Poquoson: Home of Trump Supporters and Something Ugly

Locally, one of the bastions of Trump supporters is the small city of Poquoson which sits eastward of Hampton and York County.  Ironically, Poquoson faces the largest threat of any local city from rising sea levels, yet strongly backs a man and political party that denies the existence of climate change.  A recent even involving the Poquoson High School football team suggest the root of Trump's appeal: racism.  Two videos leaked of members of the team using racial slurs and foul language - seemingly directed at black members of a rival football team. Thankfully, the school division - likely the most lily white in the region - did the right think and forfeited the game to the rival school and an investigation is ongoing.  The Virginian Pilot looks at the incident which, I suspect to many, is not surprising.  Here are story excerpts:

Poquoson High School’s football team forfeited its upcoming game against York High School after online videos surfaced of students at the school using a racial slur and foul language.

The two videos were posted to Snapchat, then quickly began to spread to Twitter and other online platforms Thursday. The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press obtained copies of the videos after they were reposted by others.

Poquoson School Superintendent Jennifer Parish said some of the students in the videos are members of the football team. Parish said the videos were recorded at a party off school property, and it appeared to be a club room.

Both videos are less than 30 seconds long. In one, a boy, who is white, threatens to beat up someone, repeatedly using a racial slur. In the background, students are gathered around a table.

He puts his middle finger up in the camera, and another boy comes up behind him and says “If you’re from York County and you want some, come get some.”

In the other video, another teenager appears to be challenging other teens from York County, and repeatedly uses racial slurs.

“The language and behavior in these videos have no place in our schools or in our community," Parish said in a statement released Thursday evening . . . . we are taking action within the scope of our Code of Conduct and under division policy.”

That included, she said, the decision to forfeit Friday’s game against York High School. It was scheduled to be played in Poquoson.

Poquoson is the smallest city in Hampton Roads, with a population of just more than 10,000. It became an incorporated town in York County in the 1950s, and then a city in 1975. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the city’s school district is made up of 92% white students, 2% Hispanic or Latino students and 1% black students.

York County has a population of about 67,000. In its school district, 72% of students are white, 13% are black and 6% are Hispanic and Latino.

In October, a 53-year-old Poquoson man was charged with assault and battery after he confronted a Poquoson High School student who was waving a Confederate flag at a football game against Tabb High, another York County school.

This post will not make me popular in Poquoson, but the racist undercurrent of the city needs to be exposed.  And personally, I try to avoid Poquoson since gays aren't exactly welcome either.

What Donald Trump's Popularity Reveals About the South

At this point I have lived the majority of my life in the South, including four years in Alabama.   While the Hampton Roads area of Virginia is less and less part of the South due to the influx of people from Northern states, there remain pockets that are very Southern when it comes to claimed religiosity, racism and hypocrisy.  The South can display charm and supposed hospitality, but depending where you are, beneath the veneer of graciousness lucks a would be KKK supporter.  As a column in Politico notes, the rise of Donald Trump's popularity in the South has done much to display the reality that while much has changed, the stain of racism and a fear of modernity and those who are different is still alive and well.  Folks may sit in the pews on Sunday morning, but they make a mockery of the Gospel message the rest of the week.  Here are excerpts:

The Republican South so far has rallied behind Donald Trump, a northerner without any of the grassroots evangelical credibility that is supposed to bind conservatives here—a candidate whose main appeal, in fact, has been coded appeals to the same hatred that drove [Dylnn] Roof to pick up a gun.

Make no mistake, Trump’s embrace by millions of people in my region isn’t solely about economic angst. It is also about the kind of pent-up fear—made up of barely submerged racism and profound ignorance—that a reader in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, expressed to me shortly after Barack Obama’s election: “I think he’s gonna enslave us,” he said. “Look what we done to ya’ll.”

Trump was, in many ways, the optimal antidote for that fear, and the racism behind it. It was Trump who more than anyone kept “birtherism” in the mainstream through the first term of Obama’s presidency, feeding belief in the deep South that this oddly-named president was not even American. And now it is Trump who has brilliantly exploited and drawn out the racism that the civil rights movement drove underground 50 years ago, but which is now resurfacing.

