Bush, who acknowledged and apologized for the Southern Strategy while <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/elections/bushtext071000.htm">arguing for</a> neo-liberal and individualist forms of black empowerment. Later, prominent conservative figures like Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck would regularly invoke Martin Luther King, Jr. </p>
<p>Third, the nation’s <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/pew-chart-on-americas-changing-demographics-2014-4">changing racial demographics</a> have forced Republicans to try to shed their image of the party of “stuffy old men” (as a <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/03/rnc-report-gop-scary-out-of-touch-88974.html">2012 report</a> from the Republican National Committee put it). </p>
<p>Meanwhile, a number of prominent Republican conservatives of color have emerged in the last decade. These include former Florida House member Allen West, Utah Representative Mia Love, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and Tea Party-backed presidential hopefuls such as Herman Cain and Dr Ben Carson. Even two of the Palmetto State’s most prominent politicians are minorities: Senator Tim Scott and Governor Nikki Haley. </p>
<p>Yet Haley’s announcement isn’t so much evidence that the Southern Strategy is <em>over</em>; rather, it shows that it’s done its job. </p>
<p>Republicans no longer need to court white southerners in overtly racist ways, because they’ve already fully absorbed them into the Republican coalition. Where else can they go?</p>
<p>This is not to say that the GOP has resolved its race problem. Indeed, Republican positions on voter ID laws, affirmative action, and social and economic policies are at odds with the political views of the overwhelming majority of African Americans. The GOP can simply pursue these ends without direct appeal to blatant symbols of white supremacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43744/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joseph Lowndes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Historically, Republican politicians have subtly – and not-so-subtly – exploited racial fears.Joseph Lowndes, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of OregonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/435972015-06-20T16:39:36Z2015-06-20T16:39:36ZThe massacre at Mother Emanuel: the past still lives with us<p><strong>Note: This article was published in 2015.</strong></p>
<p>As we stood in Charleston on Calhoun Street in front of Emanuel AME Church, my friend, Dr Chenjerai Kumanyika, and I met three men who asked us why we were there. </p>
<p>I’m not sure if I effectively explained myself to them, because the truth was I hadn’t really figured it out then, and maybe I still haven’t figured it out now. </p>
<p>As a graduate student whose primary work fuses research and artistic interpretation, I sometimes find it difficult to answer such a question to my satisfaction or to the satisfaction of anyone asking. But I try.</p>
<h2>Learning about the South</h2>
<p>Of course, we’d come to show love and respect for those lost to the senseless, cowardly violence inflicted here, and to help support, in any way possible, the community dealing with this tragedy as the world focuses its attention on Charleston <a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-south-carolina-police-shooting-20150413-story.html">once again</a> after the shooting of Walter Scott – two times too many in the last few months. </p>
<p>But I couldn’t get my mind off the statue of <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/historyofus/web05/features/bio/B07.html">John C Calhoun</a> – senator, vice president and strident defender of slavery – towering over Marion Square just a block away.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85795/original/image-20150620-3377-rvu07h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85795/original/image-20150620-3377-rvu07h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85795/original/image-20150620-3377-rvu07h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85795/original/image-20150620-3377-rvu07h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85795/original/image-20150620-3377-rvu07h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85795/original/image-20150620-3377-rvu07h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85795/original/image-20150620-3377-rvu07h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In Calhoun’s shadow.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">A.D. Carson</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Two years ago, I knew exactly why I’d decided to come down from Illinois to Clemson University. </p>
<p>That was easy. The <a href="http://www.clemson.edu/caah/rcid/">university’s program</a> in Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design is perfect for my desire to combine my academic and artistic endeavors. It allows me to do work that’s thought-provoking and necessary. </p>
