Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 19 submissions in the queue.
posted by martyb on Thursday June 11 2020, @01:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the A-See-Change dept.

Many sources are reporting what we can read at ABC News,

NASCAR banned the Confederate flag from its races and properties on Wednesday, formally distancing itself from what for many is a symbol of slavery and racism that had been a familiar sight at stock car events for more than 70 years.

The move comes amid social unrest around the globe following the death in police custody of George Floyd, an unarmed black man in Minneapolis. Protests have roiled the nation for days and Confederate monuments are being taken down across the South — the tradtiional fan base for NASCAR.

[...] The issue was pushed to the fore this week as Bubba Wallace, NASCAR's lone black driver, called for the banishment of the Confederate flag and said there was "no place" for them in the sport. At long last, NASCAR obliged.

"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," NASCAR said. "Bringing people together around a love for racing and the community that it creates is what makes our fans and sport special. The display of the confederate flag will be prohibited from all NASCAR events and properties."

[...] The move was announced before Wednesday night's race at Martinsville Speedway where Wallace, an Alabama native, was driving a Chevrolet with a #BlackLivesMatter paint scheme. Wallace got a shoutout on Twitter from several athletes, including NBA star LeBron James, for using the paint scheme in the race.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Troll) by SomeGuy on Thursday June 11 2020, @03:11PM (13 children)

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Thursday June 11 2020, @03:11PM (#1006315)

    The thing that is really scary is - what will they claim is offensive next?

    I fully expect in the future, even the word "black" may change to become "offensive". Good luck talking about paint colors, the night sky, or a power outage. Suddenly there will be a whole slew of new stuff that is "racist" all over again. You will be lucky if you are permitted to use the word as technical engineering jargon, like master/slave. On the brighter side, perhaps we will have to go back to beige computer cases.

    Don't forget to change all of the history books, because history is also offensive.

    Hey, can we get rid of all references to "God", because that is offensive and symbolizes child molestation and stupidity? What? No?

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   -1  
       Troll=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Troll' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   1  
  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @03:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @03:58PM (#1006348)

    Many private organizations SHOULD get rid of such symbolism. It is up to them as conservatives have been touting for decades. Shoe is on the other foot and now they wanna cry their crocodile tears. Boooo hoooooo. Confederate flags aren't a protected class, and you should appreciate the irony of them being prejudized against.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @04:35PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @04:35PM (#1006388)

    I live in the deep south and this is a scary question that has come up a lot in the past few weeks. They are wanting the remove anything that was Civil War related, but unfortunately that's most things in the city. Statues, the names of cities within the county, buildings, battlefields, forts, etc. All of these things have been in place for more than 100 years, so no matter what it is or why it was put in place, it's now part of the city's history.

    I'm wondering if it will be demanded that all of the antibellum houses in the area need to be bulldozed? They are private property owned by an individual, but people are not thinking clearly and are making unreasonable demands at this point, so I've heard people seriously ask the question of if the demands continue on the current path. What about artifacts from the war that can still be found on the ground in many locations? Should they be illegal to own?

    Does it all need to go? If you ask them, then yes, including removal from the history books. Will the folks that are demanding the removal or destruction of these things be satisfied when these things are gone or will they move on to something else to offend them and use for the focus of their anger?

    I think that they should leave things in place unless the new rules apply evenly to everything. If you want to remove statues, then fine, remove them, but remove all of the statues, not just the ones that are popular to hate right now. Same for all of the other historical things and places. If they are not going to apply the rules evenly, then at least let the people that live here vote on it. I might not like the result of the vote, but could live with it if it's what the majority of the people wanted.

    What I do not like is the fact that all of this is being decided by mob rule. A very vocal, but small group of people (in our area), are able to change the look and history of a city because they have the advantage of a tragic crisis as a catalyst to make demands and if they don't get their way then they'll tear things up and burn things down.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @06:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @06:09PM (#1006460)

      Super duper scary, how dare they remove confederate statues! How DARE they???

