Vox Sentences: America argues over whether the flag of a white supremacist army is racist

Tear down this flag

The South Carolina and American flags flew at half-mast after the shooting. The Confederate flag did not. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

• The Charleston shooting has reignited debate over the propriety of flying the Confederate flag.

  [NYT / Katie Rogers]

• The state continues to fly the flag on the grounds of the Statehouse in Columbia; it wasn't even put at half-mast in the wake of the shooting.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• In one Facebook photo, the suspected shooter, Dylann Roof, was pictured proudly posing in front of a car with Confederate plates.

  [Mother Jones / Tim Murphy]

• A classmate told the Daily Beast that Roof "had that kind of Southern pride … He made a lot of racist jokes."

  [The Daily Beast / Katie Zavadski]

• His roommate, Dalton Taylor, said Roof was "big into segregation" and that "He said he wanted to start a civil war."

  [ABC News / Emily Shapiro]

• The Confederate States of America wasn't the only white supremacist government Roof championed; he also took photos wearing flags of the toppled white-minority regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• During the shooting, Roof reportedly shouted at the overwhelmingly black congregation, "You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go."

  [Slate / Jamelle Bouie]

• To be absolutely clear: the Confederate flag is a symbol of slavery and anti-black violence. Indeed, in South Carolina the white supremacist terrorist group the Carolina Rifle Club adopted the flag as its symbol in 1869. White people in South Carolina have been killing in the flag's name for 146 years.

  [Google Books / John M. Coski]

• And the flag first went up at the Statehouse in 1962 and was meant to signal opposition to desegregation and the civil rights movement.

  [Washington Post / Justin Wm. Moyer]

• Historian Matthew Guterl puts it well: "When people say 'heritage not hate,’ they are omitting the obvious, which is that that heritage is hate."

  [Washington Post / Roberto Ferdman]

• Relatedly, it's absolutely obscene that towns, roads, schools, etc. are still named after racist traitors like Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Bizarrely, a number of conservative politicians have attempted to portray this as fundamentally an anti-Christian crime, rather than an anti-black hate crime.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp]

• South Carolina Sen. and presidential candidate Lindsey Graham (R) wins special points for having the temerity to defend the flag as "part of who we are," and said flying it outside the statehouse "works here."

  [CNN / Alisyn Camerota]

• Last year, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) defended it too, claiming, "I can honestly say I have not had one conversation with a single CEO about the Confederate flag … We really kind of fixed all that when you elected the first Indian-American female governor."

  [Talking Points Memo / Caitlin MacNeal]

• I'll give Ta-Nehisi Coates the last word: "Take down the flag. Take it down now. Put it in a museum. Inscribe beneath it the years 1861-2015. Move forward. Abandon this charlatanism. Drive out this cult of death and chains. Save your lovely souls. Move forward. Do it now."

  [The Atlantic / Ta-Nehisi Coates]

Waiting for Goffman

Sociologist. TED talk-giver. Would-be getaway car driver? (Bret Hartman/TED)

• If you haven't been following the Alice Goffman controversy, you've been missing one of the most fascinating stories to come out of academia in years.

  [NY Mag / Jesse Singal]

• The basics: Goffman, starting as a Penn undergrad and continuing as a Princeton sociology grad student, embedded in a poor neighborhood of Philadelphia for six years, and befriended a group of young black men living there.

  [American Sociological Review / Alice Goffman]

• The research became her senior thesis, her doctoral dissertation, an acclaimed journal article, and a book, On the Run, which has sold well among laypersons as well as sociologists.

  [Amazon / Alice Goffman]

• Her TED talk on her research is nearing a million views.

  [TED / Alice Goffman]

• Criticism of On the Run initially centered on whether it was appropriate for a privileged white woman going to Ivy League schools to tell the stories of poor black men.

  [New Inquiry / Christina Sharpe]

• But then, an anonymously circulated 60-page critique accused Goffman of fabricating major events in On the Run.

  [Pastebin]

• Northwestern law professor Steven Lubet then published an explosive review, both accusing Goffman of inaccuracies and possible fabrication and, worse, alleging that in the book she confesses to conspiracy to commit murder.

