OPINION

JOHN BRUMMETT: For human advancement

There are four stars on the official Arkansas state flag. All that state Rep. Charles Blake of Little Rock asks is that we use one of those stars to honor the Native Americans we oppressed rather than the oppression we practiced against blacks.

State Rep. Brandt Smith of Jonesboro has replied in resistance to Blake's proposal by saying we can't rewrite history.

It's not clear what Smith means.


Native Americans lived in Arkansas long before--and persevere long after--those few years in the 1860s of misbegotten secession from the world's greatest nation to fight for the right to continue our regional dehumanization of black people.

Blake's bill would choose to pay no further official homage to the Confederacy, as state law now provides for one of those four stars. It would have that star honor a richer and more relevant element of our place's history.

He would write history better. He would declare human advancement in Arkansas.

And this is important: He wouldn't change the flag. He'd merely change the words in the law book about what one of the stars represents.

It's a brilliant and elegant little bill.

This issue is easier than monuments or statues. Those are a lot of trouble to destroy, or, better yet, move from the public square to history museums.

This is the question: Do we celebrate our disgrace in the Confederacy or do we vigilantly record it, teach it, lament it and find a way to compartmentalize symbols of it?

I say that we should vigilantly record, teach and remember it, even with monuments or statues in the appropriate compartments.

If we insist on keeping a star on our state flag to celebrate slavery and the Confederacy, then we should add one for Jim Crow laws. We'd need another for the Elaine race massacre. We'd need another for lynching. We'd need another for white-only bathrooms and water fountains. And we'd need another for the white-thug debacle at Little Rock Central High in 1957.

We don't put a star on the state flag for the Central crisis. Instead we put a museum across the street from the school.

People walk through to remember. They walk through to be saddened. They walk through to be resolved never to behave that way again. That's how you do that.

The three stars on the state flag below the name of the state stand for the nations with which our little spot on the earth has been affiliated, meaning Spain, France and the United States.

Blake's bill would provide that the single star above the name of the state would no longer represent the Confederacy, as provided by a 1924 law. Instead it would represent Native American tribes ancient and rich to our little spot on the earth, such as the Quapaw and Caddo, as well as the Cherokees who passed through by the thousands on the Trail of Tears.

After Blake's bill is passed, Brandt Smith and any like-minded legislators should file their own bill to add a fifth star to honor human bondage.

Then we can call the roll on that.

There is the accompanying question of whether Smith is "blatantly racist," as the state Democratic Party put it in a public statement Saturday, or merely "clueless," as I generously suggested on social media over the weekend.

This controversy has to do with a specific paragraph in this newspaper Saturday.

This was the paragraph: "Speaking by phone, Smith later added that he did not want blacks 'to feel any type of anxiety when they look at the flag.' But Smith then questioned the motives of Blake, who is black. 'I don't know whether he's got any anger or resentment that he's holding onto personally that he can't deal with,' Smith said."

Michael John Gray, the state Democratic chairman, said Smith's remark revealed a deeply embedded racism that had no place in public dialogue today.

What bothered me was that, rather than merely calling out Smith or seeking to illuminate, the Democrats made a mad partisan rush to demonize. And that, of course, is the malignancy on our politics that metastasizes from Washington.

Smith and others like him might be less inclined to resent and recoil, and more inclined to stop and think, if cited for cluelessness rather than an evil heart.

State Democratic Party officials counter that one would need to work at being clueless to remain so at this point. They say it's important to call out Smith's remark for what it was--an attack on Blake's public policy position that suggested the problem was Blake's own hang-up about being black, when, in fact, the problem was Smith's hang-up about Blake's being black.

It is a point to ponder--blatantly racist versus clueless, and whether there's any real difference.

What doesn't need pondering is Blake's proposed human advancement in the official symbolism of our state flag. All his bill needs is its deserved "aye" votes.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 02/19/2019

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