A view from the south: let the Confederate flag go

[malaise]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/03/south-flag-confederate-pride-hatred-racists
<snip>
That flag has come crashing into the global conversation after an avowed white supremacist massacred nine parishioners in an African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina. He tore up hearts and families, left a state without its senator and a nation bereft. A crime so senseless leaves us grappling for something we can blame, or fix. We’re sickened by Dylann Roof’s self-portrait with a semi-automatic pistol and Confederate flag. In the wider world where it’s seldom seen, people must wonder how that emblem waved by a racist vigilante could ever have held appeal for local historians or thoughtful honour students.

Who gets to draw the line between tradition and callous intransigence? Where does sensitivity become censorship? Tarring whole communities with the brush of racism doesn’t bring us grace. I could have whisked my daughter from the home of the Rebels to a private school where she wouldn’t have to play Dixie. But this is our home, and I believe public schools function best when we all support our kids together. I think they’re better citizens for having grown up with many kinds of people, to be judged by the contents of their characters, not their tattoos.

We don’t want outsiders telling us what we are. So the duty is ours, and ours alone, to distinguish our past from our future. The Confederate flag is anathema to that project. Whatever it meant in the 1860s, since then it has been deliberately attached to a racist agenda, beginning in 1948 when the new, segregationist Dixiecrat party dug it out of mothballs. (Dixie, alas, was their fight song too.)

My southern home is not that nation. This month the Confederate flag finally came down from several southern state houses, and my neighbour’s barn. Our governor banned it from licence plates. The stock car drivers of Nascar, that bastion of good-ol-boys, expelled it from the racetracks. We’re honouring heritage by tapping our well of kindness, knowing that for too many people those colours evoke terror and despair. No more. Now is the moment in history when we send that flag to the graveyard.

[Archae]

1. There still are too many who susbscribe to the fantasy, other than the reality.

The fantasy? "Gone With The Wind."

The reality? "12 Years A Slave."

[malaise]

2. Indeed

and there are still some who would practice slavery tomorrow without batting an eyelid.