Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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This discussion has been archived.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: 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.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +2  
       Insightful=1, Interesting=1, Total=2
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (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.