All this has thoroughly removed the scales from my eyes. I grew up watching the South become more tolerant. My son will have far more opportunities here than my father did. But I now know just how deeply the region is stuck in our ugly past. I now realize that little boy I saw 26 years ago more likely than not grew up to harbor the same racial hatred his parents did. I’m not forced to sit on the back of the bus; I’m not restricted from swimming in some parts of the Atlantic. But too often, that overt progress has been used as an excuse by residents to pretend that further civil rights gains would be “giving” minorities something they don’t deserve.

Trump’s rise in both South Carolina and throughout the South proves why celebrating that change—the removal of a flag that should not have been flying—was in many ways premature, if not misleading.

There’s little reason to pretend, as some are, that the anger Trump has tapped into in the South, which has propelled him to a near sweep of Southern states and to the top of Republican polls, is primarily about white Southerners’ anger about their changing economic fortunes. If that were the case, Southerners would also be embracing Bernie Sanders, another candidate seen as a political outsider running on a populist economic message.

Instead, while Sanders eagerly touts his civil rights past, Southerners—including those who long claimed the principles espoused by their conservative Christian faith influence their every decision—have picked the one presidential candidate who claimed (at first) he didn’t know enough about the Ku Klux Klan to have an opinion about it—the one candidate the Klan has said it is using as a recruiting tool.

They picked the one candidate who initially excused two white men who beat up a homeless Hispanic man, saying they were following Trump’s lead.

They picked the one candidate sued by the Justice Department in the 1970s for telling employees to avoid renting property to black people.

They picked the one candidate who stoked the fires that helped lead to five young black men in New York being falsely accused and convicted in the Central Park jogger case in 1989.

They picked the one candidate who proudly said out loud what they’ve been saying throughout the entire Obama era in email chains and private discussions after Sunday morning church services: That the nation’s first black president isn’t a real American and needed to prove he belonged in a way no other president, or presidential candidate, ever had to do.

According to widely-cited exit polls and other surveys, 70 percent of Trump supporters in South Carolina wanted the Confederate flag to keep flying, compared with 31 percent of South Carolinians overall. Twenty-one percent of his voters in the state either believe whites are superior or aren’t sure; 20 percent don’t like the Emancipation Proclamation.

But none of that can detract from the fact that Trump’s supporters also include white nationalist groups like the American Freedom Party and American Renaissance whether he wants them to or not. To them, Trump has come as close to sounding like former Klan wizard and Louisiana Rep. David Duke that a politician can—and still potentially win high national office. That should give pause to the millions of other Trump supporters, or would-be supporters, who are ignoring his bigotry because they are so desperate to see a political sea change.

Too many of us have been convinced that quiet equals peace. That’s the one good thing about the loudmouth that is Donald Trump. It’s hard to remain silent in the face of the ugliness he has highlighted like no other politician has in quite some time.

He isn’t Dylann Roof, deliberately targeting a single African-American church. No, he’s potentially more dangerous because he targets the vulnerable wherever they are. There aren’t enough Americans, in the South or the Republican Party, primarily motivated by hate to have fueled his rise. His presence on the national stage is scary because too many otherwise good people—the kind who would give comfort to a black orphan or pray for a sick Hispanic friend—are turning a blind eye to his peculiar brand of bigotry and angrily following his lead.

South Carolina’s Lost Battle to Rewrite its Racist History

Having lived in the South for the majority of my life now, one steady undercurrent has always been the effort of some whites, perhaps not a majority, to keep minorities in their place.  Here in Virginia the separate rest room facilities for blacks and whites are gone, but through voter ID laws and the difficulty faced by felons (blacks are disproportionately convicted) to regain voting rights, the theme of keeping blacks subservient is alive and well, especially among Virginia Republicans.  But Virginia, despite the statues on Monument Avenue in Richmond, has been discrete about its racism compared to South Carolina, the state that started the Civil War, and which has flown the Confederate flag at its state house until today.  A column in the Washington Post looks at South Carolina's losing battle to rewrite its very racist history.  Here are excerpts:

For most of my life, a flag representing white supremacist violence against black people flew at the capitol of my native state. It is a very big deal that this emblem of hatred and oppression is finally coming down.

Gov. Nikki Haley (R) was expansive after the state legislature finished action early Thursday on a bill consigning the Confederate battle flag to the museum displays where it belongs: “It is a new day in South Carolina, a day we can all be proud of.” I have to entertain the notion that she may be right.

In the South, William Faulkner wrote, the past isn’t even past. The flag represented, for some white South Carolinians, a past that was invented out of whole cloth — a past in which something other than slavery was the cause of a conflict Southerners called the “War Between the States.”

