Another quote from the southern avenger piece, and he raises a point. Any discussion about the meaning of the rebel flag really must include the black viewpoint.
Ta-Nehisi Coates grew up in Baltimore. Is that southern enough?
Original source documents written by the seceding state governments in 1861, as opposed to modern day editorializing about them:
http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/declarationofcauses.html
@ucbalumnus I didn’t read the piece yet, so I can’t speak to the content . But to your statement " He’s from Baltimore , is that southern enough? As someone who was raised in Baltimore who now lives in SC , I’d have to say technically yes because Maryland is south of the Mason-Dixon Line , but in theory no to most southerners because they fought on the union side during the Civil War. No sarcasm inte
No sarcasm intended
That’s amazing, ucbalum, thanks for posting. Straight from the horses’ mouths, no northern perspective, no modern perspective. Mississippi just comes right out and says it, in the second line of their declaration:
Baltimore is definitely “up north.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that. 
One might go so far as to call it “Mid Atlantic.”
Today, I was exiting the major tollroad which starts in downtown Dallas and goes all the way to the northern suburbs. On the service road are obvious signs saying “Yield to ramp.” Today, a car decided not only that he wouldn’t yield to me, but that he would go totally ballistic that he had to pump his breaks to avoid hitting me after he’d sped up to keep me from merging into traffic. He was giving me the bird and gesturing wildly, all the while completely in the wrong.
Instead of a front license plate (which is legally required but for some reason often not complied with), he had a confederate flag plate. I have no idea where he got it, but it’s not legal per se. It made me think he was even more of a jerk than I normally would have. I guess these types of people are at least making it obvious to the rest of us who they are.
I imagine that confederate flag fans are having a pretty bad week.
“I want to believe that Southerners don’t fly that flag intending to communicate hate”
I spent my high school years in Georgia and the confederate flag was pretty visible at the time. I don’t believe the people displaying it at my high school were using it communicate hate. But, the big but - now as an adult, it’s very obvious to me that the flag does represent opposition to equality and civil rights for a great many people. The initial official display of the confederate flag by various states was in direct protest to civil rights and integration. That is an inescapable historical fact.
It’s like someone flying a swastika in their front yard as a symbol of good fortune. Yeah, maybe that’s one meaning of the the swastika, but it’s not the meaning most people think of.
BTW, your sentence would be accurate if it were written as: “I want to believe that some white Southerners don’t fly that flag intending to communicate hate”
I’m not white and once I left Georgia for college I swore to never again live in the South and avoid it as much as possible in general. I encountered more than enough hate during my years in Georgia.
People who persist in standing on the wrong side of history over issues of race and civil rights have always been mystified over why black people insist on getting their knickers in a twist over “little things”. I’m not yet 60 years old, but my first three years of education were spent in segregated schools. Brown vs.The Board was decided in 1954. I was born in 1957. I did not attend kindergarten. Yet, forth grade was the first year in which I attended integrated schools, due to protracted resistance to court mandated school integration, a resistance for which the Confederate battle flag served as an unambiguous ideological symbol. I can still remember watching news footage in which white southerner’s expressed incomprehension over the “Negro’s desire to mix with white people”. After all, “didn’t God himself separate the races”, thereby establishing “the natural order of things”?: “They have their schools. We have ours. They have their section of the movie theater. We have ours. They have a water fountain that looks just like ours. What’s the fuss about?”
I hear echos of the civil rights era white southerner’s incredulity every time many of today’s social conservatives expresses outrage over the liberal agenda to “once again stir the pot” over the Confederate flag. Just as segregation was no big deal, the racist history and ideology that that flag represents is also seen as nothing to get exercised about. They’ve revised history itself to say the CBF “has nothing to do with race” or racial oppression. When they fly it, it’s to commemorate of their “Southern heritage” (a fuzzy, amorphous, seldom delineated idea, whose understanding I suppose they think the rest of us should see as axiomatic). That many others who call themselves conservative openly use it in accordance with its racist and storied history means not a thing. That it inflicts emotional pain upon those of us for whom it was used to send a non-fuzzy, non-amorphous, clearly delineated message, matters not in the least either.
Only what they think matters, which is why it should remain on the grounds of the S.C. statehouse. You know…to commemorate “The South’s proud heritage” and all the fuzzy, amorphous, and non-delineated, but nonetheless somehow revised meaning inherent in that term.
From John M. Coski, Chief Historian of the Museum of the Confederacy, appearing on C-SPAN in 2005 (spoken text that was close captioned):
“In the 1940s when the Federal Government once again in the form of the Civil Rights Act and the Civil Rights Platform of the Democratic National Convention and Democratic Party started once again to scomber (sic) fear with the southern way of life—that is, segregation—for whatever reason people felt that the Confederate battle flag was a logical symbol to indicate their disdain for, and resistance to, the Federal government. That continued in the following years and was more pronounced after the Brown decision in 1954.
“It was then that the Ku Klux Klan used the flag much more frequently than in previous decades. The Klan began the wide use of the flag after 1954. But so did ordinary southerners. Students and their parents at rallies and resistance marches carried Confederate flags because they believed for whatever reason that the flag spoke to their resistance, not to something African-Americans imagined.
