Web Video: Race Card Project: “Must we forget our Confederate ancestors?”

MS. IFILL: Michele, I want to ask you about a couple more of the race – the six-word race cards on your Race Card Project because it takes us back to an interesting secondary debate we had this week about the Confederate flag and what should happen to it in South Carolina. One of them is from Pat Jones, who lives in South Carolina, and she wrote: “Why are African-Americans so hated?” Mmm. And the second one was from Jesse Dukes in Charlottesville, Virginia, and he wrote: “Must we forget our Confederate ancestors?”

MS. NORRIS: Jesse Dukes is actually a reporter, and he did a piece for Virginia Quarterly Review where he spent a lot of time with Confederate reenactors, and he wanted to understand why people spend their Saturdays reenacting the Civil War, but also why they clung to the Confederate flag. And that question, you know, is at the heart of this debate over the Confederate flag. Why do people cling to it? What does it mean to them when it is so obviously offensive to so many other people? And what Jesse found and what is absolutely supported by what pours in the inbox on a regular basis is that the Confederate flag, yes it’s about the South, yes it’s about the Civil War, yes it’s about ancestry, but it’s about something so much more than that. Most of the submissions that come in to my inbox aren’t from the South. They’re from people who live all over the country, and they embrace the flag for interesting reasons – and this is what Jesse found in his reporting also – that it’s come to symbolize something else. People are using that in some way to – as an anthem to talk about an America that they pine for that they see slipping away, that they don’t feel a certain amount of automatic privilege, that they feel a lot of fear about and disorientation about a country that they no longer understand because they’re not in the majority. Or sometimes it’s just economic, you know, that you hear about redneck culture. Well, that’s a name that some people will affix to themselves – you can’t say it, but I can, that kind of thing. But they’re also talking about the jobs that aren’t there anymore, the economic security they don’t have.

MS. IFILL: And that worry is still under – no matter what we put aside this week or what we’ve – what convulsion we’ve been through this week, that worry is still there, and so it’s still going to be part of that conversation.