The flag is down, the fight goes on.

• Author: Gray, Kevin Alexander
• Position: Column

A lot of people ask me why I stay in South Carolina. Well, my father is from South Carolina. But the reality is that you can't meet too many black people who don't have links to South Carolina. Their ancestors came through here. Sullivan's Island is our Ellis Island. We say that South Carolina is the ideological home of white supremacy. Somebody has to be here to fight that. People who say, "America is the land of immigrants," need to understand that heritage of enslavement, of kidnapping. America is the land of immigrants and descendants of kidnappees. And most of them came in through South Carolina.

In South Carolina, the Confederate flag is down now, but the fight goes on. Because the fight is about the underpinnings of racism and white supremacy in this country. The foundation of the progressive movement is fighting that racism.

The progressive movement was founded on the idea that there is no master race, no enslaved race, no superior race, no lesser race, no exceptional nation, no chosen people, no people who are genetically predisposed to rule, to commit crimes, to be poor, to be rich, to have less intelligence or to have a lesser or greater work ethic than anybody else. The foundation of the freedom struggle, the foundation of the progressive struggle, is to oppose judging, punishing, and abusing people because of their skin color or any other biological factor. That's what we're about. That's the movement that we have to integrate into who we are and how we deal with the politics of this country.

When the campaign bus pulls up to our communities, that's what we expect out of our politicians. We expect them to understand that our fight is to end skin privilege and racism in this country. Our movement is connected to the abolitionist movement, and the civil rights movement, and the peace movement. Our movement is about ending this idea of second-class citizenship and bridging the gap between race and class and man-made borders and respecting human rights here and abroad.

Respecting people's rights, respecting people's humanity both here and abroad is what the progressive movement is about. It's about asking: "What happened to that peace dividend?" Why is it that we pay $1.3 million per troop per tour in Afghanistan? Why is it that my generation and my kids' generation and my grandkids' generation have to face the prospect of endless war? We challenge this idea of empire, this idea that America is supposedly the greatest country on...