Month: August 2020

Perhaps they haven’t filled it in because they’re color-blind. Or more likely, color-fearful.

Recommended reading

The graphic essay About Face — worthwhile reading again, given that protests these days have a body count — has this observation on the merchandising of mostly-black-and-white U.S. flags:

Also worth checking out:

• The Marshall Project: The Short, Fraught History of the ‘Thin Blue Line’ American Flag
  The controversial version of the U.S. flag has been hailed as a sign of police solidarity and criticized as a symbol of white supremacy.
• Standard-Examiner: Standard Deviations: Flag desecration is flag desecration, no matter who does it
  Here’s a conservative take:

  “I get why liberals might turn a blind eye to altering the U.S. flag — what with them being just this side of commies and all. But how is a flag like this even remotely acceptable among all of the patriotic conservatives out there who believe that our star-spangled banner is divinely inspired? How is this not desecration of the flag?

  Where are the people who popped veins in their necks over millionaire athletes quietly kneeling during the National Anthem because they thought THAT was disrespecting the flag? And yet they’ve got no problem with a protest that turns the nation’s beloved red, white and blue symbol into one that’s black, white and blue.

  Listen, if the Black Lives Matter movement were to create an all-black American flag with black stars and black stripes set against a field of dark gray, you can bet Republicans would try to ram a flag-desecration bill through Congress faster than you could say ‘Colin Kaepernack wasn’t all that great of a quarterback.’

  And I’ll bet you a gazillion dollars if the LGBTQ community gave each of the stripes in the American flag a different color of the rainbow, Republican heads would quite literally explode.”

This is how the mainstream portrayed Martin Luther King during his day:

…and this editorial cartoon remains apt, even though more than five decades have passed:

Recommended reading

• Smithsonian Magazine: Even Though He Is Revered Today, MLK Was Widely Disliked by the American Public When He Was Killed
  “According to an early 1968 Harris Poll, the man whose half-century of martyrdom we celebrate this week [2018] died with a public disapproval rating of nearly 75 percent, a figure shocking in its own day and still striking even in today’s highly polarized political climate.”
• TIME: Don’t Forget That Martin Luther King Jr. Was Once Denounced as an Extremist
  “The civil rights movement was deeply unpopular at the time. Most Americans thought it was going too far and movement activists were being too extreme. Some thought its goals were wrong; others that activists were going about it the wrong way—and most white Americans were happy with the status quo as it was. And so they criticized, monitored, demonized and at times criminalized those who challenged the way things were, making dissent very costly. Most modern tributes and understandings of the movement paper over the decades when activists like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and scores of their comrades were criticized by fellow citizens and targeted as ‘un-American,’ not just by Southern politicians but by the federal government.”