The president’s speech at a South Carolina church did not go over well with the GOP candidate.

The president’s speech at a South Carolina church did not go over well with the GOP candidate.

Joe Biden gave a speech in South Carolina on Monday, and Nikki Haley isn’t happy about it. Specifically, she’s not happy about the part where the president called her out for her extremely cringeworthy comments about the Civil War, saying, “Let me be clear, for those who don’t seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War.”

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The issue of the Civil War—and her commentary on it—has come up for Haley in the past. While running for governor of South Carolina in 2010, she described the war as a matter of two sides fighting over “tradition” and “change,” adding that the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist.” She also claimed there was no reason to take the flag down from the statehouse grounds (until five years later, after the mass shooting at the Charleston church). After Haley’s gaffe in December, Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said that her failure to mention slavery was “not stunning if you were a Black resident in SC when she was Governor.”

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
    18·
    10 months ago

    Yeah, but until relatively recently, white folk didn’t think that way. At all. For young people back in the day, it was, “Yee haw! I’m a rebel!” For most, it was merely a symbol of the South, not of the Confederacy or slavery or any other such bullshit. We thought nothing of it, if we thought about it at all.

    I didn’t downvote you, but you’re speaking of your particular upbringing and experience. Your experience wasn’t that of all white people. Mine was different.

    I liked watching the TV show Dukes of Hazzard when I was a child in the early 1980s. I wanted a toy General Lee car. Similar to the picture below:

    My parents explained who General Lee was, and what the Confederate flag on the roof of the car meant. I was too young to understand all of the implications, but I clearly got the idea that black people found the Confederate flag offensive because it represented slavery. I had black friends in school and at church. The thought of me owning a toy that would made them feel bad embarrassed me.

    I asked if there was anything offensive about the KITT car from Knight Rider. I was happy to find out there wasn’t and got that one instead.

    • nonailsleft
      42·
      10 months ago

      I think the dukes of hazard is a nice example, and would add Lynyrd Skynyrd as well.

      Not everyone was fortunate to learn the full story about the Confederacy when growing up and, as the poster above you wrote, for a lot of people it was a rebelious symbol of the South. Which is the context why both the creators of DoH and Lynyrd Skynyrd used to identify with it.

      We’re growing further and further away from it, but there were families where great-gramps fought on the wrong side. Not because he was the Supreme Racist but because he happened to be born there at the wrong time. Those people grew up with a very different view of that flag than the one we have today.

      So with that context, I personally have no problem playing with a car from DoH. I even enjoy watching a vid from an old live performance from Lynyrd Skynyrd more because I know how that flag got there and what it meant for them at that time. The band didn’t believe or wanted to promote that black people should be slaves. It’s part of innocent folklore understood by those who were there in that place and time. But alas, the nuance will fade away with time, and the images will remain.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        10 months ago

        Which is the context why both the creators of DoH and Lynyrd Skynyrd used to identify with it.

        Although I agree with you that the use of the confederate flag back in the day isn’t necessarily proof that people doing so were dyed-in-the-wool racists, I think it’s an overstatement to say with such confidence that their use was something other than that. As a Southerner myself, I’m well aware of the vast difference in scope between what some folks (especially older folks) think counts as racism and what it actually is in objective reality.