White Lives Matter: Code for a Continuation of the Legacy of Racism
White Lives Matter: Code for a Continuation of the Legacy of Racism
https://cueops.com/white-lives-matter-code-for-a-continuation-of-the-legacy-of-racism/
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck then it’s probably a duck. We can apply this same line of reasoning to White Lives Matter activists gathered outside the branch of the NAACP in Houston, Texas. A bunch of white folks standing around with loaded weapons flying the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy in the State of Texas while tooting the ostensible horn of racial justice? Sorry, that dog don’t hunt and we know a duck when we see one.
A Legacy of Racism Cannot be Set Aside so Easily
It is baffling, really. This nation fought a bloody Civil War over the course of four years. The galvanizing issue which spawned that terrible conflict was the institution of slavery. This repugnant practice had persisted in the geographical region of the United States since the sixteenth century. Millions of people were held in an atrocious bondage: Mothers and fathers had their children ripped from them forever, people were whipped and kept like chattel. In the South this horrific system endured for close to 400 hundred years. We need to remember that shameful legacy. We also need to remember that the history of holding Black Americans in a de facto state of subjugation did not end in 1865. Throughout Texas and the greater south Black citizens continued to be targeted. Their right to vote was infringed. They were prohibited from exercising basic civil rights and they were often brutally murdered when they dared to try. So, when a group of white folks stand outside an organization representing people of color under the banner that upheld the institution of slavery and they are holding guns let’s just call it what it is: racism.
This Ain’t About Grits, Banjos and the Right to Imbibe Sarsaparilla
No one is telling folks from the South to disavow those portions of their Southern heritage that derive of regional flavor and flair, just those portions that mythologize institutionalized racism–and flying the battle flag of the Confederacy while toting loaded weapons outside of an NAACP office in Texas would be one of those portions that just ain’t gonna make the cut. Ostensibly, one of the major concerns is the deaths of police officers in Dallas during a Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest. Never mind that two of the five slain officers were Latinos. When you’re tooting the horn of intolerance accuracy often fails to hit the front shelf. Let’s just call this display of White Lives Matter in Texas what it is: A revived strain of white racism and nothing less.