More on the Confederate Flag : Thoughts from Kansas

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Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education. He is also a graduate student at the University of Kansas, completing a doctorate in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. When not modeling species distributions or battling creationists, he writes about developments in progressive politics and the sciences.

The opinions expressed here are his own, do not reflect the official position of the NCSE. Indeed, older posts may no longer reflect his own official position.

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More on the Confederate Flag

Category: Culture Wars
Posted on: March 19, 2007 1:47 PM, by Josh Rosenau

MB looks like he could use some help explaining to fans of the Confederate flag that a flag only represents freedom if that flag was meant to represent freedom.

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Comments

Thanks, Josh. I think the most help could come from those with special skills in communicating with rocks. Preferably boxes of them.

Posted by: MB | March 19, 2007 3:11 PM

It is not something covered here in the UK, but I do wonder how people manage to reconcile their belief that Texas didn't really like having slaves and would have got rid of them anyway, with the actual declaration of causes, which talks of little else other than the threat to slavery that they faced from the northern states.

Posted by: G. Shelley | March 19, 2007 4:21 PM

Hell, one of the founding causes of Texas was Mexico's abolishing slavery. Those fine folks at the Alamo died, in part, to create a country where other folks could own slaves.

Posted by: The Ridger | March 19, 2007 8:42 PM

Sort of a dawn-of-civilization happy face, it was all the rage 6,000 years ago. Ancient Turks loved it. Tibetans wove it into their baskets and blankets. Navajos painted it in the sand and on their pottery. Norsemen engraved on those funny helmets they wore, the ones with the Hagar the Horrible horns. It's seen on the walls of prehistoric caves as a stylized representation of the bountiful sun. Sanskrit gave it a name, a combination of "su," or good, and "asti," to be; in other words, it means "well-being."

Then Adolph Hitler came along, adopted the hooked cross (Hakencreuz) as a symbol of Arian purity or a cog in the machine that was to be a thousand year Reich, whatever, the point is: Hitler came along and ruined the swastika for all of us. Wear it now, or tattoo it on your forehead as Charlie Manson did, and most people will figure out you�re pretty much of a kook. No "bountiful sun." No "well-being." Kook, pure and simple. Not to mention: loser.

Which brings me to the Confederate flag.

A lot of people served with honorable intentions under that flag, including some of my ancestors. There was a story rolling around family reunions when I was a kid about a couple of great-great-uncles who discovered they fought against, and under, Old Glory and the Confederate battle flag against each other.

Then along came people like Edgar Ray Killen and ruined it for all. He ruined it for Robert E. Lee, who turned his back against the United States of America to fight for the Old Dominion of his native Virginia. Killen and his Ku Klux Klan adopted and distorted the stars and bars into a symbol of racist hatred.

The Confederate flag, if it ever did, no longer represents anything noble or quaint or honorable. Fly it, display it, wear it, salute it, worship it all you want -- it's your 1st Amendment right -- but it brands you as a bigot. Justify, rationalize, cite history or tradition if you can, but hard as you try, the racists have co-opted that symbol for you and ruined it. And its representation brands you as a kook, simple, and a loser.

Posted by: MonkeyHawk | March 20, 2007 6:37 AM

There's no indication at all in my genealogy that anyone in my family tree benefited directly from the "peculiar institution" of slavery. Nevertheless, when the time came to fight for farm and family, some of them took up arms, some of them bravely. Some of them under the stars and bars of the Confederate battle flag.
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All of us whites did and do benefit from slavery. The oppression of African Americans is what this country was built on. A society in which whites are elevated above others. A few benefited & continue to do so significantly more than others but make no mistake we benefited. The scars of slavery permeate our society to this day, giving whites a leg up over African Americans. The mindset of slavery that the Confederates were fighting for created a warped mindset that we know as racism. The KKK arises from that warped mindset but it did not originate it. Our society did (North and South). The Civil War was about keeping that economic system going with all its cultural trappings that came into being to perpetuate that warped mindset. No doubt that your ancestors thought they were fighting for the culture, but the culture was about keeping deeply institutionalized racism.

Posted by: ponderingfool | March 21, 2007 7:20 AM