Should the confederate flag be removed from the state house in South Carolina and other official government places, absolutely! Should the confederate flag be removed from the General Lee on Dukes of Hazzard, meh.
As with everything that is extrapolated to death, this debate was taken to it's least logical conclusion when TV land removed re-runs of a decades old show about an orange Dodge Charger and the people who drove it. This decision served to drum up interest in a bad show with cool car chases; sure to keep Bo, Luke, Daisy and Cooter in the luxurious glow of royalty checks for at least a couple more years. It also highlighted the preposterous, utterly ridiculous nature of what we deem newsworthy and the instantaneous way in which some human beings choose to take offense over the most asinine things.
A couple of days later and social media is littered with posts celebrating the young woman who removed the flag from the capital grounds and defensive memes about how not everyone who flies the flag is racist. First of all flying the confederate flag in an official government capacity is very different from allowing some guy to paint one on a truck, but I will get to that later.
Are you racist for flying the Confederate flag? Maybe you are, I tend to think most people are at least a little bit racist. We tend to treat racism as if it were an exception to the love and harmony we share as people in a nation that resembles a coke commercial. We do not live in that world. We live in a place stained by generations of institutionalized racism that continues to foster inequity in education, economic opportunity and in glaring, searing injustice in our justice system.
Racism is not an exception. It is a living, breathing organism in our society that permeates to our very core. It is a monster that we did not individually create and are individually powerless to stop. It goes well beyond a celebrity secretly caught saying the "N" word or some college fraternity singing drunken, racist songs. But this is what we like to focus on because it makes these issues seem smaller and more easily manageable, instead of what they are, gigantic messes that have no easy fixes and require a level of inward assessment that most people will never attempt, because it is painful and difficult.
I imagine most people who fly the confederate flag, for whatever reason, don't really think about institutional racism or the legacy of inequity when doing so. They probably think that they are good people who do nice things for others, maybe they are. They probably think they can fly the flag because it is their right to do so, it is. They may think they are honoring their ancestors, I could speak volumes to my disagreement with this but that is another post entirely. Maybe they just want to hear Skynard play Free Bird, well so do I, as long as I never have to Hear Sweet Home Alabama again!
If you fly the confederate flag, let me admit, I don't get it. Most of my relatives who were in the US at the time of civil war were confederates, but I am not a southerner. I am a westerner and not one given to romantic notions of how the past was somehow better. What I would ask of anyone who flies the flag is to really think about their reasoning and consider other perspectives.
The confederate flag may be a point of ancestral pride to some but to others is a frightening reminder of slavery, intimidation, segregation and lynching. It is frightening to many, who have a core visceral reaction to the very sight of the stars and bars. It is a reminder of a terrible ancestral legacy to those who watched the flag used first for the confederacy and then co-opted by the KKK and other groups who sought to intimidate black people, Jewish people, Asians people, Latinos, immigrants and even Catholics.
Maybe those who fly the confederate flag are trying to rehabilitate it as a symbol. Maybe, like with African Americans who use the "N" word, they are trying to put some kind of good spin on an inanimate thing that has been used to for the purposes of evil. If this is the case, I offer the same argument I would to those attempting to rehab the "N" word. Words and symbols have power, they have legacies and meanings. We did not create these legacies and meanings, we cannot change them.
My personal hope is that the confederate flag would die to history, just like the "N" word. Does this mean that I believe people who fly it are bad? No! I have met people who said the most ignorant things and yet, when it came down to it, showed the deepest levels of human compassion. I have seen people who talk about helping others on a large scale yet ignore the suffering of those right in front of them. Life is too long and complicated for labels that fit into facebook memes or for simple solutions to deeply rooted problems.
As for allowing the confederate flag to fly on government property. Let me first admit that I loved my General Lee toy car and Boss Hogg action figure as a child, I still wonder what happened to them.
The flag of the Confederacy was the flag of a nation that began in open rebellion with the United States of America. This was in essence the flag of a self declared nation at war with the United States. In this vein of logic the confederate flag would be on par with the flags of Britain, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, North Korea and the Ottoman Empire.
As to the heritage argument. Yes many people have ancestors who fought for the confederate nation and live in the 11 states that formed this nation. We also have several states that were a part of Mexico until they were lost during the Mexican American war. There are many people living in the United States who are descendants of Mexican veterans of the Mexican American War. Imagine the uproar if a state decided to fly the Mexican flag on official government property, let alone any preposterous attempts to fly the official flag of the Ottoman Empire.
Beyond these arguments, there is a human one. The government, as flawed as it is, is supposed to represent all people. Openly endorsing a symbol that is so deeply offensive to a large portion of the population falls far short of this aim. So yes, it is your right to fly the Confederate flag on your scale model General Lee or rock the stars and bars on that old Skynard t-shirt, but no, this is not the same as flying the flag high on the grounds of a state capitol, it is not the same at all.
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