Haley Barbour thinks that honoring the Confederacy while ignoring slavery “don’t mean diddly.”  The Mississippi Governor assures us that slavery was a bad thing and all that; it just isn’t worth mentioning.

I just got back last night from a week in Winona and the Mississippi Delta and I think I know where Barbour is coming from.  A professor at Delta State University in Cleveland, MS told me that the school was 41% African-American and over 50% white. 

“How do the white and black students get along?” I asked.

“Pretty well,” he said, “when you consider that almost all our white kids come from all-white academies created a generation ago to skirt federal integration orders.”

Talking about race and history in Mississippi is much like bringing up the Holocaust in Germany.  People avoid the issue. 

This explains why the Curtis Flowers story has received almost no coverage in Mississippi.  Nothing about this case makes any sense unless you understand the racial and historical context.  People can’t talk about Flowers without talking about race and history, so they just ignore the story.

Haley Barbour doesn’t see the point of bringing up a subject that makes black people angry and white people uncomfortable.  So, when Virgina Governor Bob McDonnell celebrated confederate heritage month without mentioning slavery he was simply exercising the gentile selectivity in which southern whites with political aspirations must become proficient.  It didn’t mean diddly.

Remember, the Mississippi state flag proudly incorporates the stars and bars.  Mississippians have no problem with black folks celebrating Martin Luther King Day so long as white folks are free to celebrate Robert E. Lee on the same day.  Celebrating only Dr. King would lend respectability to the civil rights movement; adding the Lee option allows white folks to celebrate the heritage of white supremacy.  Different strokes for different folks.  Ya’ll go to your black public schools and we’ll send our kids to lily white academies.  You celebrate civil rights and we’ll honor a culture rooted in slavery and Jim Crow.  Ya’ll vote Democrat, we’ll vote Republican and see who comes out on top.

You if you are black in Mississippi and you want to make it in the mainstream you must adapt to this good-natured apartheid.

Folks in Mississippi are very polite . . . and very nervous.

Fortunately, Haley Barbour’s “diddly” comment has sparked interest in the very issues Mr. Barbour disdains.  This Eugene Robinson column reflects the view from the left, while this instructive piece from Henry Louis Gates explores the complicity of African rulers in the slave trade, a topic Haley Barbour (and our friends at the Council of Conservative Citizens) may find more to their liking.  Those who accused Dr. Gates of wearing civil rights blinders need to check this out.  The slave trade, like the holocaust, reveals the “desperately wicked” condition of the human heart.  Nazis and Confederates have no corner on the sin market.   Hate and bigotry are spiritual diseases to which none of us are immune.