Which culture is that? Rednecks exist everywhere (whatever you happen to call them). Are you suggesting you have to be Southern to be a racist? I thought Randy cleared that up for y’all years ago. If you don’t like the culture in our location then just stay home. That’s all I’m asking. Seems a fair compromise. If I didn’t like the culture in Jersey, Chicago or Boston I wouldn’t travel or move there and then complain about it. If I were to say, “Oh I love Boston the location; I just hate the culture.” I would sound like an idiot. You see?
I love you so much for this.
/(thankfully) On a blue island in the middle of a red state
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Oh, but she’s an excellent, inexpensive seamstress. I’d assume she’d sew a confederate flag on your clothes for free, too.
You do realize that no one had a stars and bars up until the civil rights and mass resistance, right? All of a sudden, those things came right back into style and in some cases were being hoisted over state capitals that resisted integration.
And if some people in the south were questioning slavery, it was not the people who had power in the south (and in the US congress really up until 1860) who were not questioning it.
The truth is we have to live up to the racist past and present if we are ever going to move forward in a meaningful way. That means accepting reality and that reality has been deeply racist.
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I do see and I didn’t understand. I am definitely NOT asserting that Southern = racist, by any means. We live close to a town here in Michigan that has, to this day, a strong KKK presence sadly enough. My apologies.
I guess, for me, when I lived in Nashville, there was always this strange dichotomy. On one hand, you have this culture that has this wonderful history of politeness in society, great food, artistic achievement (literature, music) etc. But on the other hand, that holds tenaciously to a view of history that no one else can quite seem to understand and for the most part, find terribly offensive. It’s hard to reconcile.
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The Declarations of Secession speak for themselves:
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its
connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it
is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have
induced our course.Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of
slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor
supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most
important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are
peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an
imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to
the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world,
and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.
In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith
and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the
people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong
enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States,
based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States
and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery,
proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men,
irrespective of race or color–a doctrine at war with nature, in
opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the
plainest revelations of the Divine Law.
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I’ve got two houses in the South, so I keep roots there. I’ll leave when I get done taking enough of y’all’s money.
I’ve had a real gun pointed at my head. Southerners don’t generally use such direct figures of speech that involve guns or killing.
Wow. I never knew that piece of history. I feel a little sick.
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I think this is an important point. Whatever the Confederate flag may
have meant at the time of the Civil War it’s become a symbol of
racism, and has been used as one for decades.
I think it was used as a symbol or racism from the time of the civil rights movement up to the 80s, with declining support since. Real symbols of racism look more like variations of a plus sign with serifs, surrounded by a white circle.
Well by that logic ANY flag from early American history would also be a hate-symbol because it was made by racists, for racists, to represent a gov’t that treated people very differently based on their race. Yet I don’t hear complaints about that every July 4th. I strongly suspect therefore, that we’re dealing with high-sounding excuses rather than actual reasons why people want to think poorly of people displaying the Confederate Battle Flag. Why won’t they just give the real reason? My guess is it isn’t a flattering one.
Anywho I have seen the Confederate Battle Flag done up in the red, black, and green of the Pan-African movement’s flag displayed by black southerners. Would that be better?
Do you mean White Southerners? Black ones? Jewish ones?
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Read American Mediterranean, which asserts that slave holders actively sought alternatives to the end of slavery, including Confederate imperial expansion and leaving the US post war.
The entire US economy was bound up with slavery and the coming of wage labor in the north, and the tenacious hold on the republican white yeoman farmer ideal, pushed the north to look to exclude slavery but not end it, as it competed with free white labor. But much of the wage labor to be had in the antebellum was the making of cotton. The reality is that the south dominated the economy and the political structure for decades, and the secession crisis was their temper tantrum when the northern industrialists started winning out with the election of lincoln who had not intentions of ending slavery, and argued initially for colonization of blacks.
