Recently, I had an opinion piece published on Blavity titled, “As Black People, Will We Ever Truly Have A Future In America?” It was written in response to the violence that erupted in Charlottesville on Saturday, leaving numerous people seriously injured and one young lady dead.
In my hometown of Durham, North Carolina, where I currently reside, a very public statute that memorialized the Confederate States of America was dismantled by a group of protesters. These courageous individuals decided that they weren’t going to wait for America to do what is right by removing a monument that should’ve never been erected to begin with. As I pen this follow-up piece, I don’t look to address the terrorism in Charlottesville, nor the patriotic acts in Durham; my concern lies in the opinions openly shared online by people who live in the same region of North Carolina as I.
Durham is viewed as a pocket of progress in a state that has been pegged and proven regressive in nature, particularly over the past few years. From the notorious HB2 pro-discrimination bill to Voter ID laws that disenfranchise many citizens to being a haven for human trafficking (which is modern day slavery, for those who are unfamiliar), my home state has not been bashful in its regular appearance on national television. Nonetheless, I had hope for my hometown, along with a few other pockets of liberalism across the state. And that hope has been reinforced with the long overdue dismantling of a statue that honors individuals who committed treasonous acts against the United States government, which falls second to the crime against humanity of working on behalf of a confederacy government to keep my ancestors as owned livestock. These men and women of the Confederacy should never have been honored using my tax dollars.
But I digress. Why are people like Michelle Baker comfortable leaving statements on the local ABC affiliate’s Facebook page saying, “I have a confederate flag hanging in my yard. Please come and try to destroy it. You will be the only thing destroyed”? Is your flag, which sheer probability (my 30 years in the south) tells me is the baseless rectangular flag as opposed to the actual battle flag, more important than the life of someone who burns it? Is your treasonous southern heritage that important?
Or you have Greg Blanton, another North Carolinian, who forgot a letter when typing, “To bad there wasn't a few Dodge Challengers there to clear away these ignorant fools”, as if a woman wasn’t just killed by a white supremacist who drove a Challenger into a crowd at full speed. How do you call for such violence against other human beings, first of all, and secondly, how do you do so without fear of being made an example of? But I guess if your boy can march in a menacing manner with a lit torch, leaving a hateful comment is the least you can do.
As stated in my aforementioned opinion piece, I was let go from a job for simply saying that black lives matter on my personal blog. Every time I speak out against these less-than-smart citizens who believe that the south will rise again, I wonder if I’ll be seen as too divisive by someone who wants to honor the fact that their great-granddaddy fought on behalf of a system of oppression, only to be fired again. But I know that right is right and wrong is wrong.
Those individuals who pulled down the statue broke the law. I won’t disagree with that. But guess what? So did the folks who the statue honored. If the United States cannot erect a statue of Mohamed Atta in New York City or if Germany will not honor Josef Mengele with a bust that sits in Bellevue Palace, then why would the south (which is now a part of the Union and has been forever, even in its attempted succession) honor its treasonous heritage? To do either of these things would be disrespectful, traumatizing and distasteful. If you watched Sesame Street growing up, you recall them asking, “Which one of these three does not belong?” Honoring these soldiers is what does not belong. Their side lost the war. The last place their legacy should've been honored was on a tombstone.
Oh, and before I go, for those who cannot get it through your thick heads, when you say things like, “The south will rise again,” or other things that make it seem like you wish the CSA had won, it translates to “You n***ers should still be in chains.” No matter how you slice it, that would’ve been the outcome. How many societies let go of slave labor just because it’s the right thing to do? Don’t worry. I’ll wait.
