It takes a willful disregard of history to appreciate how white Southerners could look at the Confederate battle flag and see states' rights or a way of life or a tradition - and not one human being whipping another, which was a common occurrence.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the selective interpretation of symbols and their histories, particularly regarding the Confederate flag.
Richard Cohen's quote addresses how some white Southerners view the Confederate battle flag through a lens of states' rights and tradition, deliberately overlooking its connections to slavery and oppression. This willful ignorance of the historical context allows them to maintain a narrative that sanitizes their past, ignoring the suffering and brutality that the flag represents for many others.
In practice
In a lecture on American history, this quote can be used to discuss the symbolism of the Confederate flag.
Republicans and others who are in anguish over the possibility of socialized medicine ought to have to explain their ideology to a mother with a sick newborn. They ought to have to explain how this nation can debate health care and not mention how abysmal ours is.
I've met many Holocaust survivors who find the era infinitely compelling because they have this deep hunger to understand how it all could possibly have happened.
Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.
Our prime minister could embrace and forgive the people who killed our beloved sons and fathers, and so he should, but he could not, would not, apologise to the Aboriginal people for 200 years of murder and abuse. The battle against the Turks, he said in Gallipoli, was our history, our tradition. The war against the Aboriginals, he had already said at home, had happened long ago. The battle had made us; the war that won the continent was best forgotten
Would America have been America without her Negro people?
Every February, we reflect on and honor the achievements, struggles, and icons that comprise Black history. As a proud, Black man running for office and raising two young, Black boys in the South, I am acutely aware that I stand on the shoulders of giants.
From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.
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