So the Tennessee House of Rednecks— sorry, I meant Representatives—is
extremely upset with Memphis lawmakers for the removal of the racist statues.
The House voted to pull $250,000 from the city’s budget, which was intended to
be used for bicentennial celebrations next year. After calling the amendment to
the appropriations bill racist, Antonio Parkinson was literally booed. In the
Tennessee House of Representatives. They booed his like children. Like whiny
children who didn’t get their juvenile, racist way. He responded by saying, “You can call boo all
you want, but let's call it for what it is. You remove money from a city
because we removed your god from our grounds." [1]
Parkinson’s
choice of words is very compelling. To the Tennessee House, people like Nathan
Bedford Forrest and Jefferson Davis are gods. They still owe their old money
and their generations-long positions of power to them and the institutions they
represented. I, personally, often forget how trash of a state Tennessee is.
Having been born in Memphis and living here my whole life, I go about life with
the false assumption that Tennessee is like Memphis. Memphis is by no means a
perfect city with no problems, but it’s definitely not as bad as the rest of
the state. The only thing I can think of to support me dragging the state of
Tennessee to filth is the road trips my family used to take to various places
across the state. My grandfather built this log cabin in a place called Camden,
Tennessee, and we go there quite frequently. There is no concept of “neighbors”
in Camden, but the closest house to the cabin is a man named John. I have never
met or seen John. John has at least 12 confederate flags just in his front
yard. John is like a lot of Tennessee residents who think they’re fighting fire
with fire, when in all reality, they’re fighting justice with ignorance. When I
drive anywhere in Tennessee outside of Memphis, I always keep a mental count of
the confederate flags I see. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I can’t help
it.
The
House claims that the punishment is for Memphis finding a way to get around a
law that protected the statues by selling the parks they were contained in to
nonprofit organizations, who would be allowed to remove the statues. They are
looking down on Memphis like we pulled a cheap move by finding a loophole to
try and rid the city of racist monuments. I would argue that the real cheap move
is forcing us to find loopholes because the House is protecting racist
monuments.
[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2018-04-18/tennessee-lawmakers-pull-memphis-funds-after-city-removes-confederate-statues
I really appreciate the tone of this blog post. It certainly captures the way that many people, myself included, feel with regard to the Tennessee state government and its many questionable (to put it politely) decisions.
ReplyDeleteThe public display of confederate flags is another topic that particularly interests me. I'm originally from Ohio, and the sheer number of confederate flags that I have seen while driving through rural Ohio never ceases to amaze me. While in Tennessee, I feel that the historical argument has some level of credibility, though not a lot, the fact that people in Ohio feel the need to display confederate flags baffles me. I will probably never understand what drives these people to do this.