Last week it was the Marine Corps. Today, it’s NASCAR.
One by one, America’s government and private institutions are stepping up to do something 155 years overdue: Banning a symbol of hate, bigotry, slavery and open insurrection against the United States of America.
America’s premier stock car racing circuit prohibited the Confederate battle flag Wednesday from its races and properties just days after its one black driver, Bubba Wallace, called for the symbol to be removed.
“The presence of the Confederate flag at NASCAR events runs contrary to our commitment to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all fans, our competitors and our industry,” the organization said Wednesday.
It’s a stunning move, considering just how prevalent the flag is at NASCAR events, and it comes five days after the United States Marine Corps did likewise on its installations.
Nationwide demonstrations for racial equality in policing are getting through to these people, forcing them to reexamine their policies and rectify wrongs. There should be no place for Confederate memorabilia in this country, whether they be flags, memorials or monuments. Schools and military bases should not glorify traitors to this nation, and those that do should all be renamed.
Of course, Donald Trump doesn’t agree, but it is well established that he sides with racists. One influential group of Republicans who support Joe Biden correctly called Trump, “The second Confederate president,” today after he came out against renaming U.S. Army installations that honor the men who fought against the United States.
To review, and this needs to be constantly repeated, the Confederate rebels were traitors to this country. Their cause was hardly the just one lionized by the movie “Gone With The Wind,” a film in which rebels were referred to as gallant and post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan gatherings were glossed over as, “political meetings.”
The South did not fight for “states’ rights,” as revisionist historians would have us believe. Its goal was the maintenance of slavery in perpetuity. There were four million black slaves in the South when the Civil War started. Had Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis had their way, the descendants of those men and women would still be enslaved 155 years later.
That is not the kind of “heritage” of which one should be prideful, which is the very reason all these bogus explanations still exist for what some Southerners still call, “The War of Northern Aggression.” The truth is shameful.
The South started and fought a war in which 620,000 Americans died, so white plantation owners could continue to exploit the free labor of their black slaves. They desperately wanted to continue an economic system in which people were property. That’s the painful and bitter truth, and that is why these symbols need to be eradicated.
Southern men who perpetrated the Civil War should not be exalted. Like Benedict Arnold, their names should be forever stained with the mark of the American traitor.
NASCAR made the right move today. Here’s hoping more organizations follow its lead instead of our overtly racist president.