SOUTH CAROLINA IS A SOUTHERN STATE IGNORING THE “ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM”

Governor Nikki Haley was seriously scrambling with the Mother Emanuel Church Massacre.

I’ve always thought that Nikki Haley was unqualified to be the governor of a backward conservative Southern state such as South Carolina.  Her stated qualifications are: she was the CFO of her mother’s clothing company that had become a multi-million dollar business.  She is rated 34^th out of 50 in job creation as a second-term governor, and she is anti-union for her state and anti-Common-Core for her state's public education.

Haley has also received very heavy criticism for her initial comments, or lack of appropriate comments, right after the 9 killings in the historic Mother Emanuel Church in her historic town of Charleston.

In the governor’s initial statement after the massacre, she said, “…we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter our places of worship and take the life of another.”  But she refused to state that the killer was obviously one of those Confederate Flag lovers that still feel all blacks should remain slaves. 

When asked about finally getting rid of their state’s symbol of a long-lost war, the Confederate Flag, she immediately rebelled. At first, it was obvious that Haley thought being against that flag would stir up that nut-case wing of her conservative supporters.  So, instead of saying that it was time for that symbol to be retired to the historical museum, she back-pedaled at saying anything negative about the flag. 

Then, when she later realized that 75% of public opinion, in both the nation and her state, was against the flag being flown at a state or federal building, the governor went 180° in reverse. 

Haley, days later, went public and made a very positive speech about having the Confederate Flag removed from the front of the South Carolina State House.

But earlier, on the CBS Morning News, Haley had totally dodged the flag question, refusing to give her personal opinion.  She had implied that a debate over the flag would just be too traumatizing for her state. 

 

The CBS host had asked: “There are all those calls today that you have to take the Confederate flag down from the state capitol. How do you address those calls?”  Haley then replied with some random positive comments about the people that had been killed and said, “This is very real to us…….There will be policy discussions and you will hear me come out and talk about it.  But right now, I'm not doing that to the people of my state.”

One day later, she made her 180° turn.

But even with all of this positive action, she has still refused to use the term “racism”.  Her lack of leadership in this was in stark contrast to another Southern state years some ago.  That being the state of Georgia.  In that state, way back in 1992, Governor Zell Miller (D), called for changing the Georgia flag so it no longer reflected the Confederate symbol in the state flag’s upper left corner.  This symbol had just reminded everyone of Georgia’s history as a previous slave state.

Haley's avoidance of the same issue of her own state’s racism has seriously helped her eluded the giant elephant in the room.

Martin Luther King Jr. had dealt with that “elephant” when he talked in 1963 about the young black girls that were killed in the church in Birmingham, Alabama.  Dr. King had said: “They [the children] say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.” 

Governor Haley was just being a coward in not understanding that in order for her citizens to heal, you must first admit that there is a problem.  Failing to address the legacy of racism in South Carolina, only avoids the issue and is like putting a Band-Aid on a deep hemorrhage that tries to conceal the raw truth.

Until that fact is admitted to, by all the Southern state’s leaderships, and then acted upon, we will be seeing more deaths of innocent black and white Americans by crazy Southern racist.

Copyright G.Ater  2015