It said it right there in the confederate founding documents – they built their ideology on white supremacy. Sure, it supported a particular economic model, but it was one based on slavery, which was built on race (unlike, say Russian Serfdom, which ended in 1861, but took years to actually wind down). That’s the long and short of it. While the north was sure as hell not fighting to free the slaves (no one liked the abolitionists, as they were viewed as a bunch of extremists), the south sure as hell was fighting to keep their way of life. And then they spent the next 50 years rebuilding a racist structure, and the next 40 or 50 defending it via brute violence, which was perpetrated not just by ignorant hicks, but by respectable middle class people, so says Nancy MacLean. As I said elsewhere on this thread, the confederate flag became popular not as a point of southern pride (and despite our warts, we do have things here to be proud of, including some of the best culture in the world, created by some of the most trodden on people in this part of the country), but to protest integration. I mean, just look at this very famous picture of one of the little rock 9…
That is not some backwoods hick, shouting at that child, that was likely a middle class, respectable women, who went to church, gave to charity, and loved her children. And she is clearly gone mad with anger because this young woman wanted to be treated as a human being.
For fucks sake, can we please, please, please stop pretending that the racist past doesn’t matter in the south, because we’re all steeped in it. The confederate flag is racist and is employed for racist effect. and at the heart of it, the civil war was about slavery, not taxes… Was it Faulkner who said “the past isn’t over, it isn’t even the past”.
Oh, and the north also fought tooth and nail to disenfranchise blacks, including a big stink in places like Boston over busing in the 70s, so no one gets off clean here…
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To be fair, some might have had a confederate battle flag, like people whose parents and grandparents were confederate vets, but the raising of the flag on a large scale, especially with state support happened during Civil rights.
You have to have a strong stomach to be an historian, cause history is full of shitty things like this, and generally much worse. There is a reason I look at the history of the recording industry… it’s not nearly as depressing.
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Oh Millie, of course he means WHITE southerners, because those are the only REAL southerners… the rest of us are carpet baggers (born in Mass, so I don’t count as a real southernern, though my moms side has deep roots here in GA, while my dads is a bunch of catholic yankees - although I’m pretty pasty white myself… can’t leave the house without sunscreen lest I immediately get skin cancer… ).
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Awesome comment. And yes it was Faulkner (except for the second “the”).
Yeah. I was just hoping to get him to say it out loud. Which is a lost cause, I suppose. It’s only behind closed doors that most racist white Southerners will let it all out.
But sometimes you get outed like old Paula Deen… sadly not nearly enough.
Honestly, I think that a fair number of them don’t think of themselves as racist, though. They think it means just hating people of color and being a member of the Klan. But whatever. I’ve never had patience with that point of view, and the older I get, the less patience I have for it. I live here too and as it stands right now, I don’t intend to move. The south has some great things to recommend it - great food, lovely weather, beautiful sights, lots of pretty places to see, a deep cultural history (blues, blue grass, some great literature)… but asshats like this keep fucking it up for us. it’s frustrating.
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Yes, it does have some pretty places, good people, good food and rich culture. Kudos to you for calling out the asshats and shouting them down.
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There is a difference between a symbol made in times of racism, and one made to celebrate that racism. Jefferson may have been a slave owner, casting a serious pall on how much he truly believed all men are equal, but that still leaves his flag different from one made with a declaration claiming blacks aren’t part of that. I don’t believe for a moment you don’t understand that. This is plain sophistry.
It also makes it very hard to take your other point about tariffs being a more prominent cause seriously. Both you and others have posted document after document saying the whole thing was about slavery, and just pointing to a book that explains everything in terms of merely taxes seems an inadequate response. I mean, it would be one thing if I could trust you weren’t trying to downplay their connection to white supremacy, but pretending they were no different than anyone else in that doesn’t inspire confidence.
Meanwhile, the point remains: the Confederate flag was created by a movement that enshrined white supremacy as a founding principle, and as Mindysan33 points out, it was used more recently in opposition to things like civil rights movements. Some might use it as a symbol of the south, but generally it stands for a white south, forgetting how black people might take it if not actively antagonizing them. That history is enough reason to hate it, thanks.
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Exactly. And not even “generally”; I’d say “specifically.” And so, it’s a stick in the eye to 99.9% of black Southerners (and black people everywhere), all of this “We’re just preserving our heritage!” stuff be damned.
In terms of race, there wouldn’t be “white” without a subjugated “black.”
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