In truth, the Civil War only was about states’ rights in the sense that the Confederate states feared losing one specific “right” — to own human beings and compel their labor. No amount of Spanish moss can obscure this basic fact. No paeans to the valor of Confederate soldiers can change the fact that they were fighting for slavery.

And no amount of revisionist claptrap can change the fact that the flag was hoisted at the capitol in Columbia in 1961 and kept flying not to honor some gauzy vision of Southern valor but to resist the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation. The flag meant whites-only schools, whites-only public accommodations, whites-only voter rolls. It represented white power and privilege over subjugated African Americans.  

[I]t was another woman — Republican state Rep. Jenny Horne — who guaranteed success with a powerful speech telling her colleagues that enough was enough.

“I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful, such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds on Friday!” Horne thundered. She wasn’t having any of the “noble heritage” cornpone that flag apologists were selling; Horne is a descendant of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, she said, and still she knew it was time for the flag to come down.

Before Horne’s intervention, it looked as if the state House might cave to the latter-day Johnny Rebs who were seeking to stall the legislation into parliamentary oblivion.

For 150 years after Appomattox, the states of the Confederacy lived a twisted fantasy. As evidenced by the diehards in the South Carolina legislature, some white Southerners still refuse to wake from the reverie. But the rest of the state has finally moved on.

Does this mean that South Carolina and other former Confederate states will take a new look at all the monuments and memorials dedicated to white supremacists who advocated slavery and fomented armed rebellion against the United States?  . . . . Probably not, or at least not anytime soon. Emanuel A.M.E. Church is on a street named for John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina “statesman” who defended slavery not as a necessary evil but as an absolute good, and who laid the philosophical groundwork for the treasonous act of secession.

The flag is more important, though, because of the way it has been used — not just as an instrument of repression but also as a way to deny history and thus avoid history’s judgments and responsibilities. What South Carolina’s governor and legislature have announced is clear: It’s time, finally, to stop pretending.

Symbols matter. South Carolina should have brought down the Confederate battle flag long ago. . . .

KKK Rally in SC to Defend Rebel Flag and Promote "White Christian Nation"

Try as they might to distance themselves from racists and white supremacists, the Christofascists are finding the effort difficult.  Now, the Klu Klux Klan is making the effort even more difficult as it announces that it will rally at the South Carolina capitol to defend the Confederate flag and to promote "White Christian Nation."  I have often maintained that if you scratch beneath the surface of most supposed Christian "family values" organizations you will find a bunch of would be segregationist and white supremacists.  That holds true for Family Research Council or The Family Foundation here in Virginia.  Patheos.com looks at situation in South Carolina.  Here are highlights:

The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan will rally on the Statehouse Grounds in South Carolina next month to promote a “White Christian nation” and defend the honor of the Confederate flag.
On Monday, state officials confirmed that the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’s Pelham, North Carolina, chapter have reserved the Statehouse Grounds in South Carolina for a rally in front of the South Carolina Statehouse scheduled for July 18.
The Post and Courier reports the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which calls itself the “largest Klan in America,” filed a permit saying they expected between 100 and 200 people to attend the event on the north side of the building, where the Confederate battle flag is currently being flown.
In a statement, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said the KKK was not welcome: This is our state, and they are not welcome.

However, despite Governor Haley’s protests, Brian Gaines, spokesman for the South Carolina Budget and Control Board, confirmed the rally, noting the state provides rally space at the Statehouse site when space is available or previously not reserved.

The KKK rally promoting a “White Christian nation” and defending the Confederate flag will take place a month after Dylann Roof entered a historic church in Charleston and shot to death nine African-Americans during a Bible study meeting last month.

On their website, the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan claims Southern whites are facing “cultural genocide” while insisting they are not a “hate group.” The group insists that the KKK is all about obeying “God’s law,” and restoring “America to a White Christian nation founded on God’s word.”  The following is an excerpt:

We hate drugs, homosexuality, abortion, and race-mixing because these things go against God’s law and they are destroying all white nations. But rather than focus on hate, we try to focus on the love of our race. Love for our God and Country. Our goal is to help restore America to a White Christian nation founded on God’s word. 

It sounds almost the same as the agenda on the websites of FRC and TFF.  Conservative Christianity is truly something ugly. 