<p>The initial adjustments, however, were rough. They consisted of me learning about where I’d moved, what was there before me and what that meant for my present – and my future – there. </p>
<p>I learned about <a href="http://newsstand.clemson.edu/tv/ebony__ivy_race_slavery_and_the_troubled_history_of_americas_universities/">Clemson’s history </a> as a slave plantation owned by John C Calhoun, and the benefits it received from slave labor, sharecropping and convict labor. </p>
<p>This information became the basis of my research, which I funneled into the <a href="http://seestripescu.org/">See The Stripes campaign</a> to raise awareness about commonly overlooked contributions to Clemson University’s history – its name is a play on the fact that the university’s mascot is a tiger with different colored stripes. </p>
<p>The campaign, in turn, led to many, many conversations across many communities at the university – from undergraduates and graduate students to faculty senate and even a <a href="http://www.greenvilleonline.com/videos/news/2015/03/10/24745043/">debate hosted by the The State newspaper</a> – over the course of the past school year. </p>
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<p>While many were very productive, others were quite divisive, particularly the ones that dealt with the monuments and memorials on campus. More specifically, there was a lot of public controversy around the name of <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=dOA4CQAAQBAJ&pg=PT4&lpg=PT4&dq=university+press+biography+tillman&source=bl&ots=sqDfthE8kx&sig=zUVYltoU77wjCA9gnerkKAcCKJs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6mKFVfSAB86ayASLkoGgBA&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=university%20press%20biography%20tillman&f=false">Benjamin Tillman</a> being on the <a href="http://www.greenvilleonline.com/story/news/local/2015/01/16/debate-rages-clemsons-tillman-hall/21888173/">university’s most prominent building</a>.</p>
<p>It is because of my last two years at Clemson that I arrived June 18 in Charleston fully aware of some of the historical parallels to the present moment. </p>
<h2>The past in the present</h2>
<p>Particularly chilling was the fact that this was not the first time a black state senator was murdered by a white supremacist and – <a href="http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-20/how-norway-threw-away-term-lone-wolf">let’s not shy away</a> from this word – terrorist. </p>
<p>In 1876, State <a href="http://eraofcasualfridays.net/2009/10/29/%E2%80%9Cit-can-hardly-be-expected-that-any-negro-would-regret-the-death-of-benjamin-tillman-%E2%80%9D/">Senator Simon Coker</a> – who was in Charleston investigating violence against blacks – was seized by a mob and <a href="http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/ben-tillman-was-a-racist-terrorist-and-murderer-its-time-to-take-down-his-statue/Content?oid=4857402">shot in the head</a> as he kneeled in a last prayer. </p>
<p>One of the perpetrators of that atrocious event was none other than the eventual governor and senator, Benjamin Tillman, who made his disdain for black people known, <a href="http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/charleston/ben-tillman-was-a-racist-terrorist-and-murderer-its-time-to-take-down-his-statue/Content?oid=4857402">explaining</a>, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“It had been the settled purpose of the leading white men of Edgefield to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the negroes a lesson; as it was generally believed that nothing but bloodshed and a good deal of it could answer the purpose of redeeming the state from Negro and carpetbag rule.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dylann Roof said to one of the Emanuel AME massacre survivors, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I have to do it — you [African Americans] rape our women and you’re taking over our country.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Not only do I hear echoes of Tillman in Roof’s words, I see his reflection in Roof’s actions. </p>
<p>While the present governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, pleads ignorance, saying that <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/18/nikki-haley-charleston-shooting_n_7612398.html">“we’ll never know what motivates anyone”</a> to do what Roof did, she need not look far from the seat she occupies – either historically, as she shares an office bequeathed by Ben Tillman, or literally, as the battle flag of the Confederacy flies at the State House outside her office – for some answers. </p>
<p>In South Carolina, there stand monuments and memorials to the progenitors of the very thoughts Roof spoke.</p>
<h2>Why changing names matters</h2>
<p>Maybe what brought me to Charleston in the wake of this tragedy is, in part, the same thing motivating my work at Clemson. </p>
<p>See The Stripes is an effort to help us see how history lives with us in the present moment. Without acknowledgment of our complicated pasts, we run the risk of unnecessarily repeating yesterday’s mistakes. </p>
