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The Charlottesville riot and matters
arising
E. Ablorh-Odjidja
August 17, 2017
There is a disturbing trend in American
politics and it is the use of racially charged agitation
(agitprop) to inflame matters not necessarily related to core
Black issues or interests.
Charlottesville, Virginia, August 12,
2017 two opposing parties, armed Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, white
supremacists on one side and left leaning ANTIFA
anarchists/activists on the other, clashed.
The parties stood in opposition to the
other on the issue relating to the removal of the statue of
Robert E. Lee, a Confederate General, from a public space in the
state of North Carolina.
In the midst of the protest, a woman,
Heather Heyer, an anti-Confederacy activist died, run down in a
car driven by a self-described Neo-Nazi white supremacist.
Both murderer and his victim were
white, but the result has become a case for racism.
No surprise here.
In the age of Trump, everything is racist.
Consequently, Charlottesville has
become a cudgel to pommel President Trump ever since he
commented on the tragic Heather Heyer accident.
“Racism is evil. And those who cause
violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK,
neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are
repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans,” said Trump
in his second clarification statement.
Why this statement made President Trump
a racist could be a conjecture.
But Charlottesville has turned him into one and racism
has become a convenient agitprop for all causes against Trump.
Racism has always been a charge that
Democrats and their allies only level against Republican
politicians.
Miraculously, no white Democrat has
ever in recent history been perceived as racist, despite their
rich history of racism.
More vocal as accusers of racism,
especially after Charlottesville, were prominent Black
politicians, naturally all Democrats, but who should know
better. Many have
lived through the Civil Rights years and the marches and should
remember which party was behind the Jim Crow movement in the
South.
Not that there is no racism in the U.S.
But there is no need to be delusional about the original
party of the perpetrators of racism.
This amnesia cannot help Black interest.
These days, the racism charge has
assumed an overweening tone, one that makes you wonder whether
the term's usage is not being burdened with another intent – a
vastly different one from the original intent that drove the
Civil Rights marches.
Plainly spoken, the utility of this
charge of racism, in its current usage, has nothing to do with
and does not serve Blacks interest - not in the short term and
not in the long term either.
It is nothing but a political ploy.
The current fervor for the charge of
racism came after Democrats lost the presidency to Trump in
November 2016. It
peaked through his inauguration and then devolved into the false
Russia Collusion charge, meant to remove Trump illegally from
office.
Fair to say, Democrats were not alone
in the denunciation of Trump as racist after Charlottesville.
Close in fervor were the "Republican
Never Trumpers," in this particular case Senator Lindsay Graham
of South Carolina.
In condemning Trump for his
Charlottesville statement, Senator Graham forgot the key element
that triggered the event - the removal of the statue of the
Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
In Graham's own state of South
Carolina, dozens of monuments and memorials honoring confederate
heroes, that connect the South to its racist history, still
stand. Graham has to
date not requested for a removal of any of these memorials.
Even so, the removal of a Confederate
statue's act alone would not sound the death knell of racism.
f allowed to stand, the statutes would
become monuments of shame, whereas a removal could eventually
delete the historic crimes of these individuals from memory.
Robert E. Lee's existence was a
historical fact. Of
course, he was a Confederate reprobate. All the same, his statue
should be allowed to stand.
This time, with a brass plate epithet that says who he
was, namely, a general who stood for the Southern states
so-called right to preserve slavery.
Remove Lee's statue and we would be
copying a scene from “1984,” the dystopian fiction by George
Orwell, where inconvenient facts were removed at whim.
Under this spell, Washington, Lincoln, even Martin Luther
King's monument can be removed.
So, the logical question after Robert
Lee’s statue is whose statue will be next?
The answer, as someone suggested, was
to limit the destruction of these monuments to the Confederate
era, thus sparing those who though were slave owners were not
from the Confederate South or belonged to that era.
Thus, George Washington would be
spared, And so would Thomas Jefferson and a host of others, all
Southerners, from the Founding Fathers' generation.
Clever as this demarcation approach
might be, it could only be seen as a fine start for the
destructions to follow.
A slave owner is a slave owner, isn't it?
After all, this was what the cry to remove Robert Lee's
statue was about.
And since the core reason of the
Confederacy was to maintain slavery because of the financial
gains, why not allow this intent to cut across time and the
boundaries of geography in America?
Why free from sanction a Southern slave owner who came
before the Confederacy, or a Northerner who gained from the
profits of slavery?
Slavery cannot be free of racism since
it is linked particularly to the Black skin tone, the most
obvious way to identify a slave back then.
Racism in America is, therefore, an inference from
slavery, not religion or culture.
The “cause celebre,” of the protest at
Charlottesville, was about slavery.
George Washington's monument could be a fair target
later, since he was a slave owner too.
Same for families for whom wealth from
slavery supported.
It was the threat to the slave economy
that caused the South to secede and the Civil War to follow. So
why should anybody who benefited from this slave economy, pre or
post Confederacy, be spared from the destruction?
To seek destruction of these monuments
would be a tragic experience; lessons from which would not be
available for the generations to come; a huge price to pay
aesthetically, intellectually and morally as the physical
representation of the awful deeds of some of these virulent,
racist, historical characters would be made to vanish from
sight.
A monument is meant for remembrance. In
this case, make the monument represent the negative, not make it
invisible.
Trump speech after Charlottesville was
fair. He condemned
hate, violence and bigotry. If a Democrat had made the same
speech, it would have been hailed as heroic.
Gore, Hillary, Bill Clinton would have
been heroes after such a speech, even though you could factually
add the worse racial ancestry, associations and reputations to
their names. Yet it
was Trump who was under attack.
More Blacks voted for Trump than any
past Republican presidents in recent memory. Trump took his
campaign to Blacks, promising, School Choice, jobs and economic
uplift. Could the
potential fulfillment of this promise be what is under attack?
Hillary, who also chimed in to call
Trump a racist on account of the event in Charlottesville, had
before this called Robert Byrd of West Virginia her mentor.
Byrd was a known KKK leader but there are more edifices
build in the name of Byrd alone in W. Virginia than for any
other law maker in any other state.
His portrait still hangs in the halls
of Congress. There
has never been a threat against this portrait or any of his
monuments at W. Virginia Capitol either.
The hypocrisy of this one-sided racism
charge is obvious. Not
being able to voice it is the shame that must fall heavily on
any Black leader who cries racism against Trump.
E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher
www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, August 17, 2017
Permission to publish: Please feel free to publish or reproduce, with
credits, unedited. If posted at a website, email a copy of the web page to
publisher@ghanadot.com . Or don't publish at all.
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