Jim Goad writes:
All these broad-brush acts of historical erasure were intended to commemorate nine dead in Charleston—a tally which is, oh, only about 7,500 short of how many blacks kill one another every year in America.
Lost in the shuffle were the 300,000 or so white Southern males who died fighting under that Rebel flag. Their lives ceased to matter entirely.
Three hundred thousand corpses are staggeringly more than the nine who died in Charleston or the 3,445 American blacks who were lynched between 1882 and 1968. (And no one seems to mention the 1,297 whites that were lynched during that same period, most likely because they weren’t even aware of them.) Nor does that total include the fifty-thousand-plus Southern civilians who died as a direct result of that bloody conflict.
Every third Southern household lost a family member in the Civil War. And the overwhelming majority of white Southern households did not own a single slave. And still they’re not allowed to mourn their dead ancestors?