<p>It’s difficult to see sincerity in Governor Haley’s condemnation of Dylann Roof’s actions while that flag flies on the Capitol and a statue stands to honor Tillman on state grounds. </p>
<p>It’s hard to believe her statements about the tragedy of the present moment <a href="http://www.greenvilleonline.com/videos/news/2015/03/10/24710819/">given her call </a> to keep a murderer’s name on our Main Hall at Clemson, and “accept history for what it is.” “Look forward and not look back,” Haley said in March, because “if you start changing the names you’re gonna be changing the names of a lot of things.”</p>
<p>I’m not so sure “changing the names of a lot of things” is such a bad plan. This isn’t to suggest we rewrite history or erase the past.</p>
<p>Maybe we should consider a bit more seriously how what we honor could be reinforcing those thoughts, words and actions we thought we left in the past. This is especially the case if the person who committed the acts and said the words we now condemn is immortalized in sculptures that are part of our everyday life.</p>
<p>There are others much more deserving of our attention than the Dylann Roofs and Benjamin Tillmans of the world. These are the people we should honor – looking backward, forward and at our present moment. </p>
<p>Their names: Rev <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/south-carolina-state-senator-clementa-pinckney-speech-walter-scott-video">Senator Clementa Pinckney</a>, <a href="http://www.people.com/article/tywanza-sanders-save-susie-jackson-shooter">Tywanza Sanders</a>, <a href="http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20150618/PC16/150619385">Cynthia Hurd</a>, <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/19/charleston-shooting-victim-sharonda-coleman-singleton-always-saw-greatness-in-us.html">Sharonda Coleman-Singleton</a>, Rev <a href="http://www.people.com/article/charleston-church-shooting-victim-depayne-middleton">Depayne Middleton Doctor</a>, <a href="http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/charleston/obituary.aspx?pid=175111207">Ethel Lance</a>, <a href="http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20150618/PC16/150619336/1177/susie-jackson-remembered-for-energy-faith-and-love-of-family">Susie Jackson</a>, Rev. <a href="http://www.bustle.com/articles/91498-who-was-rev-daniel-l-simmons-sr-a-retired-pastor-who-attended-emanuel-ame-every-week">Daniel Simmons, Sr</a>, <a href="http://www.watchtheyard.com/deltas/delta-sigma-theta-myra-thompson-charleston-shooting/">Myra Thompson</a> as well as Senator Simon Coker and so many others senselessly taken from us by malicious acts callously committed in the name of hatred and bigotry. </p>
<p>We owe to them a commitment to try to change the many conditions that caused the tragedies. </p>
<p>But let’s just not pretend our present doesn’t look eerily similar to our past. </p>
<p>If we refuse to accept our present, with hopes that we can do better and be better, can’t we do the same with our history?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43597/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>A.D. Carson is the founder of the See The Stripes Campaign at Clemson University.</span></em></p>Why studying South Carolina’s history led to one graduate student’s activism – and how that experience informs his reflections on the Charleston killing.A.D. Carson, Associate Professor of Hip-Hop, University of VirginiaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/435932015-06-20T14:13:26Z2015-06-20T14:13:26ZLook for the patterns in Charleston<p>When you read about Dylann Roof, think about the patterns he represents. </p>
<p>There’s more than one.</p>
<p>Over the next few days, we’re going to hear about mental illness. We’re going to hear about troubled loners. We’ll hear about a young man’s racist fantasies, so outrageous that he would
<a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/6/18/8806633/charleston-shooter-flags-dylann-roof">celebrate the apartheid regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia</a>. </p>
<p>We’ll hear from family, neighbors and high school friends, and the picture that will start emerging is of a young man who was <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/18/us/charleston-church-shooting-suspect/">strange</a>, <a href="http://www.rawstory.com/2015/06/lindsey-graham-downplays-race-after-black-church-shooting-people-looking-for-christians-to-kill-them/">disturbed</a>, <a href="http://www.insideedition.com/headlines/10834-shooter-dylann-storm-roofs-friends-hes-a-pill-popping-gun-toting-loner-who-made-racist">sick</a>, abnormal. </p>
<p>The message will be that the massacre in Charleston was an unpredictable, unavoidable tragedy carried out by an individual madman.</p>
<p>Don’t lose sight of the patterns.</p>
<h2>A crime of hate</h2>
<p>When Dylann Roof shot and killed nine African Americans at a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, it was a hate crime. </p>
