Before trotting out the "it's a symbol of heritage" line, ask yourself exactly what that heritage is.
I do not believe those who spend a few hundred to have it tattooed on their bodies, or people who buy one for $7.50 from China off Amazon [1] when they say such things, because there's no value in displaying a representation of a thing that's historically represented nothing but hate.
Owning and preserving an authentic flag shows a commitment to history. Displaying a representation of it shows a commitment to hatred.
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[0]: https://www.newsweek.com/2015/07/17/value-confederate-flag-c...
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/ZHENGYU-Polyester-Double-Sided-Milita...
Some comment I saw online made me research it, which then made me aware of other symbolism it has.
So don't be so quick to assume racism in those who fly it.
Southerner here. The South is a very diverse place with a sizable African-American population.
Perhaps I'm just missing all the African-Americans who proudly fly the Confederate battle flag, but my perception is the flag is used by a small subset of white southerners as an anti-virtue-signaling device.
Are you suggesting that African-Americans identify with the Confederate battle flag flown in service of keeping their ancestors enslaved, or did you mean that the flag had attached to a particular subset of Southern identity? Please expand, I'm curious.
Are you suggesting that African-Americans identify with the Confederate battle flag...?
No, and nothing in my comments suggested that. It makes sense that they wouldn't since their relatives probably didn't after the war. For many people, their relatives did identify with the flag. It probably started as something racist by the survivors of the war, but morphed into what it is today, something that isn't considered racist by most around where I live. Do you really think NASCAR, a big business, would have previously allowed it to be flown if it was universally considered a hate symbol?
I am saying this as gently as possible: the majority of bigots don't walk around thinking or saying "Wow I sure am a bigot!". They mostly just think of themselves as normal people with normal values.
> Do you really think NASCAR, a big business, would have previously allowed it to be flown if it was universally considered a hate symbol?
There is a team in the NFL that is named a literal slur against indigenous Americans. I am not quite sure where one would get the idea that the US sports industry is a bastion of sensitivity.
Could that be because there isn't just one type of "southern heritage?" Do you really want to equate the southern heritage of black people in the south with those who fly the Confederate battle flag?
It was started as something racist and still remains incredibly racist to pretty much everyone else, despite doe-eyed claims from southerners who want people to believe that a 5 year long pro-slavery rebellion represents the history and pride of the South.
I mean, it's not like I'm wholly unsympathetic to failed secessionist states and their symbols/paraphernalia. People still use the flag of Biafra where I'm from, after all. But those that do are self-aware enough to acknowledge/be upfront about the values they hold and the message they pass when they use it (it certainly helps that Biafra attempted to secede in response to ethnic tensions/discrimination, not because it wanted amongst other things the right to keep slaves).
It's just a symbol of identity or culture, like most flags. There's a massive cultural difference between the rural south and the highly populated coastal cities. The flag to many is a symbol of that difference, and has many of the psychological undertones that makes the "don't tread on me" flag popular, mostly a willingness to push back against external influences.
And there are a lot of people outside the South who do show and like the Confederate flag.
So while I agree that it's a symbol of an identity and culture, I don't think it's a geographic regional identity and culture.
I think you're arguing in good faith based on your own experience, but I would gently suggest this is an opportunity to consider a wider variety of data and perspectives.
There's a reason they chose Lee's flag and not a CSA flag associated directly with a rabid slaver like Jefferson Davis. Indeed, the Army of Northern Virginia flag used to be a symbol of progressive racial integration, at a time when poor white southern migrant workers and poor African Americans found common cause against unfair wages and unsafe working conditions.
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/8gvw5g...
https://images-theconversation-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/im...
History is nuanced. Insisting that your view of what a symbol means should control others is toxic and Orwellian. Our society should be better than that.
[1] https://history.army.mil/books/R&H/R&H-FM.htm, Section VI with Ulysses Simpson Grant as part of the unbroken chain of command.
Unilateral succession is illegal. Those flying the confederate flag were not defending themselves, they were committing treason. Our Union is an indestructible one. It was safeguarded then by the U.S. Army who will continue to safeguard it as long as America endures.
It feels me with great sadness to think of the blood that was spilled, but at the end of the day Americans who take up arms against the U.S. Army are criminals and traitors. No American should fly the flag of those who have killed our soldiers.
