Charles Blow: “In the wake of the Charleston massacre, there is a rapidly growing consensus sweeping the country to remove the Confederate flag, a relic of racial divisiveness, from civic spaces.”
“All of this is well and good. We should move overt symbols of racial division to places like museums, where they can be displayed in proper context and where education is part of the mission.”
“And yet, there is a part of me that still believes we are focusing on the 10 percent of the iceberg above the water and not the 90 percent below … When do we move from our consensus over taking down symbols to the much harder and more important work of taking down structures?”
“I worry much less about individual expressions of racism than I do about institutional expressions of racism. And we live in an age where people are earnestly trying to convince us that institutional racism doesn’t exist.”
Blow argues that definitions of racism that demand some sort of “articulated proof” are “incredibly narrow.”
“Institutional racism will not be limited in that way. Institutional racism is often like a pathogen in the blood: You can’t see it; you have to test for it. But you can see its destructive effects as it sickens the host.”
We shouldn’t have to change the name of the city of Houston. Sam Houston, for which it is named, was governor when the legislature voted for secession in 1961. Sam Houston vigorously opposed it. He was run out of office. Some downtown Houston streets, though, may have to change names — Fannin, Austin, Travis, Milam, and others elsewhere in the city — Crockett, for instance.