US racism is not just a toxic legacy of its past but commonplace today

IN response to comments made by ‘Christian’ (Write Back, August 20) regarding my correspondence (August 17) in connection with the Black Lives Matter movement, I would seek to offer the following clarification.

Christian seems to be fixated on my reference to the US Civil War ballad The Day They Drove Old Dixie Down.

Unfortunately, he/she has demonstrated a misunderstanding of the significance of this potent song and, consequently, has failed to grasp the point that I was trying to make.

It is ostensibly the poignant story of a poor Tennessee farmer, facing devastation at the war’s end. However, it is ultimately a vehicle for propagation of a pernicious, racist American myth

— an elegy for the “lost cause”. This is an ideology which argues that the cause of the Confederate states, complete with slavery, was just and heroic. This message has also been part of mainstream US culture, as evidenced by such movies as the explicitly proKKK Birth Of A Nation.

Christian also infers that my interest in slavery and the BLM movement is a case of virtue-signalling about past events. This betrays his/her second major misconception: the problem of US racism is an historic issue. Overt slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment. However, it was replaced with covert slavery in the form of bonded labour and sharecropping.

The subsequent imposition of the iniquitous Jim Crow laws in the South ensured that the position of African-americans continued to be institutionally disadvantaged.

The all-too-frequent news bulletins about the shooting of black men by white police officers testify not only to this toxic legacy, but also its very contemporary relevance.

All this appears to be of little concern to Christian, who seems to think that he/she has found the true “evil” of our time, which is abortion.

I can only say this is fine by me, but this judgment represents his/her moral compass — not mine.