      If you think that equates with book burning and re-writing history then you're a special kind of conspiracy crazy. Conservatives have been banning books and censoring people since forever, so get off your high horse.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @08:21PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @08:21PM (#1006573)

      It is interesting that the overlap between the statue supporters and those who consider themselves "real Americans" is very large considering that they are passionately paying homage to traitors in the very literal sense of the word. Where else do you see statues and monuments raised to enemy officers? Where are the Rommel statues? The military bases named for Giáp? Not only raised, but revered? And consider themselves "real" Americans in honoring and worshiping them, people who were traitors and un-American in both the literal and figurative sense of the words? It is just amazing.

      Southern Pride has an inescapable history of racism, and even if a lot of people look past the past and focus on what it means to them today, it is still a celebration of an insurrection against the country. But they're the first to shout "America: love it or leave it!" all without any hint of self awareness.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @08:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @08:41PM (#1006583)

      It's important to provide some context about the statues. Most aren't actually from the Civil War era. Many were built between 1890 and 1950 [history.com] and were not actually memorials of the Civil War. A lot of them were cheap and mass-produced [washingtonpost.com], not carefully crafted memorials. If the goal is to memorialize the lives lost in the Civil War, it seems like cheap generic statues aren't a good way to do so. We need to draw a distinction between actual memorials, many of which are in cemeteries, and statues intended to promote the reasons the Confederacy went to war. Context matters, and I highly doubt that there's much interest in removing legitimate memorials.

      Take Germany for example, where there are lots of memorials that mourn the evils of the Nazis, but none that glorify them [theatlantic.com]. Dachau [wikipedia.org], a former concentration camp, hasn't been demolished, but stands as a very solemn memorial of the atrocities committed by the Nazis. Nobody wants these memorials removed. The statues you're describing would be like if Germans built statues of Adolf Hitler and SS Generals in the 1960s and 1970s that portrayed them favorably, then tried to defend their presence as memorials of the past. That simply isn't welcome in Germany.

      A lot of these monuments are from the Jim Crow era, built to support racism. Those need to go. Renaming streets and even cities isn't entirely uncommon, so I don't understand why this is inherently a problem. But there's good reason to think that many of these street names are also from the same era as the aforementioned statues [1843magazine.com]. This seems far more about celebrating the cause of the Confederacy, not memorializing the Civil War.

      As for plantation houses, those are legitimate monuments from that era. Many have burned to the ground since the Civil War. But I haven't been able to find much interest about actually demolishing the houses. There are criticisms of events like weddings at plantations [thenation.com] that could be interpreted to view the history of those buildings in a positive manner, but I'm not aware of any seriously efforts to demolish those houses. There are, however, a lot of that are memorials or are considered historic places [wikipedia.org].

      The distinction seems to be between legitimate memorials and relics from the Civil War and the decades prior versus monuments created several decades after the Civil War to celebrate the cause of the Confederacy. A lot of the fear mongering seems to omit this important distinction. Most of the modern use of Confederate flags is in the latter category, celebrating the goals of the Confederacy, not as memorials of the Civil War and the decades leading up to it.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @04:36PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @04:36PM (#1006390)

    Sure. You should be able to proudly use the N word too, right?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @05:09PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @05:09PM (#1006426)

      Oh Jesus. Just say the word: Nigger.
      A word so terrible it cannot be uttered... except in copious amounts of entertainment such as rap music.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @10:16PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @10:16PM (#1006626)

        F word you C word W word R word

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2020, @11:06PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2020, @11:06PM (#1007138)

      When someone says it, they should only get a well deserved punch in the face. Not a permanent worldwide humiliation and unpersoning.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @07:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @07:06PM (#1006525)

    Huh? How exactly are "they" claiming this is an offensive symbol? It was explicitly used for that purpose by the Ku Klux Klan, which a terrorist organization, and adopted as the flag of the Dixiecrats, whose party platform was built on the issue of segregation. It's an offensive symbol because racists chose to use it explicitly for that purpose. If you don't like that, your objections should be with the racists who decided it is an offensive symbol. Your question is just like asking who decided the swastika is an offensive symbol after its use as a positive symbol for thousands of years. The fact is, the Nazi Party in Germany decided that the symbol is offensive because they chose to use it for that purpose. If you want to complain to the people who decided that certain symbols represent racism, go complain to the racists who chose to use those symbols for that purpose.

