The Shadows of the Confederacy

Taking down the confederate flag is a constructive and symbolic financial decision for most corporations. Actually ceding power and income to workers, to pay taxes for education for all, to negotiate with workers as equal partners, those acts will be much harder to achieve.
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150 years ago the Civil War the Union Army, with white and black soldiers, brought the confederacy of slaveholding states to its knees. Slavery was dead. And yet for the past 150 years a majority of white Southerners have been celebrating the heritage of the South and the flag of the confederacy, as if it was benign. Now we know it isn't.

Perhaps now, when we see the murderous result in Charleston of obeisance to the confederate flag, when we acknowledge ingrained racism, and when we recognize the determined fight to maintain white superiority and black oppression, we can also hope that the Civil War has reached its final outcome.

The confederate flag is being buried in the ashes of history, and the monuments and declarations of homage to the leaders of the Confederacy, especially Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, and to the founders of the Ku Klux Klan, like Nathan Bedford Forrest, are being forsaken.

But it is not as simple as that. When we take down the flags and the confederate statutes, when we stop thinking that Dixie is just a fine sentimental tune, and "the Day They Drove Old Dixie Down" is just a good folk song, we are still left with the legacy, culture, politics, and economy of racism, of segregation, of slavery, of hate. We have a lot of work to do. This legacy runs the gamut, from politics, to workers, to equality of opportunity and security. It encompasses all of our mutual striving for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Let's start with the District of Columbia. The citizens of our nation's capital are not allowed to have voting Congresspeople and Senators to represent them in our representative democracy. We exclude 658,000 people from democracy, just because they live in the District of Columbia. Or maybe not, maybe it has more to do with the fact that blacks make up half of its population, and whites are a minority of citizens. Vermont and Wyoming, both with fewer people than DC, and both overwhelmingly white states, have representatives and senators in Congress. Not DC. Only Congress can admit the District of Columbia as a state and in this way enable representation. The refusal to do so echoes the institutional racism of our own Congress.

For generations, racism has been a handy tool for splitting people against each other, and particularly white workers against black workers, both to be more easily manipulated and regulated by corporations from the Armour meat-packing company of the last century to criticisms of immigrant workers today. When the Governor of South Carolina campaigns openly against workers organizing into a union at Boeing, she is telling workers not to trust each other, and encouraging divisions that undermine solidarity of workers.

In states which make union shops illegal, which are mainly the southern states of the confederacy with a few western and Midwestern states, average wages are $1,500 less than in states which allow union shops, almost 5% fewer workers get employer-sponsored pensions and close to 3% fewer workers get employer-sponsored health coverage. 150 years after the Civil War, median wage workers in the North make more than $2 an hour - almost 13% more - than workers in the South. And median wage black workers in the North make more than $1.25 more per hour than black workers in the South.

This disease of racism may have its roots most deeply in the South, but it certainly has staying power in the North. Slavery cultivated a virus of superiority and inequality, which has held sway in our country, North and South, for generations. We see the consequences black kids falling behind at the start of life and never catching up, of starting life in poverty and ending life in poverty. The average black worker makes almost $5 an hour less than the typical white worker. When you consider worker advancement in terms of increasing the minimum wage, paid sick days, and family leave insurance, these steps have been realized only in the North and West, with no movement in the South.

Where do the wages and benefits go when workers lack bargaining power in the labor market? To the corporations that dominate our politics and economics. They have formed a new corporate plantation economy, on the divide-and-conquer rule of institutional and racial suspicions.

We have a lot of work ahead of us. To advance workers and citizens, black, white, and Hispanic, we must re-establish the dignity of work and the value that each worker brings to his or her job. We must demand economic autonomy and security for workers, whether that is when to take a day off of work because you are sick, when to have a child and know you can get family leave, or when to organize together into a union. Society and government must contest corporate interests and balance these with the interests of workers - our neighbors and friends.

Taking down the confederate flag is a constructive and symbolic financial decision for most corporations. Actually ceding power and income to workers, to pay taxes for education for all, to negotiate with workers as equal partners, those acts will be much harder to achieve. But we must achieve them, if we are truly going to put behind us the confederacy, white superiority, and institutional racism.

This blog enables the personal opinions of the author, not the organizational agreement of the Economic Opportunity Institute.

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