My posts here have, to this point, steered clear of politics and social issues that might be considered hot-button, or perhaps more aptly put, subjects related to the culture wars so prominent in our time and place. I also like to use pictures, but I couldn’t bring myself to post a picture of the confederate flag. While this will largely be the case in this space, a recent thought pointed out an irony or two lurking behind the use of the Confederate Flag as a symbol of “Southern Pride” and not Southern Prejudice.
Before I get into the ironies, I want to make something clear. The American Civil War was about slavery. Full. Stop. The view that the Civil War was about states’ rights is simply false. Please check out the following website for more. Briefly, the Southern states were angry that Northern states were not adhering to a federal law about fugitive slaves and wanted the federal government to enforce the laws within the states. The South was fine with federalism when it suited them. Further, there are several direct statements that claim that secession and the war were about slavery and that the south did not believe that the black man has the status of a white man and was thus supposed to be enslaved. The sad part is that for those who believe otherwise none of this evidence will do anything to change their views. At some point in my life I would have accepted that states’ rights were part of the reasons for the rebellion, but as I’ve learned more, the evidence clearly shows that this idea is at best a red herring, and at worst a malicious obfuscation to somehow put lipstick on the pig that was slavery. Oh, and I’m sorry to the pigs I’ve offended with this last statement. Pigs don’t enslave other pigs.
Now let’s get to one of the first ironies of the use of the Dixie Flag. Many, a majority of Americans in fact, believe that the Dixie flag is a symbol of Southern Pride and not racism. In an odd turn of history, the famous, though little used Stars and Bars flag, has become a symbol of this pride. As someone who’s resided in various parts of the south for over two decades, I see the flag in peoples’ yards, on highway billboards, bumper-stickers, widow decals, and even larger than life actual flags on the highway. At one point there were three flying within a mile of my home. It’s as if a large portion of American society has tried to resurrect or perhaps rehabilitate this symbol into something opposite of what its history shows.
The irony shouting at us in this approach, if indeed this is what’s happened, is that they are taking the specific symbol from a particular time that represented, in war, the very thing the war was about, slavery. If you want to take pride in southern culture, why use a symbol that is so indelibly linked to the cruel and inhumane treatment of a race of people? Why choose a symbol that represents the original sin of this country and the dehumanization and killing of hundreds of thousands of human beings? Surely there’s another symbol of the South that could do the work without all the baggage that goes with it.
The irony isn’t simply that the choice of symbol is so odd. The real irony lies in the apparent and obvious contradiction in what the flag meant and what it’s intended to mean. If we want to celebrate those parts of the south that are things we should have pride in, crawfish boils, barbeque, swamps, pine forests, and some wonderful weather, why would we choose to use a symbol that can so clearly be offensive to those people who see it as directly related, which it is, to slavery?! Why choose a symbol that represents, historically, the abject viciousness that was slavery and the culture that went to war over it? Rebellion in the name of the enslavement of others, is not something to be celebrated, it’s something to be mourned. It’s quite literally absurd to try and rehabilitate a symbol that is so soaked in the blood of not just slaves, but in the lives lost in the war over that abhorrent institution. If a coalescence around the parts of southern culture is what is sought, then using the flag of the rebellion should never have made it as a possibility. Furthermore, the history of the flag’s resurgence belies that it really wasn’t about pride in things Southern, but a response to a resurgence in the prejudices against black Americans.
It’s surely one of the greatest modern historical ironies that a symbol of degradation has become a symbol of pride. In fact, the divisiveness that the current controversy surrounding the flag would have made the secessionists proud. They wanted a nation divided and they’re getting it. They just didn’t get it in their lifetimes.
As a concluding post-script, some might object that the use of flag is akin to groups who’ve adopted terms of hatred and turned them into terms of empowerment, e.g. the “N” word and a word for gay men that rhymes with maggot. There are a couple of reasons not to buy this line of thought. First, southerners never had the term “rebel” or the flag associated with them used to harm them. To make the comparison is not even to compare apples to oranges. It’s to compare apples to mud pies or something equally as nonsensical. If those terms were used in a negative way, at best it would have lasted for a couple decades since the flag gained resurgence as a symbol of pride fewer than 60 years later. The second reason to deny this comparison is that the flag isn’t a word and no one used it to malign anyone. It was and is a symbol. Someone can use a word to hurt someone. One doesn’t call someone a flag or use it to demean and harm another as one can with a word. Sticks and stones may break bones, but words can have a lasting and accreting harm that sticks and stones lack.
If we’re ever to deal with the original sin of slavery, to do so requires an honest reckoning with the tortured history of race and value in this country’s history.
Is this a historical reductionist satire I'm not getting? Mea culpa, if so. But I didn't see a single joke in here outside that possibility. Or, maybe I did. I'll have to stew on it.