To replace the Confederate flag with a Pride flag won't fix American racism

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/29/confederate-flag-pride-flag-fix-racism

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One of the most widely disseminated images on social media this weekend was that of the Confederate flag being lowered and the Pride flag being raised in its place. But the image – which was Photoshopped without the original artist’s consent to add the Pride flag – puts two histories in conversation with one another in a deeply problematic way.

In his eulogy for assassinated state senator and Emanuel AME pastor Clementa Pinckney, President Obama described the Confederate flag as representative “of systemic oppression and racial subjugation [and] of the cause of slavery.” Though its supporters often discuss it as a symbol of southern heritage and, less often, as a symbol of white pride, the Confederate flag is less a marker of ancestral remembrance – otherwise, it wouldn’t be seen nearly as often outside of the American south – and more a symbol of continued and desired racial divisions.

The Pride flag, created in 1978 by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker, is today a profound international symbol for LGBT visibility and rights. Harvey Milk, the assassinated gay civil rights leader, strongly supported the idea of a flag to make the LGBT rights cause “more visible”. Baker said: “A flag really fit that mission, because that’s a way of proclaiming your visibility, or saying, ‘This is who I am!’” And, though it’s worth celebrating that the United States became the 20th country to legalize gay marriage – and worth waving that flag on its own – the right for same-sex couples to marry is not freedom for African Americans from the oppression symbolized by the Confederate flag. To suggest otherwise is to pit two important, but very different, struggles for equality against one another in the cheapest way.

When, some 20 hours after the US supreme court legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states, Bree Newsome bravely shimmied up a pole in Columbia, South Carolina, to take down the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds, she didn’t replace it with the Pride flag; it would have negated the powerful visual statement of a black woman removing that symbol of her racial oppression. And yet, the image of raising the Pride flag in place of the Confederate one does exactly that.

Images conflating the slow, if not-yet-guaranteed, removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol with the legal successes of the same-sex marriage movement are especially galling when, at the time of the passage of California’s anti-marriage equality referendum, black voters were widely blamed for its passage, despite the fact that voting data at the time and by early 2009 debunked those theories. Nonetheless, the myth of black homophobia remains a powerful one – and one often used to justify negative stereotypes about black people in general, and black churchgoers in particular. Worse yet, the myths, the conflations and renderings like those that circulated last weekend deny the existence of LGBT people of color.

And, as my colleague Dr Timothy P McCarthy told me, “[The flags] represent different traditions of protest – the former a reactionary one, the latter a progressive.” To put these flags in a line of succession is to disrespect the continuing impact on black Americans of the widespread display of the Confederate flag, and to fundamentally misunderstand the depths of the oppression still faced by LGBT people – and black LGBT people – even with the right to marry now enshrined in law.

Even if taking down the Confederate flag meant the end of American denial about American history and race – it doesn’t – and the raising of the Pride flag meant an end to the discrimination that LGBT people face, the ability to come to terms with our racist past and present isn’t necessarily informed by equal protection for LGBT people. As McCarthy told me, the image suggests that “we no longer have to worry about anti-black racism and white supremacy now that gays have the right to marry.”

But perhaps the creator of the five-panel comic unintentionally illuminated something deeply critical about the way that Americans reckon with progress: lowering the Confederate flag and raising the Pride one right away in its place suggests that, rather than dealing comprehensively with our history of enslavement and the denial of civil rights to African Americans, we’re a bit quick to replace a difficult reckoning with an enthusiastic celebration. Certainly, it implies that there’s a disappearing of layered histories for one, positive history.

However, the LGBT rights movement cannot swallow black lives for its wellness. Images like this and the other widely circulated image substituting two white, rainbow-clad men for two heroic black athletes giving the black power salute at the 1968 Olympics, deny intersectionality and pit two groups and movements against one another, rather than allowing both to co-exist and naturally overlap. Pride is not a substitute for dealing with America’s shameful racist past or difficult present; both removing the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s statehouse grounds and granting same-sex couples the right to marry cannot be our only victory for either movement in 2015.