Adult: “It honors the Civil War leaders who fought to keep Black people slaves.”
Huh? How does that sound to a Black child? What message does it send to a white child?
Honoring the Confederacy is an ongoing outrage to fellow Texans and an incitement to violence, from small insults to deadly force. Continuing to celebrate this holiday perpetuates the culture of oppression of fellow Texans. This issue is back before the Texas Legislature this session.
“These images and words (honoring the Confederacy) give some people the courage and even the audacity to do what they do to people of color, because it emboldens them,” state Rep. Jarvis Johnson of Houston, who in 2019 authored a bill to remove this holiday, told Texas Monthy in July.
Research bears this out: Evidence presented at the landmark Brown v. Board of Education trial in 1954 included the results of the famous “doll test.” In the 1940s, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, a husband-and-wife team of psychologists, studied the mental and emotional effects of segregation on African American children ages 3 to 7. They showed the children dolls, identical except for color, to test children’s perceptions of race.
“A majority of the children preferred the white doll and assigned positive characteristics to it,” the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund explains on its website. “The Clarks concluded that ‘prejudice, discrimination, and segregation’ created a feeling of inferiority among African-American children and damaged their self-esteem.”
That study was 80 years ago. Have we learned nothing? Are we still stuck in the 1940s? Continuing to celebrate this holiday perpetuates the culture of oppression of fellow Texans.
In the words of Amanda Gorman, America’s first youth poet laureate, on Jan. 20:
“The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade
We’ve braved the belly of the beast
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace
The norms and notions of what just is
Isn’t always justice.”
Yes, this 47-year-old Texas state holiday “just is.” But no way is it “justice.”
Continuing Gorman’s sea metaphor, this time in the words of the Bible (Jude 1:13), this Texas state holiday is “raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame.”
As former director of campus programs at the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life at Brandeis University, I believe continuing to observe this holiday damages all Texans — Black, white and every shade in between — and adds to national perceptions of Texas as oppressive and backward. This is not the Texas I know and love. It’s past time to abolish this shameful holiday.
The issue of a Confederate Heroes Day is in front of the Texas Legislature right now. Sound off! Write your legislators. Find them at house.texas.gov/members/find-your-representative.
Marci McPhee lives in San Antonio.
The Link LonkFebruary 03, 2021 at 01:04AM
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Commentary: Confederate holiday fuels oppression - San Antonio Express-News
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