I want to make another point about Haley Barbour and the Confederate flag, because I'm afraid my post yesterday responding to Jeffrey Goldberg may have given the impression that Barbour or white people in Mississippi are acting out of racist anger toward black people in their veneration of the Confederacy. If prejudice required anger to exist, it wouldn't be much of a problem because few people are capable of being angry all the time.
I think Barbour's experience with the integration of Ole Miss is instructive here. Barbour was present when the school was being integrated, and he recalls a formative experience with a friendly black student, Verna Bailey, who let him cheat off her work. Barbour recalls the integration of Ole Miss as "a very pleasant experience."
Their seats were assigned alphabetically, and he said they developed a friendly rapport. She let him copy her notes when he skipped class.
"I still love her," he quipped.
He remembers her name almost as if it were yesterday, though he'd recalled her middle name as Lee. It's Ann.
Right, he "still loves" her. Except he can't even get her name right, and both in the present and at the time, he was entirely indifferent to the nightmare she was experiencing:
She recalled dancing in Oxford Square once with another black student at a school celebration when a crowd of whites began pelting them with coins and beer. "It was just an awful experience. I just saw this mass of anger; anger and hostility. I thought my life was going to end."
A campus minister, one of the only whites she remembers showing her kindness, took her by the hand and led her to safety. She said the minister was ostracized.
During her undergraduate days, she was inundated with intimidating phone calls to her dorm from white men. "The calls were so constant," she said. "Vulgar, all sexual connotations, saying nigger bitches needed to go back to the cotton field and things of that nature." She'd complain, have the phone number changed. Then the calls would start again. Funeral wreaths with what appeared to be animal blood on them were found outside her dorm.
In one science class in a lecture hall, no one would sit near her. The only class in which she remembers alphabetized seating was a Spanish class where the teacher seemed empathetic to her. Bailey figured that was because the teacher was from South America, not Mississippi.
I think this story is instructive, because it reveals how a majority of Mississippi residents could vote to retain a flag that venerates a society built on chattel slavery. Anger isn't necessary, merely the complete indifference to a group of people too marginalized to compel the majority to understand their concerns. Barbour remembers Bailey because she did him a favor and because she exists as a totemic racial alibi against a kind of political racism Barbour doesn't want to associate himself with, not because Barbour had any love or understanding for her as an actual human being. Barbour offers a rather literal example of how that indifference is a lingering product of white guilt from a history of racial injustice--and how that guilt can serve as a motivation for ignoring suffering rather than addressing it.
Again, on the list of political priorities facing black folks in the poorest state in the union, addressing this kind of Lost Cause pageantry has to rank pretty low, despite the Confederate flag being a visible symbol of disrespect.