<p>We know, because Roof told the survivors precisely why he had come to <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/18/the-incredible-history-of-charleston-s-emanuel-a-m-e-the-bravest-church-in-america.html">this historic church</a> to commit mass murder: <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/video/church-gunman-reportedly-said-i-have-to-do-it-467402819802">“You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go.”</a> </p>
<p>It was an act of domestic terrorism. Roof has reportedly told investigators that <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/19/us/charleston-church-shooting-main/">he wanted to start a race war</a> with his actions. Shooting nine black people as they prayed was a way to terrorize all black people and to destroy the safety and comfort of what should be the safest of spaces.</p>
<p>It was also part of a pattern.</p>
<h2>Everyday racial violence</h2>
<p>The United States is a dangerous place to be a black person. </p>
<p>Black Americans are <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/09/19/the-racial-divide-in-americas-gun-deaths/">twice as likely to die from gun violence</a> as white Americans are. Hispanic and Asian Americans are less likely to die from gun violence than white Americans – gun violence is a tragedy that disproportionately affects black Americans.</p>
<p>So is murder. In 2012, blacks represented 13% of the US population and represented 50% of homicide victims. Black men were 8.5 times more likely to be the <a href="http://www.vpc.org/studies/blackhomicide15.pdf">victim of a homicide than white men</a>. </p>
<p>Politicians and commentators – notably <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/11/24/what-rudy-giuliani-gets-wrong-about-the-deaths-of-young-black-men/">Rudy Giuliani</a> – are fond of pointing out that most black men who die of homicide are killed by other black men. That’s true. But it’s also true that white men are mostly killed by other white men.</p>
<p>Most murders – 78% between 1980 and 2008 – are committed by someone the victim knew well: a family member, friend or other acquaintance. Given high rates of <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/15/AR2006101500913.html">homophily in American society</a>, it’s not surprising that black people know – and kill – black people and white people know – and kill – white people.</p>
<p>What is surprising is how police handle these murders. </p>
<h2>Tension with the police</h2>
<p>In New York City, <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/forgotten-record-murder-rate-cases-unsolved-article-1.1566572">the “clearance rate” for homicides with white victims is 86%</a>. For homicides with black victims, the rate is 45%. </p>
<p>In other words, in the majority of homicide cases in which the victim is black, the case is <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/chester-gun-violence-black-deaths-matter">unsolved and the murderer remains on the streets</a>. </p>
<p>And while we’re talking about the police, let’s remember that at least 101 unarmed black people were <a href="http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/">killed by law enforcement in 2014.</a> That includes Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley and Darrien Hunt, but it also includes dozens you probably haven’t heard about, like <a href="http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2014/05/06/family-coach-killed-basketball-fight-loved-kids-coaching/8778079/">Justin Griffin, a 25-year-old basketball coach</a> who had an argument with a referee – the referee was an off-duty sheriff’s deputy, and he and another deputy beat Griffin to death. </p>
<p>From 2010-2012, <a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white">teenage black men were 21 times more likely than teenage white men to be killed by police</a>.</p>
<p>We need to learn to see these patterns.</p>
<h1>#blacklivesmatter</h1>
<p>Thanks to Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, we have a narrative – #blacklivesmatter – that helps draw connections between Walter Scott’s death at the hands of the police in North Charleston and the slaughter of nine of Charleston’s finest citizens at the hands of Dylann Roof. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"609517056002793473"}"></div></p>
<p><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/01/black-lives-matter-patrisse-cullors-baltimore-protests_n_7187954.html">As Cullors has explained</a>, #blacklivesmatter is not just about the death of black people at the hands of police or vigilantes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The media really wants to say ‘This happened in Ferguson, this happened in Baltimore, this happened in New York. Are they the same?’ Yes, they’re the same. Black people are not a monolithic group, but what we are facing is something that’s extreme – and that’s poverty, that’s homelessness, that’s higher rates of joblessness, that’s law enforcement invading our communities day in and day out – and we are uprising.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Cullors talks about a “Black Spring,” a parallel to the Arab Spring, in which black people and their allies start uprising and demanding a more just nation. </p>
