Jeffrey Goldberg tries, and fails, to get a straight answer from Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour about Republican veneration of the Confederacy:
Just imagine if this discussion was about the Holocaust. Do we really think the world would allow Germany to venerate the Nazis? Well, slavery was the Holocaust of the African-American experience, and yet, here we are, listening to respectable governors of large southern states rationalize the celebration of evil.Goldberg asks, "Why Do African-Americans Forgive So Easily?" The answer is that black people don't "forgive" any easier than anyone else. Goldberg doesn't show any indication of having looked back at black efforts to end Mississippi's celebration of the Confederacy in its state flag. In fact, the NAACP sued Mississippi over it in the 1990s, leading to a referendum in which Mississippi residents voted 65 percent to 25 percent to keep the flag the way it was. I don't have a racial breakdown for that, but I doubt the fact that the 2000 census has Mississippi's population being 35 percent black and 61 percent white is a coincidence, although I'm guessing the electorate was probably slightly less diverse.
Obviously, I can't speak for black folks in Mississippi, but I'm guessing in general they're used to this kind of nonsense in a way Northerners aren't, have more important and immediate things to worry about, and simply lack the political influence to prevent people from celebrating as a matter of state identity a society built on the concept of whites owning black people as property. Assuming black people are somehow especially forgiving allows an observer to avoid all these troubling questions that lead to some ugly conclusions about the continued salience of race in Southern politics.
I don't mean to be nasty here, but it seems to me that part of Goldberg's problem is that he's viewing this issue through the prism of his own personal ethnic identity. Saying something anti-Semitic in this country is the kind of thing that gets media figures canned, repeating subtly racist canards about black people gets you front-page stories in Forbes and audiences of millions on radio and television, as long as you're explicitly couching such statements as protestations against anti-white oppression. Unsurprising, considering the Confederates told themselves they were fighting oppression too.
UPDATE: Also, what Jamelle said.
