More Than a Flag

Last Thursday, the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations honored Governor Nikki Haley, Republican of South Carolina, with an award of appreciation for her role in the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of South Carolina’s capitol. This past summer, nine churchgoers and clergy were murdered in a mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston by Dylann Roof, an avowed white supremacist. That tragedy prompted a renewed push to end South Carolina’s display of the Confederate battle flag. The emblem first flew over South Carolina’s Capitol dome in 1962—a signal of the legislature’s disapproval of the civil rights movement—until 2000, when it was moved to the State House grounds. On July 9, Governor Haley signed a bill that finally ordered the flag’s removal.

Governor Haley deserves credit for her display of leadership in a very troubling time. After the shooting, some politicians, including Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio, avoided taking strong stands on the Confederate flag issue. Governor Haley’s full-throated insistence that the flag be removed—she called it a “deeply offensive symbol of a brutally offensive past”— played an instrumental role in building consensus in the state’s Republican Party. South Carolina is a better state, and the United States is a better country, with the flag down. Insofar as Governor Haley brought this about, she deserves credit.

And yet, as one Crimson op-ed writer has already noted, there is a strong argument that Governor Haley’s evolution on the Confederate flag came too late. Just last year, she refused to answer a question on the same topic, suggesting that the flag was a non-issue. And the very fact that the Harvard Foundation, or anyone else, considers this vote an achievement on Governor Haley’s part tell something unsavory about the state of racial politics, in South Carolina and nationally. Similarly, though Governor Haley’s role in the flag debate was crucial, other politicians and activists played significant parts in retiring the flag. Plenty of figures also deserve their fair share of credit.

But however we apportion accolades, last summer's debate over the Confederate flag—overdue though it was—cannot be the end to any conversation about race in America. One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, vast racial disparities continue to exist in the United States, and government policy is often complicit in perpetuating them. These disparities manifest themselves in poverty rates, in health care access, and in restrictive voter identification laws that, intentionally or not, are far more likely to impinge on the right to vote of minorities. (South Carolina’s laws are sufficiently strict that Governor Haley’s predecessor was once turned away at the polls when he, as governor, failed to show up with the proper identification cards.) These are the issues of race relations that should deeply concern Harvard students and faculty; as Governor of South Carolina, Haley has all too often been on the wrong side of them.

It’s hard to talk about race without taking stands on government policy, whether that policy consists of flying a flag or refusing to expand Medicaid. It should also be contended that even if we view many of her policies as ultimately harmful, Governor Haley's personal story itself demonstrates progress against systems that disempower people of color . Reasonable people can disagree about which government policies are appropriate measures for redressing a long history of racial discrimination. We believe, however, that Governor Haley has too often supported policies that have disproportionate and negative effects on communities of color. The Governor deserves her due praise for her stand on the Confederate flag. We now hope that her views become attuned to more pressing issues of racial injustice in other areas of policy.