<p>People who knew Roof tell us that he was obsessed with the protests resulting from the Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray deaths – a Black Spring is exactly what he appears to have feared the most. </p>
<p>Those he killed, notably <a href="http://www.emanuelamechurch.org/revpinckney.php">the Reverend Clementa Pinckney</a>, who as a state senator was a key figure in the fight to bring <a href="http://www.thestate.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/the-buzz/article24839449.html">body cameras to South Carolina police</a>, were <a href="http://magazine.good.is/articles/charleston-victims-church-killings?utm_source=thedailygood&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailygood">precisely the people</a> working to better the lives of the black community – and the community as a whole – in Charleston, South Carolina.</p>
<h2>It happened in South Carolina</h2>
<p>Was Dylann Roof a troubled loner? </p>
<p>Yes. But he was also a resident of a state where a segregationist flag flies above the State Capitol and <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/charleston-church-shooting/south-carolinas-confederate-flag-not-lowered-half-mast-after-church-n378316">can’t be taken down or lowered to half-mast without approval by the state assembly</a>. </p>
<p>To reach the scene of his crime, he drove <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2015/06/19/read-jon-stewarts-blistering-monologue-about-race-terrorism-and-gun-violence-after-charleston-church-massacre/">on highways named for Confederate generals</a>. He lives in a country where black people are disproportionately the victims of official and unofficial violence. </p>
<p>Dismissing him as a uniquely sick individual ignores the pattern.</p>
<h2>Gun problems</h2>
<p>Roof also lives in a nation with a unique and problematic relationship with guns. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">2008-2015: Obama addresses the nation after gun massacres.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rates of private gun ownership are <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/12/1/what-makes-americas-gun-culture-totally-unique-in-the-world-as-demonstrated-in-four-charts/">higher in the US than anywhere else in the world</a> – twice as high, for instance, as that of Yemen, a conflict-torn nation in the throes of a domestic insurgency.</p>
<p>Our gun murder rate is off the charts: <a href="http://www.humanosphere.org/science/2014/03/visualizing-gun-deaths-comparing-the-u-s-to-rest-of-the-world/">to find adequate comparisons, we need to look at countries like Iraq and the Democratic Republic of the Congo</a>. </p>
<p>Not only were Dylann Roof’s crimes part of a pattern of gun violence that’s near-unique to the US, they are part of a pattern of mass shootings. </p>
<p>Mother Jones, tracking shootings by single killers in public places in which four or more people were killed, has identified more than <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map">70 mass shootings in the US since 1982</a>. Like most mass killers, Roof used a handgun, and like the vast majority of mass killers, he obtained his weapon legally.</p>
<p>We have a pattern of mass gun killings in the US, and we have a pattern of doing nothing about them. </p>
<h2>Resisting gun control</h2>
<p>Two years after the massacre of elementary school students in Newtown, Connecticut, The New York Times has tracked gun laws passed in the year after the Newtown shootings. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/10/us/state-gun-laws-enacted-in-the-year-since-newtown.html">The results: 39 laws tightened gun restrictions; 70 loosened them.</a> </p>
<p>If the pattern continues, South Carolina – a state where you do not need a permit to own any sort of handgun – is more likely to legalize concealed carry without a permit than it is to pass significant restrictions on handgun ownership.</p>
<p>We didn’t have to wait long to hear the argument that more guns would have saved lives in Charleston. Fox and Friends managed to find a pastor who argued that religious leaders should <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/06/18/3671110/state-gun-laws-south-carolina/">preach while armed</a>, so that they could defend the flock from attack.</p>
<p>NRA Board member Charles Cotton found a way to blame Roof’s crimes on a <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2015/06/18/nra-board-member-blames-murdered-reverend-for-d/204057">man he slaughtered, Reverend Pinckney</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“he [Rev Pinckney] voted against concealed-carry. Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>American resistance to sane gun control laws is based on fantasy. </p>
<p>We fantasize that guns will protect us from being victims of crime. They don’t. Gun owners are <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/mar/25/guns-protection-national-rifle-association">five times more likely to be shot than non-owners</a>. </p>
