DALLAS, Texas — So I am sure everyone has either read, seen and/or heard South Carolina’s state representative Jenny Horne’s impassioned speech as why the “Stars and Bars” needed to be removed from the South Carolina state capitol grounds. If you haven’t, just take a look at the CNN story that I posted here.

Ever since the Charleston, S.C. tragedy where nine African Americans lost their lives behind a sensless shooting of a young man who has a warped sense of reality, there has been a conversation about racism, the meaning of this particular flag and a near “uprising” of African American ‘leaders’ wanting something to be done.

Now I put the word “leaders” in quotes for a reason and that reason is simple: this debate has been going on for as long as many of us can remember and nothing was done then but now it seems that this is the time to do it now.

Don’t get me wrong here. It has been a far too long of a period for this symbol of hatred be flown on a public ground where taxpayers were footing the bill for the landscaping but as Rep. Horne put it, “I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful, such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds on Friday.”

She and so many others are right: it took a tragedy like this to shake this country to its core foundation to move in a direction that should have happened years and years ago.

But I do have a fundamental problem when people, especially many in the Black community, believe that their voice has been speaking out on this issue for decades.

Look that voice probably has been speaking out for years but it only got louder when something like this type of shooting happened or when a man is dragged behind a pick up or when a youth is killed on a sidewalk near his dad’s home. When these incidents don’t happen or are brought to the forefront thanks to social media, where are these same voices? Are they being heard just as loud?

Maybe they have…maybe they haven’t.

With all of that said, I just have one final question: why did it take so long for the people of South Carolina realize that this particular flag bore no honor (as it was probably intended) but defined two factions of what still exists today: racism is real.

And if took a shooting of this magnitude to shake a state’s foundation about its heritage, how long will be when other forms of racial injustice fall?

One may never know.

Hopefully it won’t take another tragedy such as what happened in Charleston, S.C. to remind us that this country has so far to go.