According to a recent poll most white people see the Confederate battle flag as a symbol not of racism but of southern pride. Really? Must be southern white pride. And what do southern whites have to be proud of - qua southern white - slavery? segregation? ancestors and parents who supported both? Don't it make your blue eyes brown?
Better to remember those in chains as bound with them, as William Blake wrote in the Price of Experience - Let the Slave:
Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field
Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bnght air
Let the inchained soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary Years
- gwc
The Paragraph On Slavery That Never Made It Into The Declaration Of Independence
by Ben Railton//Talking Points Memo
"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither … And he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of whichhe had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."
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