Last recorded lynching was in the eighties. I say recorded because every few years you'll hear about suspicious suicides that might be much more.
You know, I understand the thicker skin argument completely, and most of the time I would probably get behind it, but this issue is more complex then that. The problem is the question of who is truly winning. Racism is an awkwardly multifaceted problem, and you can't really break it down into something as simple as Skinheads vs their Victims. I am inclined to agree with the Avenue Q song and say that, really, everybody is racist in some sense and racism is a cross that everybody who lives in a racially divided society has to bear. If you want to understand the problem, you have to imagine racism as two (or more) waves of unconscious racial preconception playing for control of the general population in an almost meta-physical sense. In this mess is the Neo-Confederate movement, which are those who are more comfortable imagining slavery through the rose-colored lenses of Gone with the Wind and Song of the South. The more you absolve white-European culture of having done anything wrong in the past, and the more you condense the crimes to a view easily abandoned wing-nut racists, the easier it is to unconsciously blame the effects of this history on black society.
So there is the question. When you fly the confederate flag over state property, what are you saying? Are you proclaiming pride in the Confederate past and the crusade that nation fought to protect racial slavery? What type of message does that convey to the decedents of slaves, or to young people about the nature of the past?
You can imagine the same problems in Germany arising if the government chose to bring back the Nazi-flag for limited use amidst a strange culture of Fascist romanticism. What would such a movement say to the Jews in Germany? What would such a movement say to the Germans? It's one thing to have a symbol used by individuals, but it is quite another for it to be adopted officially by a government, and symbols can never just mean only what you want them to mean. At the end of the day, you can't just up and decide to reclaim 'Porch Monkey'.
Wilted Rose