Why Taking Down the Confederate Falg is Important to LGBT's

Some might question why the current debates and arguments over the flying of of the Confederate flag in South Carolina and elsewhere has any bearing on LGBT rights.  But it doesn't take much examination to discern that those who support the state sponsored display of the Confederate flag are (i) largely one and the same people who supports same sex marriage bans and opposition to LGBT rights, and (ii) using the same arguments of "tradition" and state rights to justify hate and discrimination and the undermining of the U.S. Constitution.    Scratch the surface of the leadership of Family Research Council, The Family Foundation here in Virginia, and many other "family values" and "Christian" political action groups and you quickly find former segregationists and white supremacists.  A post in Huffington Post makes this case.  Here are highlights:

The Civil War wasn't about slavery. That's what I was told by teachers, family, friends, churchgoers and casual motorists at gas stations throughout my childhood in rural Alabama. Black and white had nothing to do with it, they said. States' rights, they would all echo. States' rights, yes, now that was the real reason--usually punctuating that last bit by spitting out a wad of chewing tobacco.

When you are white in the South, what you learn about the Confederate flag--which gets slapped on everything from pickup trucks to cakes to state houses--is that it is a flag of honorable defense against a tyrannical invader. It is meant to invoke a feeling of legacy for our ancestors who died in some great struggle for their definition of liberty.

[T]he survival of states' rights rhetoric in today's contemporary political landscape. During the oral arguments of Obergefell v. Hodges, both the counsellors and justices seemed as easily distracted as mayflies--hopping from one sour line of questioning to the next. However, one telling quote did stand out, from U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli, Jr.:

"You may have many states, perhaps most states, in which gay couples can live with equal dignity and status," he said, "but you will have a minority of states in which gay couples will be relegated to demeaning, second-class status, and I don't know why we would want to repeat that history."

Those states that believe in enforcing marriage as a procreation-centered union and that assert their right to deny recognition to those who marry outside their lines are ever so slightly retracing the same lines that divided this country between free and slave states more than a hundred years ago--which took the country's deadliest war in its history to erase. 

White LGBTs can never fully know the painful past the Confederate flag holds for our brothers and sisters of color. However, we do know how the rhetoric it represents threatens our future. We are one country, with one flag, and we live by one promise: liberty and justice for all. The call to take down the flag is our call, too. Not just as supporters of the black community, but as members of our own community. A handful of states say they have the right to dictate our lives, our families and our happiness because they still believe in the awful patchwork of states' rights arguments that nearly brought our nation to the brink. Taking down that tattered flag is a symbol that LGBTs stand with the black community, and as importantly, stand for themselves as citizens of this Union.

Governor McAuiffe Orders Confederate flag Removed from Virginia License Plates

In the wake of the white supremacy inspired murders in Charleston, South Carolina, last week and last week's 5-4 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that the First Amendment does not prevent states from banning the Confederate flag from license plates, Governor McAuliffe has ordered that the Confederate battle flag be removes from Virginia license plates. It goes without saying that the move will cause shrieks from the white supremacist base of the Virginia GOP.  Of course, if the Virginia GOP opposes the move by McAuliffe, it will be a wonderful reminder to voters in the lead up to November's state election of who the Virginia GOP really represents.  Here are highlights from CBS News:

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe has ordered the Confederate flag removed from Virginia state license plates. The flag is displayed on a specialty plate designed for the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The governor’s announcement came in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the state of Texas was allowed to reject a license plate design that featured a Confederate battle flag and the removal of the flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds following last week’s fatal shootings at am African-American church in Charleston.

"As [South Carolina] Governor Haley said yesterday, her state can ill afford to let this symbol continue to divide the people of South Carolina. I believe the same is true here in Virginia. Although the battle flag is not flown here on Capitol Square, it has been the subject of considerable controversy, and it divides many of our people,” Governor Terry McAuliffe said. “Even its display on state issued license tags is, in my view, unnecessarily divisive and hurtful to too many of our people. As you all know, I have spent the past 17 months working to build a new Virginia economy that is more open and welcoming to everyone. Removing this symbol from our state-issued license plates will be another step toward realizing that goal.”

McAuliffe said he has asked the Attorney General’s office to “take steps to reverse the prior Court ruling that requires the Confederate flag be placed on state license plates.” He also told the Secretary of Transportation to “develop a plan for replacing the currently-issued plates as quickly as possible.”