  [New Rambler Review / Steven Lubet]

• The allegation concerns an event described in an appendix wherein Goffman describes driving her friend Mike around after the death of their friend Chuck, trying to find his killer.

  [NYT / Jennifer Schuessler]

• On Goffman's telling, Mike thought he saw the killer and walked out of the car with a Glock in his jeans while Goffman "waited in the car with the engine running, ready to speed off as soon as Mike ran back and got inside."

  [Amazon / Alice Goffman]

• Goffman writes, explicitly: "I got into the car because, like Mike and [their other friend] Reggie, I wanted Chuck's killer to die."

• Goffman issued a response to Lubet, rebutting claims of false or fabricated details and arguing that her ride (rides, actually) with Mike trying to find Chuck's killer were "about expressing anger and about grieving, not about doing actual violence."

  [Alice Goffman]

• University of Wisconsin - Madison, where Goffman is now an assistant professor, issued a statement calling the accusations against her "without merit."

  [University of Wisconsin - Madison]

• Lubet was not impressed, noting that Goffman's response directly contradicted her account of the rides after Chuck's killing in On the Run, implying that she either did commit a serious violent felony, or else grossly embellished the story.

  [New Republic / Steven Lubet]

• Part of the problem is sociology's approach to ethnography, which allows books like Goffman's wherein the identities of subjects are obscured so much that the work can't possibly be fact-checked.

  [Slate / Leon Neyfakh]

• A revealing quote from Harvard sociologist Christopher Winship: "If you told a sociologist they got a particular fact wrong, they’d say, 'Well, that doesn’t matter—what’s important is that it’s true in a bigger sense.'"

  [Christopher Winship to Slate / Leon Neyfakh]

• If you read one thing on this whole saga, read Jesse Singal's masterful feature, where he went to Philadelphia and found some of Goffman's subjects. Singal literally stood out on a street handing out Munchkin donuts to get people to talk and help him find the pseudonymous book characters.

  [NY Mag / Jesse Singal]

• Singal's basic conclusion is that Goffman's book is "almost entirely true," but somewhat imprecise with facts at times. The biggest mystery, to my mind — is Goffman guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, or did she embellish her account? — is unresolved.

• One last fun fact: Goffman is the daughter of the late Erving Goffman, my personal favorite sociologist. Here's "On Cooling the Mark Out," which is on one level about how con men console their victims, but is really about how people reconcile themselves to major setbacks: people who don't get into law school deciding they didn't actually want to be lawyer, people who get fired but convince themselves it's a blessing, etc.

  [Erving Goffman]

Misc.

• Happy Juneteenth!

  [Slate / Jamelle Bouie]

• Google built a neural net that can recognize buildings, animals, and objects in images. The program changes pictures to emphasize what it recognizes, resulting in trippy stuff like this:

  [The Guardian / Alex Hern]

Google

• Somehow I missed this at the time, but in 2012, MIT students converted the tallest building on campus into a giant, playable, multi-color Tetris game.

  [Interesting Hacks To Fascinate People: The MIT Gallery of Hacks]

• This is just a very good chronicle of the posthumous journeys of Napoleon's penis.

  [Washington Post / Ishaan Tharoor]

Verbatim

• "If you want to write a musical about Andrew Jackson, you have to preface his name with 'Bloody Bloody.' Hamilton sells musicals on his own."

  [Washington Post / Alexandra Petri]

• "Say things like 'Yes,' and 'I agree,' and 'I remember that' and 'I also venerate our King, as you do' instead of opening conversations with 'WHO ARE YOU' and 'I DON’T THINK TREASON IS A VERY BIG DEAL.'"

  [The Toast / Mallory Ortberg]

• "The point is not for a cat to emerge. The point is for Mike Bloomberg to have cats in a bag. Until they are all dead."

  [Politico / Luke O'Brien]

• "Johnny Depp had to go and fuck it up for everybody by re-introducing the concept of failure and disappointment and unforgivable awfulness back into cinema."

  [AV Club / Nathan Rabin]

• "It came down to the wire, but we ended up nixing the ending where Ross knocks down the cockpit door and calmly states, 'Now is the time for sea to consume us. Now is the time we will become immortal.'"

  [Clickhole]

Song of the day

• Neil Young, "Southern Man"

  [YouTube]