Consider for a moment the vision of an Indian-American governor of South Carolina, flanked by a black senator whom she appointed and an eleventh-term black congressman, and uttering the words “the flag of our country and our state will fly over on our capitol grounds and no other.” In contriving this view of Governor Nikki Haley, Senator Tim Scott, and Representative Jim Clyburn—one in which the former governor Mark Sanford and ranking Senator Lindsey Graham were exiled to the periphery—the Republican Governor’s office was, no doubt, attempting to create a visual counterpoint to the ugly imagery we’ve seen since last Thursday. Even given the political calculations—insuring that this issue does not dominate the South Carolina primary, bringing a merciful end to the embarrassing chorus of mumbles that has characterized the responses of the G.O.P. Presidential candidates—it was an indelible scene.
Twelve years ago, Georgia Governor Roy Barnes changed his state’s flag, which had prominently featured the Confederate flag within it, and was soundly defeated in the next election by Sonny Perdue, who vowed to restore the symbol. (That never happened.) The atrocity of nine deaths gives Haley the cover that Barnes lacked, but her words were not without some political risk. Haley’s speech, which perhaps not unexpectedly equivocated about a decision that will alienate a swath of the electorate, held that it was possible for the tradition that valorizes the Confederate flag to coexist with the one that recognizes it as a symbol of oppression and slavery—just not on state grounds. But outside the realm of demographically calibrated political speech, the massacre in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church has pointed out that these arguments have been, from the outset, dishonest.
[For more of this story, written by Jelani Cobb, go to http://www.newyorker.com/news/...rate-flag-charleston]
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