Sen. Lindsey Graham
South Carolina senator and long-shot Republican presidential candidate Lindsey Graham has been having a little trouble calibrating his response to the racist mass murder in his home state Wednesday night. In one of his efforts, on CNN, Graham said he is theoretically open to "revisiting" the decision to have the Confederate flag flying outside the state capitol,
but he says it's also "who we are."
At the end of the day it's time for people in South Carolina—to revisit that decision would be fine with me, but this is part of who we are. The flag represents to some people a Civil War and that was the symbol of one side. To others it's a racist symbol, and it's been used by people, it's been used in a racist way. But the problems we have in South Carolina and throughout the world are not because of a movie or a symbol, it's because of what's in people's heart. You know, how do you go back and reconstruct America? What do we do in terms of our history?
Gosh, I don't know, it seems like removing from its proud position outside the South Carolina capitol building that symbol of racism and of the side in the Civil War that was fighting to defend slavery would be a start. Telling people who have racism in their hearts that the state is not with them on this one. Admitting that South Carolina was wrong in 1860 when it became the first state to secede in defense of slavery and wrong through the Civil War when it fought to keep people enslaved and wrong when it again raised that flag over the capitol in 1962 as a direct response to the civil rights movement.
Because let's be clear. That flag's official presence, the fact that the governor cannot order it to fly at half staff as she can so order the American and state flags, is not some age-old remembrance of 19th-century war dead. It's an expression of 20th-century racism and outrage that black people would demand equality. And its presence there in that spirit was affirmed by the South Carolina government in the year 2000.
For a South Carolina politician like Lindsey Graham to say "it's who we are" is to say "who we are is defiant and proud in our racism." And that may be true. But if what we care about is not official actions of the state in embracing or rejecting racism but only what is in people's hearts, then this should be a moment when every South Carolinian who has supported the presence of that flag at the capitol should look into their heart and think hard, really hard, about how it came to be there and what that means to them.
In the mean time, though, while people are working on what's in their hearts, South Carolina could remove its official support for the symbol, whether so that the families of the victims of this racist mass murder or of other past racist murders or of routine, everyday, but still unjust and soul-killing racism do not have to look at it or so that racists like Dylann Storm Roof don't look at the symbolic center of their state and see their racism affirmed and reflected back at them.