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.
World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic - with many a wink - in the people's name.
The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation.
I cannot write about the past unless I go where history happened. Some make very good armchair historians, I'm not one of them. If you're going to inhabit someone else's world, the very least you can do is to spend a little time in it.
Worse still is that mankind - the non-Jewish world - learned nothing from the Holocaust: The event which had no precedent in history, which should be equal to the Revelation at Sinai in significance.
The acceptance of the facts of African-American history and the African-American historian as a legitimate part of the academic community did not come easily. Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.
The world must know what happened, and never forget.
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