An actual moral reason not to fly the confederate flag on your home or your video game automobile would be because many black people interpret it as a racist symbol, and they might feel unloved and alienated.
A philosophical reason would be if you disagree with the sectionalist politics of it. That's why many groups opposed the introduction of the symbol into state flags in the past. That sounds more aligned with your reasons, but is a different reason. The act of flying Italian, German, Mexican, or British flags to celebrate one's ethnic heritage seems quite different than that of flying the confederate flag.
Your arguments are transparently shallow, poorly thought out, and profoundly un-American. If my arguments would satisfy an automated grading system, yours would fail immediately upon parsing. I see no value in continuing a conversation with someone who claims there is no moral foundation in opposing the killing of U.S. troops by illegal insurgents. Feel free to have the last word here on this message board; in the real world the last word was the surrender of the Confederacy.
To summarize: 1) South Carolina secedes. 2) South Carolina demands the Union remove its troops from their soil. 3) The Union refuses, garrisons a fortress on foreign soil, and attempts to resupply said garrison. 4) South Carolina offers an ultimatum--remove your soldiers or we will attack. 5) The union refuses to remove their troops from foreign soil. 6) South Carolina's militia attacks Ft. Sumter.
South Carolina's militia fired the first shots, but I'm not sure how you can say that they 'Initiated hostilities'. Occupying foreign soil has always been considered an act of war. History is written by the victors, I suppose.
After seceding those who were illegally occupying the land were the secessionists themselves. You cannot unilaterally seceded from the Union. Hundreds of thousands of my countrymen died in the Civil War to establish this principle; it is the law of the land and to imply otherwise is to dishonor their sacrifice.
No unilateral secession, period. That is what 350,000+ U.S. military personnel died for. If you believe it was legal for those folks to secede I suggest you renounce your U.S. citizenship and leave.
I just saved everyone a ton of time there.
Many times, and I can earnestly say I've never seen that. Nor in rural Pennsylvania for that matter, which I would otherwise characterize as slightly less sophisticated than NY. Are there racists in that region? Certainly. But I can't recall ever seeing somebody in those states flying the confederate flag.
I'm sure it's happened before, I'm sure you can find me local news reporting on instances of it. But it's definitely not a common sight.
If they assert that the confederate battle flag is a symbol of their heritage, then it is.
Are you going to respect that?
You can easily find (racist white) people displaying the confederate flag in northern states, but you will be hard pressed to find any black people in the south who feel regional pride toward confederate symbols.
Flying the Confederate flag is a sign to anyone else from the South that you are probably a racist. I would bet money that there is a strong correlation between “people who say it is a symbol of heritage” and “people who display the CSA flag”, because very few people are willing to come out and say “fuck yeah I am totally a racist and proud of it!”.
As a bonus, I would also bet that the overlap between “people who say it is a symbol of heritage and/or display it” and “people who are not white” is virtually nonexistant.
This isn’t surprising. An heritage is well, an heritage, which is coming from ancestors. Only very few people get to aquire culture heritage accross race boundaries (for example by adoption). It’s like saying the overlap of "people who celebrate Chinese new year" and "people who are not asian" is virtually non-existent to shame them; this make no sense.
Like, okay, sure, I guess the pointy white hood your grandfather wore when he was a Grand Wizard of the KKK is part of your heritage, but if you take it out and wear it around town, people are gonna be all "hey look at that racist jerkass", you know? And if I hung up a CSA flag outside my house in a big Southern city, all my neighbors would say the same thing no matter how much I tried to convince them it's just me celebrating my heritage.
The winner gets to make the rules. The South has had 150+ years to celebrate their treason. It's more than enough time that the winners put that symbol to rest.
> resulted in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands
In other words, a war
It's got a lot of history being flown specifically to spite black people -- if you want to reclaim that as a non-racist symbol, you'll have to do a lot of work. Otherwise the obvious response is "heritage of what, racism? Why are you proud that your parents tried to keep black people from voting?"
The Confederate flag is even more powerful because people have been convinced it has something to do with Southern (white) culture and Yankee oppression. Maybe they need a new symbol, that isn't intimitely tied to slavery.
https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/14-wor...
The fact that it isn't racist in, say, China doesn't mean it also isn't racist when spray painted on a synagogue.
> While the Nazi flag may be a racist symbol, the Swastika, however, is not a racist symbol.
