Removing Confederate flags from the South Carolina statehouse is a “meaningful gesture,” but more must be done to reform laws that would benefit African-American citizens, the brother of a Charleston church shooting victim wrote to the Washington Post Wednesday.
A racially-charged shooting in Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Church at the end of June left nine people dead.
Malcolm Graham, brother of victim Cynthia Graham Hurd and a former N.C. state senator and former Charlotte city councilman, gave several suggestions to further progress:
In the days after the shooting, South Carolina honored those killed by removing the Confederate flag from the state house. It’s a meaningful gesture. But we cannot stop there.
Ultimately, the flag is just a symbol. Its removal must be the beginning of bigger reforms that empower America’s African Americans. That might mean opposing restrictive laws that prevent minorities in America from voting or pushing states to expand Medicaid and embrace the Affordable Care Act or fighting bias in the courts, which place too many African Americans behind bars for long sentences for minor offenses or before their cases have been heard.
It must also mean addressing the disparity in education funding or the fact that in states such as North Carolina and South Carolina, historically black colleges and universities get funded disproportionately to white institutions. It has to be about confronting the unconscious bias that means that the white Sarah Johnson with a stellar résumé gets a job, while the black Shamika Johnson with the same accolades can’t even get an interview.
We need to start by getting Hollywood to stop portraying Black men as thugs and criminals all the time, and go after people who use those kinds of images in their politics.
Hear, hear!
This needs to be a grassroots movement, supplied by each of us as individuals to stop discriminatory practices where we see them.
Along the lines of if you see something, say something, we should also take Jon Stewart’s if you smell something, say something.
The only way is to stop these things one at a time and call out the perpetrators, even if they are those in power like the police or legislators that would change a voting district to minimize the impact of voter participation.
We have the power to stop this. We need to take it and make sure that power realizes that black lives matter and we won’t stand by for extermination or hindrance.
This is something I wondered (and worried) about even as the confederate flag controversy was playing out: i.e., that the flag flap, although not unimportant, was being permitted to overtake and supplant discussion other issues that were likely far more significant with respect to the shootings in Charleston.