Charleston Hate Crime Suspect Captured - Did He Drink Right Wing Kool-Aid?

More and more details are emerging about the murder of nine people last night in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and it is becoming more and more evident that hate and racism may have been a motivating factor.  The suspect, who was captured this morning in North Carolina, Dylann Storm Roof, 21, is reported to have made racist statements during the shooting spree and his Facebook profile picture shows him wearing a jacket decorated with the flags of two former white supremacist regimes, in apartheid-era South Africa and in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.  The New York Times and 13 News Now have details.  Of equal note is a piece in Esquire, which focuses on why the horrible event is not "unthinkable" or "unspeakable."  We have Republican politicians and "family values" organizations constantly sending racist dog whistle messages to their followers.  Is it any surprise that some take the message to heart and decided to act?  While Roof acted alone, in many ways he did not.  He had lots of encouragement from GOP politicians, Fox News and many far right pundits. First, these highlights from the Times piece:

The gunman wanted in the killing of nine people at a prayer meeting at a historic black church in this city’s downtown area was taken into custody Thursday morning in North Carolina.

The police here have said Mr. Roof, who is from the Columbia, S.C., area, is the white gunman who walked into a prayer meeting, sat down with black parishioners for nearly an hour, and then opened fire — a burst of violence that officials described as racially motivated.

Mr. Roof’s Facebook profile picture shows him wearing a jacket decorated with the flags of two former white supremacist regimes, in apartheid-era South Africa and in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of Mr. Pinckney, told NBC News that she had spoken with a survivor of the shooting who told her the gunman reloaded five times. The survivor, she said, told her that the gunman had entered the church and asked for the pastor. Then he sat next to Mr. Pinckney during the Bible study before opening fire.

“I have to do it,” the gunman was quoted as saying. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”

13 News Now adds this:

The suspect's uncle, Carson Cowles, 56, tells Reuters that he recognized the young man in the surveillance photo as his nephew.

"The more I look at him, the more I'm convinced, that's him," Carson Cowles, 56, tells Reuters in a phone interview.

Cowles said Roof was given a gun by his father as a 21st birthday present in April.

 As noted, the Esquire piece makes the case as to why thee should be little surprise that such an event could occur.  Here are excerpts:

What happened in a church in Charleston, South Carolina on Wednesday night is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is "unthinkable." . . .What happened in a Charleston church on Wednesday night is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is "unspeakable." We should speak of it often. We should speak of it loudly. We should speak of it as terrorism, which is what it was. We should speak of it as racial violence, which is what it was.

We should speak of it as an attack on history, which it was. This was the church founded by Denmark Vesey, who planned a slave revolt in 1822. Vesey was convicted in a secret trial in which many of the witnesses testified after being tortured. After they hung him, a mob burned down the church he built. His sons rebuilt it. On Wednesday night, someone turned it into a slaughter pen.

It is not an isolated incident, not if you consider history as something alive that can live and breathe and bleed. We should speak of all these things. What happened in that church was a lot of things, but unspeakable is not one of them.

Not to think about these things is to betray the dead. Not to speak of these things is to dishonor them. Let Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, look out her window at the flag of treason that is flown proudly at her state capitol and think about these things, and speak of them, before she pronounces herself so puzzled at how something like this could happen in South Carolina, the home office of American sedition.

The country must resist the temptation present in anesthetic innocence. It must reject the false comfort of learned disbelief and the narcotic embrace of concocted surprise. There is a ferocious underground fire running through American history. It rages unseen until it flares again from the warm earth. It has raged from the death of Denmark Vesey in 1822 to the death of the Reverend and state senator Clementa Pinckney on Wednesday night.

This was not an unspeakable act. Sylvia Johnson, one of only three survivors of the massacre, is speaking about it.

"She said that he had reloaded five different times… and he just said 'I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go.'"

There is a timidity that the country can no longer afford.This was not an unthinkable act. A man may have had a rat's nest for a mind, but it was well thought out. It was a cool, considered crime, as well planned as any bank robbery or any computer fraud. If people do not want to speak of it, or think about it, it's because they do not want to follow the story where it inevitably leads. It's because they do not want to follow this crime all the way back to the mother of all American crimes, the one that Denmark Vesey gave his life to avenge. What happened on Wednesday night was a lot of things. A massacre was only one of them.