You deliberately distinguished between the Nazi flag and the Swastika, an element incorporated into the Nazi flag, and claimed that between the two, only the flag was racist.
And I'm merely pointing out that in the Western world the only part of the Nazi flag even considered racist is the Swastika.
Symbols are not racist, which is what should obviously be taken away from this.
Heritage of what?
The South has hundreds of years of history. Why are the 4 years of the Confederacy so celebrated?
I mean it's definitely being flown by racists and edgy teenagers and I think there's a strong case to be made that a different design is warranted since the heritage people have been largely unsuccessful in keeping the iconography from becoming a racist dogwhistle. But I think it's important to meet the heritage people where they are and start from there.
One could even argue that it's at best negligent to fly a flag without knowing the most basic history of its symbolism, but if that's really what's going on, then surely it wouldn't be hard to educate all these people who are unintentionally flying the flag.
The Confederate flag has always been a racist dogwhistle. Right from day 1.
The flag, as far as I understood it, was about being a rebel, “don’t tell me what to do” anti-authority.
Maybe my experience is quite different from yours. I never saw a klan rally or anything like that.
I did only buy a “git ‘er done” lighter from a gas station for its redneck kitsch. I didn’t intend to be a racist signal. Comically it’s stuck somewhere and I suspect should my grandkids ever find it in my estate it will be revered as some nazi memorabilia, incorrectly based on my intent.
The point it became a "southern symbol" is a previous set of edgy teenagers and racists who flew it while legislating against black people and trying to stop civil rights.
The point of that iconography is to be a racist dogwhistle, and it's been a very successful one over the past hundred years
I think the fundamental argument here is this: clearly the Confederate flag has been spoiled -- the racists won out and now people associate the flag more with racists than Southern/rural pride.
What should happen? There are people who I think have a legitimate non-racist benign claim to the flag but they're now in the minority and being drowned out by racists. And the public discussion on the matter is an absolute shitshow because those people see the desire to ban the Confederate flag as a racist symbol as an attack on Southern culture/pride. Worse! We have people in this fight who actually are doing that because there is a very real anti-rural anti-Southern sentiment that exists in the US. And on the other side we have racists who are hiding behind Southern pride in an attempt to keep their symbol. Ugh.
So everyone thinks everyone else is arguing in bad faith, nobody believes anything anyone else says, some of the people are actually lying and arguing in bad faith and we're all arguing against caricatures of our opponents.
That pretty much sums up most modern sociopolitical discouse right there.
This postulates that the Confederate flag did not start out spoiled by racism.
If it's being used now by people intending it to represent regional pride who are simply unaware of its history (which I find unlikely, but a lot of people are claiming that), then all it should take to convince them to take down their flags is to share that history with them.
As a symbol for part of the Confederate army, it's still racist even in its first use. Some of the people fighting might have been conscripted against their will, but the symbol itself is still one that promoted slavery of black people
The flag was flown as the symbol of the actual Confederacy for a short time sure, because the Confederacy itself was short lived. But it's been flown as a symbol of southern pride for a long time since then.
And traditions need only span one's own lifetime to be meaningful.
Wouldn't surprise me to see these people switch to one of the other, lesser-known variants to work around the ban.
That's exactly what Georgia did. In 1956 they added the Confederate Battle Flag to their state flag in support of white supremacy and segregation, and in 2003 switched it for the Confederate Stars and Bars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Georgia_(U.S._state)
>On April 23, 1863, the Savannah Morning News editor William Tappan Thompson, with assistance from William Ross Postell, a Confederate blockade runner, published an editorial championing a design featuring the battle flag on a white background he referred to later as "The White Man's Flag."[6] In explaining the white background, Thompson wrote, "As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause."
That's why it's illegal in Germany in the first place; if there was universal acceptance that it was an obscenity there wouldn't be much purpose in banning it.
Another issue, of course, is that teaching about the US civil war, and general cultural treatment of it, has been, and in some cases still is, far more dishonest than teaching about World War 2 in Germany. Note that in this thread there are people questioning whether it was about slavery. The initiators on the confederate side would not have questioned that, they could hardly have been more clear that it was. There's a huge amount of mainstream cultural baggage glorifying the confederacy and important confederate figures in a way that there isn't about the Nazis (with the possible exception of some rather creepy Rommel apologia that shows up sometime).