Those who want to "celebrate" their Southern "heritage" have plenty of symbols and flags to choose from that don't have inherently racist and treasonous implications.
Such as? What are those examples?
Is there a reason you feel the need to put scare quotes on celebrate and Southern heritage? Are they not allowed to have a heritage?
I don’t want to defend the flag, because the Confederacy was a monstrosity. But I also don’t like seeing people that have never met a Southerner in their lives (not necessarily you specifically, but certainly most people attacking it) thinking they know all about it and all about the people that fly it.
There are ample numbers- by no means a majority, but certainly a large number- of Black people that use the flag because, whatever its flaws and whatever evils committed under it, that flag is the most popular symbol of Southern culture- their culture.
That’s another factor; most people insulting the South don’t realize just how much of their attacks land on Black people themselves.
My first example of this came when I was ~7 and Robinsons' badges that I'd been collecting since a toddler were seen as an image of racism. It didn't take much work to accept that they were no longer acceptable and that while fun to collect, their time had passed. As it happened, at around that time collecting Star Wars figurines became the de jour thing, so there was something new to enjoy in it's place.
Some people still swear that the badges' meaning is divorced from the racism, and still collect them to this day. I don't know how they can really.
For info on the badges I'm talking about: http://www.golligosh.co.uk/
If you're young, you have many years ahead of you. A lot of time for culture and norms to keep changing and evolving. I guarantee that one day, you're going to wake up as an old person, and something that you like that's innocuous today will have been deemed terrible and hateful by a future generation. Maybe even for good reasons. You'll be kicked off platforms, called ignorant, and shunned for being associated with this now-controversial thing. It's going to be confusing. You're going to feel as though the world has gone off in some crazy direction and left you behind.
I'm not saying have empathy for racists. But maybe we could try to put ourselves into the shoes of someone for whom time and culture are moving too fast and imagine how disorienting and confusing what's going on today might be for them. I'd guess that these people might want to lash out at the rest of the world who suddenly seem to be against them. Or turn inward into hermits and avoid society. I don't really understand it, but I'm still young enough to keep up with all this change. But I feel I'll be left behind eventually. It'll probably happen to us all.