    And by the way, context matters. For example, the word "Negro" is not offensive in all contexts. It isn't offensive at all to talk about the Negro Leagues [wikipedia.org]. Of course, in that context, it's referring to black baseball players who weren't allowed to play in MLB because of segregation and organized their own leagues.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Friday June 12 2020, @11:19AM (2 children)

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 12 2020, @11:19AM (#1006816) Journal

    This has already happened.

    Watch the film the "Dam Busters" about the exploits of 617 Sqn RAF during WW2. Wg Cdr Guy Gibson had a black Labrador dog. If you watch the film today you will hear the dog being called 'Digger'. It wasn't called Digger, it was called Nigger. Someone in the USA decided that history must be rewritten and so had the sound track changed. I remember watching the film in my youth and it was certainly called Nigger then, and the grave (which was then located on an operational RAF station) still bore the same name.

    Shoe polish that I bought in the 1970s was described as 'Nigger Black' on the labelling. You can't buy it any more.

    Now, people are so frightened of a word that they dare not even use it - they call it the 'N-word'.

    The word originated in the 18th century [wikipedia.org] as an adaptation of the Spanish negro, a descendant of the Latin adjective niger, which means black. It was used to describe many things other than a certain race or, more accurately, a labourer of that race.

    In its original English-language usage, nigger (then spelled niger) was a word for a dark-skinned individual. The earliest known published use of the term dates from 1574, in a work alluding to "the Nigers of Aethiop, bearing witnes."[2] According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first derogatory usage of the term nigger was recorded two centuries later, in 1775.[3]

    Read that again - the earliest known published use of the term dates from 1574.

    Today we can use the term black - but no doubt, as you suggest, someone will decide that such a phrase is inappropriate again and demand that we change it once more.

    To me, while being interesting, the terminology is less important that the problem that we face today. We should , indeed must, strive to remove any discrimination based on nationality, race, religion, skin-colour, gender, handicap or whatever else someone might dream up. When we are born we do not get to choose any of these things. All men should be judged upon their own standards and achievements, not on something that their ancestors may have done centuries, decades or years before they were even conceived.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2020, @06:06PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 12 2020, @06:06PM (#1006989)

      So, janrinok, you're saying that, historically, it is OK to be racist?

      • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday June 13 2020, @06:33AM

        by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 13 2020, @06:33AM (#1007332) Journal

        Where did I say that?

        I am saying that you should judge me on my actions - not on the actions of people I have never known who died long before I was born. I am now retired but during my active life I socialised every day with people from all over the world, of many diverse religions, and probably of various sexualities. I do not judge people on how they look.

        I am not responsible for how people were mistreated in the past - I am responsible for how I treat people and how I help to prevent others from being mistreated today.

        People have been mistreated for millenia - the ancient Egyptians had a huge slave workforce. I haven't seen anybody protesting today about the mistreatment of those slaved during the building of the pyramids. As the human race has developed it has made many mistakes and we have learned, albeit very slowly, how other people should be treated. The more recent past, particularly in America but elsewhere as well, has been a terrible part of that learning process.

        During WW2 the Americans who were stationed in the UK couldn't understand why British police would not enforce the segregation laws that the US forces were used to with regards to bars, mixing with others from different ethnic backgrounds, etc. It took a while for them to learn that it was not illegal to do any of those things in the UK. But the UK did have, and still has, a problem today. Like elsewhere, it is a slow learning process.