And your heritage. And your legacy.
We’re not stopping at your statue-sized Civil War Participation Trophies, either.
The legacy of the Old South lingers in every oozing orifice of this country. It’s there in the criminal justice system, where 32% of the children arrested are black, and 52% of the children tried in adult court are the same. It’s there in policing, where a disproportionate number of black drivers are pulled over despite lower rates of contraband possession.
It’s there in the death penalty, where 80% of executions take place over a white victim, even though black people and white people have roughly equivalent murder victim numbers. It’s there in the prosecutors who try these death cases—95.2% of them white in a country where black and brown people make up an increasingly large slice of the demographic pie.
It’s there in vigilante justice, where the Confederate notion of black criminality and white infallibility lead the cops and wannabe cops to slaughter Tamir Rice and John Crawford and Jordan Davis without consequence.
It’s there in your segregation academies, those shitty little shacks branded “college prep” to obscure the obvious reasons why you named it after Robert E. Lee when it opened in 1965.
It’s there in the economy, where red-lining and outright housing discrimination stole from black people the chance to ride home ownership--the economic elevator to the middle class—in the post-war era.
It’s everywhere around us. It’s more than just a slaveholder’s name on the front of a school; it’s what happens within those schools. It’s the suburban fear of black people that drives American drug policy. It’s dog whistles used by congresscritters who conjure votes from the poor on the promise that in their wholesale, across-the-board baby starving, a handful of black babies will starve, too.
We’re coming for your history. Every last goddamn artifact of the Old South that infects this forsaken country. We’re coming for your felony voter disenfranchisement laws that leave 33% of black men in Alabama unable to vote. We’re coming for your disproportionate drug sentencing, your inequitable bail decisions, and your judges who deny black men their humanity.
We’re coming for your Dixie Youth Baseball, the knockoff, low-rent version of Little League Baseball you conceived in Charleston when a black team had the gall to want to play ball. We’re coming for your football teams that make monkey sounds when playing black opponents. For your blackface parties. For your employment policies where a white man with a criminal record has a better chance at getting the job than a black man without one.
We’re coming for all of it. Every last fucking remnant of the shit-stain Confederacy that tried to wreck the Union through war and succeeded in wrecking 150 years of this country’s future through policy after policy built in white supremacy and white fear.
If you think a handful of misfits plucking their parents’ tiki torches off the patio will stop the arc of justice, reconsider. We’re coming for every goddamn thing your great-great-grandparents stood for. Your statue-sized Civil War Participation Trophies are just the beginning.