Now-defunct Charleston-based NuSouth clothing line logo, which re-appropriated the stars and bars for black southerners.
Last week, a white man went into Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina and murdered Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Reverend DePayne Middleton-Doctor, Honorable Reverend Clementa Pickney, Tywanza Sanders, Reverend Daniel Simmons Senior, Sharonda Singleton, and Myra Thompson, nine praying southern black men and women. Beyond its brutality, as if anything could be beyond such brutality, was the seeming anachronism of the massacre, which was jarring for some folks. After all, had we not moved on from murdering people in churches, preferring to feed them their forced deaths slowly through heapings of institutional racism? Pictures that surfaced of the killer, swath in the confederate flag, fueled the talk of anachronism, the how-could-this-happen-when-we-have-a-black-President, the deliberate forgetting of that lesson Faulkner taught us about what the past is and ain’t. White folks who think they don’t participate in racism always get spotlight anxiety when some white folks who have no qualms about their racism whatsoever are center stage in media discourse. These white folks, who call the other white folks “backwards,” “rednecks,” “racist,” and “trash,” hate to have their whiteness sullied by these other white folks. They wouldn’t want colored folks to think they were like those white folks. So, they latched onto the thing that they hate about backwards white southerners more than Honey Boo Boo, trucker hats, Toddlers and Tiaras, burning crosses, and Swamp People combined–the confederate flag.