<p>Women who live in a house containing one or more guns are <a href="https://www.vpc.org/fact_sht/womenfs.htm">3.4 times more likely to be killed than women who live in gun-free homes</a>. </p>
<p>We fantasize that we will stop crimes with guns, if only pastors or teachers or any brave civilian were allowed to carry concealed weapons. </p>
<p>We’d do well to remember <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2011/01/friendly_firearms.html">Joe Zamudio</a>, a bystander at the rally where Representative Gabby Giffords was shot, who had a concealed weapon and narrowly missed killing not the gunman, but the man who wrestled the weapon away from the gunman.</p>
<p>These fantasies keep us from seeing the pattern. </p>
<p>We live in a country where it’s far too easy for anyone – a disturbed individual, a criminal or an ordinary untrained citizen – to obtain a gun, and where gun violence is an endemic public health problem. People in other countries think we’re crazy. </p>
<p>But so long as we treat each mass shooting, each black death as an isolated tragedy, there’s nothing we can do. </p>
<p>Look for the patterns.</p>
<p>America’s obsession with guns is a big part of what makes this nation so dangerous for black people. America’s endemic racism is a big part of what makes American buy, own and lobby for guns, to protect ourselves from an “other” that we fear.</p>
<p>Jon Stewart did a wise thing in reacting to the shootings in Charleston – <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2015/06/19/read-jon-stewarts-blistering-monologue-about-race-terrorism-and-gun-violence-after-charleston-church-massacre/">he admitted that there were simply no jokes that could be made.</a> But he also articulated a sense of hopelessness that’s easy to feel, and hard to fight: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I honestly have nothing other than just sadness once again that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal, yet we pretend doesn’t exist. And I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jack shit.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We’ve got to do better than that.</p>
<p>Help people see, and help us fight, these patterns.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43593/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ethan Zuckerman receives funding from the Knight Foundation, Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation and Google Ideas. He is affiliated with the Open Society Foundation, and nonprofits Ushahidi, Global Voices and PenPlusBytes.</span></em></p>So long as we treat each mass shooting, each black death as an isolated tragedy, there’s nothing we can do. Things can change if we look for the patterns.Ethan Zuckerman, Director, Center for Civic Media , Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/435342015-06-19T14:11:00Z2015-06-19T14:11:00ZThe lethal gentleman: the ‘benevolent sexism’ behind Dylann Roof’s racism<p>Many important things will be said in the next few weeks about the murder of nine people holding a prayer meeting at a historic African American church in Charleston, South Carolina on the evening of June 17. </p>
<p>Here I want to focus on what the suspected killer, Dylann Roof, said right before he gunned down a room full of black worshippers. Reportedly, Roof proclaimed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is amazing all that can be said in three little sentences. </p>
<p>To a sociologist who studies gender and its intersection with other forms of inequality, this statement spoke volumes.</p>
<p>Roof’s alleged act was motivated by racism, first and foremost, but also sexism. In particular, a phenomenon called benevolent sexism. </p>
<h2>Benevolent sexism</h2>
<p>Sociologists use the <a href="http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/21/1/119">term</a> “benevolent sexism” to describe the attribution of positive traits to women that, nonetheless, justify their subordination to men. </p>
<p>For example, women may be described as good with people, but this is believed to make them perform poorly in competitive arenas like work, sports or politics. Better that they leave that to the men. </p>
<p>Women are wonderful with children, they say, but this is used to suggest that women should take primary responsibility for unpaid, undervalued domestic work. Better that they let men support them. </p>
<p>And the one that Roof used to rationalize his racist act was: women are beautiful, but their grace makes them fragile. Better that they stand back and let men defend them. </p>
<p>This argument is hundreds of years old, of course. </p>
<p>It’s most clearly articulated in the <a href="http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=1581">history of lynching, </a>in which black men were violently murdered routinely by white mobs using the excuse that they had raped a white woman. </p>
<p>Roof is the modern equivalent of this white mob. He believes that he and other white men own me and women like me — “you rape our women,” he said possessively — and so he justified gunning down innocent black people on my behalf. You are vulnerable, he’s whispering to me, let me protect you.</p>
