I Have a Suggestion For April

Downtown

2:

Pan-African flag raised at St. Louis City Hall for Black History Month

Today is the start of Black History Month. To mark the occasion, the red, black and green Pan-African flag will be raised at St. Louis City Hall at 10 a.m.

The St. Louis African-American Aldermanic Caucus suggested the move to honor the contributions African-Americans have made to St. Louis.

I have a suggestion for the month of April.

Though I know it will never be anything more than a suggestion, because this city can’t even tolerate a statue in a park.

But this reminds me of some unfinished business in this space.

Through most of 2015 and extending into early 2016, we had someone here in the comment boxes that some of you might be tempted to call a troll, but that’s too harsh and unfair to describe his presence and rhetoric.  Let’s call him an incredulous interlocutor.  Anyway, on occasions when I’d do a Confederate flag or statue posts in this space, one of his favorite retorts would go something like this:  “But how would you feel if an official public building few the red-black-green Pan-African flag?”

DERP.

And that leads me to my point, in finishing this heretofore unfinished business, which I remiss in not doing back then.

The first problem with the mentality that there’s some necessary requirement of fairness, in that if you have Confederate than you have to have Pan-African, and vice versa, is that it does not practically manifest in the real world.  As we can see in our own fair city right now.

The second problem is that the politics of settling the question of Confederate yay or nay juxtaposed with Pan-African yay or nay are hardly ever predicated on the bedrock of fairness, but almost always on the bedrock of tribal demographics.  Virtually nobody in Official St. Louis (by that, I mean the continuum of public, quasi-public, quasi-private and private sector important people in the city and region), who either caused, support or have no problem with the Pan-African flag flying over City Hall this month are going to turn around and say MUH FAIRNESS in the process of advocating flying the CBF over City Hall in the month of April (Confederate Heritage/History Month, in case you didn’t know), or at least returning the UDC monument to Forest Park and reconstructing the short Confederate Drive therein in accordance.  Likewise, last current year, when Official St. Louis connived to kick the UDC statue out of Forest Park, not a one of them so conspiring had the mentality that what they wanted to be done had to be done because it was unfair that there was a Confederate monument but no Pan-African monument in Forest Park.  That’s because it’s all about MUH DEMOGRAPHICS and not MUH FAIRNESS in the minds’ eyes of Official St. Louis, and for that matter, just about all of everyone else.

Third, and on this, if the incredulous interlocutor wants to correct me, I’ll be more than happy, but I highly doubt he was in the comment boxes of sites and blogs like Root, Grio or any of the many problacktard nodes on Ye Olde Internets lecturing them about MUH FAIRNESS, stating that they shouldn’t advocate for Pan-African because they would have to drop their opposition to Confederate out of a sense of fairness.  Here in the real world, when this issue base comes up, the fairness sword that the left wing and vicinity swings around is a single-edged sword that they almost always swing in only one direction.  And the disparate impact is that they want us to think about the politics of these things in abstract and universalist political terms, while at the same time either being too scared to oppose, or not actually opposing, or being okay with, or sometimes even encouraging the tribalist particularism of the other side.  White people have to be abstract and universalist, whilst non-whites can be tribal all the live long day — When that happens, I start reaching for Shift+9 and Shift+0.