The War That Never Ended

Tiberius GracchusSo much has been said, and continues to be said, about the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin that one hesitates to add so much as a word to what some describe as our “national conversation” on the subject. This awful event cries out for more than a “conversation”.  It demands that we confront a reality more terrible than the event itself.

When a self-appointed vigilante carrying a loaded weapon and a head loaded with prejudice, hunted and then gunned down a seventeen-year-old Black boy—a boy who was doing nothing wrong nor anything even remotely illegal—he fired another shot in the never-ending Civil War that began in 1861 and continues to this day.

George Zimmerman’s brutal and indefensible act was merely the latest example of Southern whites and their surrogates trying to contain, control, and cow the black people they seem to fear so much and whose humiliation is so central to their pathological sense of identity and manhood. It is no accident that Zimmerman got away with his crime in one of the original Confederate states. If he had pulled the trigger in New York or California, he’d be in prison by now.

Today’s Civil War, of course, is being waged by a new Confederacy, which includes not only the old South but similarly minded states in the West and Midwest. They all share the same paranoia: fear of those who look and act differently, hatred of the federal government, absolute loathing for Barack Obama because he signifies both. The tragedy is that, more than 150 years after the Civil War supposedly ended, the new Confederacy seems to be winning.

It has already won over the Supreme Court. The present conservative majority on the Court is the most unapologetically racist since the days of the Dred Scott decision, when a slave-owning Chief Justice asserted that black Americans could never become citizens let alone possess legal rights. The current Court is cut from the same cloth. It exalts “states’ rights” over human rights. It prefers “state sovereignty” over the interests of the nation and all its citizens. It believes that any effort to end racial discrimination is a form of “racial entitlement”.  The Chief Justice himself infamously said, “The only way to end racial discrimination is to end racial discrimination,” by which he meant any laws designed to level the playing field between whites and nonwhites.

Justice Roberts would have us believe that the very idea of racial injustice is an anachronism, that the South “has come a long way” and no longer requires vigilant oversight. Yet, just hours after Roberts and his neo-Confederate colleagues gutted the central provision of the Voting Rights Act, states throughout the new Confederacy rushed to introduce a new form of Jim Crow with the sole purpose of denying blacks and Hispanics the right to vote.

Throughout the new Confederacy, a new era of segregation and submission is on the march. In the name of “small government,” “low taxes,” and “choice,” these states subsidize private schools attended by whites and starve public schools attended by minorities. In the name of “God” and “conscience,” they deny abortion rights to women, especially when those women are poor and nonwhite. In the name of “states’ rights,” they refuse to provide basic health care to their poorest citizens, who are almost invariably people of color. Rich, self- satisfied white men sitting in the halls of government lecture these people on the “sanctity of life,” “personal responsibility,” and “freedom,” but they won’t lift a finger to help them live decent lives.

Not very long ago, such a blatantly racist agenda would have been cloaked in the raiment of polite and politically correct euphemism. No longer. Today’s Confederates don’t bother to pretend. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama shamelessly congratulated a rally of tea party zealots for their “superior DNA”.  Representative Stephen King of Iowa unapologetically asserted that immigrants should be selected for their “breeding,” like “bird dogs”.   The newly elected head of the National Rifle Association said with a straight face that the Civil War was really “a war of Northern aggression”.   And the idiotic governor of Texas continues to say, without fear of contradiction, that “secession” is a right rather than the treason the Constitution proclaims it to be.

Thanks to the new Confederates, even the most modest proposals for gun control went down to defeat after the slaughter of twenty innocent children and their brave teachers in Newtown, Connecticut. Thanks to the new Confederates, concealed weapons can now be carried into schools and churches throughout the land without inspection or challenge. Thanks to the new Confederates, a predatory racist can stop an innocent teenager on a Florida street, put a bullet through his heart, and walk away.

We thought we fought the Civil War to stop all this. We thought it was over. But the war continues. Until we recognize it for what it is, it will never end.