<p>That’s chilling enough, but he also makes claim to the nation itself. “You’re taking over our country” reflects a xenophobic white entitlement to land. We could call it ironic – given the presence of Native Americans centuries before the arrival of the white man – yet it is so routine as to be the common sense of this country. </p>
<h2>Colonial attitudes</h2>
<p>When European colonizers first arrived on the shores of America, the country was a “she”: they saw “her” as open to discovery and exploration. Today, we still call her the “motherland” and, when she is attacked, we refer to her as the domesticized “homefront.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85669/original/image-20150619-32080-5fbxgs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85669/original/image-20150619-32080-5fbxgs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=836&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85669/original/image-20150619-32080-5fbxgs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=836&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85669/original/image-20150619-32080-5fbxgs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=836&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85669/original/image-20150619-32080-5fbxgs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1051&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85669/original/image-20150619-32080-5fbxgs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1051&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85669/original/image-20150619-32080-5fbxgs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1051&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Europe supported…</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In art, too, nations are often portrayed as women, such as in English painter William Blake’s engraving, “Europe supported by Africa and America” (1796) of three naked women – one black, one white, one brown – who stand in for their countries. These white male colonialists hardly differentiated between what could be extracted from the land and their right to extract whatever they wanted from native women. </p>
<p>Roof is that colonizer. White women are his land. His land is a she. His relationship to this country and the white women in it is the same: both belong to white men like him. </p>
<p>In his mind, apparently, black people are the interlopers, the rapists, the plunderers of his natural resources, female and otherwise. It’s a twisted but not an unusual way to think about the world; not then and not now. </p>
<p>As sociologist Michael Kimmel documents in <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/11/17/americas_angriest_white_men_up_close_with_racism_rage_and_southern_supremacy/">Angry White Men</a>, the rage felt by many rural, poor and working class whites is rooted in the belief that a country that is their birthright is being taken away from them.</p>
<h2>A Texas pioneer</h2>
<p>In the 1920s and ‘30s, Texan <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/revolt-against-chivalry/9780231082822">Jessie Daniel Ames</a> was one of the first women to argue that lynching was sexist as well as racist. </p>
<p>She exposed the idea that white women needed protection from black men as a lie, gaining the support of thousands of women and hundreds of public officials for <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/revolt-against-chivalry/9780231082822">her anti-lynching campaign</a>. </p>
<p>She and other women went into communities where lynchings occurred — where their lives really were at risk from angry white men — and protested the murder of black men with white women’s rape as a justification. </p>
<p>Historian <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/revolt-against-chivalry/9780231082822">Jacquelyn Dowd Hall</a> describes Ames’s work as a “revolt against chivalry.”</p>
<p>Ames understood that all oppression is interconnected. </p>
<p>We know this now more than ever. We live not in isolated pockets of prejudice, but with a collection of privileges that depend on each other for their persistence and resonance.</p>
<p>Roof’s act was racist, yes, but his racism was built upon colonialism and sexism. Our hierarchies interconnect, interweaving, providing each other with support. </p>
<p>“We are none of us free,” wrote the poet <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S16/82/70M09/index.xml">Emma Lazarus</a>, “if we are not all free.” </p>
<p>I am a white woman. I am not yours to protect. No more murder in my name.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43534/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lisa Wade does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The killing of nine people in Charleston’s AME Church was motivated by racism, first and foremost, but also sexism.Lisa Wade, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Occidental CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.