“They encountered it because white people purposely used that flag to indicate their opposition to integration. It doesn’t matter whether that opposition was based on state’s rights or white supremacy and racism, the results were the same. They were opposing rights for African-Americans. African-Americans had every reason to believe that it indicated a threat to their rights or perceived interests at the very least.
“If you want to understand why African-Americans feel threatened by the flag, don’t go back to the Civil War. Only go back to the 1950s when there were people using that flag to mean exactly what African-Americans feared.”
Ummm, I did not write anything about Baltimore in this thread.
I think the Baltimore comment/question was posted by Cardinal Fang.
Bay, you miss the point by asking if Ta-Nehisi Coates is a Northerner or a Southerner. The point is that whether you consider Baltimore part of the North or the South, Coates is an African-American, a descendant of slaves. It’s how he and others like him perceive the flag that should matter. Regardless of where he was born. The individual intent of those privately flying the flag is irrelevant; after all, as people sometimes say, “intent isn’t magic” and doesn’t wash things clean if they’re inherently soiled. As the Confederate flag has always been – not only in the 19th and early 20th century, but also since it began to be widely used by the Dixiecrats and others to signal opposition to civil rights and desegregation in 1948. That’s why it was put on the S. Carolina capital building in 1962 in the first place; nothing to do with “heritage.” So people have a right to associate all displays of the flag with its general underlying nature and purpose, regardless of the purpose individuals may have in displaying that flag in front of their houses. But that kind of display is irrelevant anyway, since nobody is trying to ban it. It’s public displays by state and local governments, etc., that people are seeking to end.
I’m sorry . It was a post above your post. Truly sorry. It was meant to go to @cardinalfang
Yes, it matters, I totally agree.
I don’t agree; I think this matters, too. I am not in favor of judging flag-flyers by the viewer’s perspective only. We had a discussion about the American flag when it was banned by six UCI student-representatives for being “oppressive.” No matter how oppressed it made them feel, the viewer should not have the only voice in defining what the flag means when it is being displayed in a public space.
In this case, I don’t disagree with taking the flag down. I don’t see any rational reason for keeping it up (but I did with the American flag). But I also don’t want to judge every SC voter, by proxy of their legislators, as racists because the flag is/was flown. I don’t think that is fair without hearing them out.
My own personal impression is that most (not all) white people in the South do in fact, fly or flew the flag as a sign of “Southern Pride,” but without regard to how it made black Americans feel. They prioritized their own feelings over the feelings of the black community for whatever reason, but most likely not because (most of them) hate black people, but rather because they hate the North/federal government more. I’m guessing they are now realizing that is not the right thing to do. Perhaps, like others have suggested, they will come up with another flag that is inclusive of everyone living in the South, and I am totally cool with that.
I don’t think anyone here is doing that at all. Judging by the photos and video I’ve seen in the last week, there are a whole heck of a lot of white S. Carolinians who understand what that flag means to blacks and want it gone. Hopefully their legislators will catch up with them.
I love the flag of The United States of America because I feel it represents all that I love about our singular Constitution, a document that ultimately mandates that we compare our stated ideals against the shortcomings of our reality. We are The United States because of that document, a plural nation to whom the world has long looked to define freedom and justice. Our flag represents us as a nation that has shown the courage time and again to move toward a more perfect union, as defined by our Constitution. I don’t know of a single African American who advocates for the removal of the U.S. flag from any government building. Those six UCI students not withstanding, I don’t think their extreme minority opinion on the U.S. flag has any legitimate place in this debate, other than perhaps to muddle and obfuscate.
Of course not. But an Anti-American flag (by which definition the secessionist, Confederate battle flag most certainly fits) being given a place of honor on American, tax payer supported buildings and grounds flies in the face of logic, doesn’t it? The cognitive disconnect which has allowed for this contradiction, however, also ironically ensured that the voices of a lot of Anti-Americans have held sway over this issue. And no matter how some viewers might like to see it, the CBF’s origins and subsequent history cannot be divorced from fact.
Indeed!
Wow, people who hate their own government, but nonetheless count upon that very entity to protect their rights…as Americans…?(head explodes!) b-(
Sorry, I don’t know how to transfer a post so I have to cut and paste the old fashioned way.
“They prioritized their own feelings over the feelings of the black community for whatever reason, but most likely not because (most of them) hate black people, but rather because they hate the North/federal government more.”
It’s not that they hate the government (although many are not fond of big government), it’s that they hate being told by “outsiders” what to think, how to act, or what they can or cannot do. There’s a stubborn, rebellious, independent streak that runs through a lot of Southerners. They resent the superior attitudes displayed by some Northerners towards the South. Also, keep in mind that as the losers of the Civil War, Southerners’ history and experiences differ from those of Northerners.
In saying this, I am not defending the CBF nor am I suggesting it should remain. I am asking that those who are quick to condemn and judge view a people with a different history, culture and experience from yours with the same sensitivity you are asking them to display toward others. They are coming around. Things move slowly in the South 