gracchusdixit

In the wake of last week’s dreadful murders in Charleston, South Carolina, the Republican governor of that state, Nikki Haley, stood before the microphones and television cameras to make this tearful and emotional statement:  “We have some grieving to do,” she intoned, “and we’ve got some pain to go through.  We are a strong and faithful state.  We love our state, we love our country, and most importantly, we love each other.”

If only these words were true.

Nikki Haley, like so many Republican politicians who rushed to condemn the slaughter of nine innocent black citizens as they were reading scripture in Charleston’s historic Emanuel Church, is at best a hypocrite and at worst a de facto accomplice to the hateful murders she purports to condemn.  If Nikki Haley truly loved our country, if she honestly wanted all the citizens of her state to love each other, then she would confess her guilt and repent of her ways.  That is unlikely.

For nearly 40 years, the Republican Party has preyed on the fears, resentments, and prejudices of white Americans in general and Southern whites in particular.  Instead of denouncing those prejudices, they have perpetuated them, refusing to acknowledge, let alone take responsibility for, their own role in inflaming the stubborn racism that continues to bedevil our country.

Nikki Haley, and others like her, have excused the ongoing display of the Confederate battle flag in South Carolina’s capitol and elsewhere throughout the Old South, rationalizing this display as an expression of “cultural heritage,” when it is nothing less than an open and deliberate affront, not only to African-Americans, but to every decent person in the land.  Her decision to remove that flag, in the face of mounting pressure, came too late to save the lives of the worshippers gunned down in Charleston.  Even then, she failed to acknowledge what that flag really stands for: racism, secession, and treason.

Symbolism aside, Republicans like Halley have defended, indeed expanded, the unfettered ownership of guns, allowing them to be used, as they have for generations, to terrorize and kill helpless and law-abiding citizens of color.  They have justified the worst abuses of minorities by the police, demonizing those protesting those abuses as “thugs” who deserve to be rounded up and jailed.  They have insisted on the continued imposition of the death penalty in the face of overwhelming evidence that it not only fails to deter crime but kills countless innocent people, most of them black or brown.  And finally, they have maligned the President of the United States as an illegitimate alien, not because that is even remotely true but, rather, because he is black. From the day Barack Obama was elected, Republicans like Nikki Haley vowed to bring him down even if that meant tearing the country apart.

Since that January day 152 years ago on which Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, we have made undoubted progress toward racial equality.  But not nearly enough.  The 13th Amendment may have abolished the institution of slavery, but it has not ended the subjugation of those whose forebears were slaves.  The 14th Amendment may have given all Americans equal protection under the law, but it has not prevented officers of the law from ignoring the very laws they are sworn to uphold.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 may have ended legalized discrimination, but it has not ended de facto discrimination in housing, education, the workplace, and the courts.

And thanks to Republicans like Nikki Haley, even the fitful and partial progress we have made in the last 152 years is now in jeopardy.  Affirmative action has been dismantled.  Minority voting rights are being suppressed.  Police officers continue to go free after committing even the most egregious crimes.  Murderers like 21-year-old Dylan Roof are dismissed as deviant exceptions instead of being acknowledged as the all-too-typical racists they actually are.

It was the Great Emancipator who addressed these words to the nation as the carnage of the Civil War was coming to an end:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

It is deeply ironic, and even more deeply tragic, that today’s Republicans are so determined to ignore the greatest Republican President in our history.  They are hateful hypocrites one and all, and we can only hope that they too will someday face the righteous judgment of the Lord.