The Confederate Flag: Racist or Southern Heritage?

Working and traveling around the south, I encounter the confederate flag in many ways. On bumper stickers, hanging on someone's house, a confederate flag bikini, T shirts. I never asked anyone about why they wear/have this flag, but I'm wondering is there a way for it not to be seen as racist. I'm sure some people have the idea it's a way to show a sense of southern pride, ie where one is from. What are your thought on this?

My thought is that it's racist.

ever seen an Afro-American with this flag on his bumper/or whatever?

How is the rebel flag not a racist symbol?

Is it racist when a bunch of cluelss Scottish twats put it on the cover of their album?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f9/Give_out_but_don%27t_give_up_album_cover.jpg

oh man, people are constantly arguing over this in letters to the editor in my hometown paper. i mean this has been going on for years and years and years. it's them saying it's part of the heritage out there & isn't meant to offend anyone basically. the latest flare up was after the parents of black students at the high school objected to kids wearing it at school, so the schools banned it (good for them), and then a bunch of people freaked out.

Someone's gonna lock this, right?

in about 300 posts, yes

Southern Brooklyn Hertigae, maybe.
http://gothamist.com/2009/07/29/bay_ridge_man_displays_confederate.php

Sorry I should've used the search function.

These choices are not mutually exclusive, btw.

I wonder what George Clinton feels about being on an album with this as the cover.

one time at the boxing matches in Greensboro some guy came in from TN with trunks that had the Confederate flag on them. I don't know how the rest of G-boro feels about it but the boxing public was way not into it, it was hilarious - the whole room did a double-take when this guy got in the ring, he was the most-hated heel of the night.

Chris Troupe, who had come up from Georgia & whom I ran into five minutes later in the men's room as he was unwrapping his fists, knocked him out.

These choices are not mutually exclusive, btw.

This is the pink "DUH" in the room.

Yeah rly, my answer to the thread question is "YES".

Sad about the General Lee, my favorite car of childhood.

Is it racist when a bunch of cluelss Scottish twats put it on the cover of their album?

To be fair though, clueless Scottish twats are responsible for a lot of the "heritage" of the South

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVQ0fvsv1DU

There's little to be proud of here. The Stars and Bars is a terrorist icon; the battle flag of a confederation of states who tried to destroy the Union so they could continue enslaving people in a supposedly free republic. The justification for this through virulently malicious yet completely specious racism would be risible were it not the source of a great deal of pain and evil and the economic ramifications of the South's attachment to slavery were that it lagged behind the North, Britain, Germany and even France as an agricultural commodities backwater. Anyone who fails to see the contradictions in Jeffersonian democracy as practiced in the American South isn't really looking at Monticello too closely.

There are many things about where one is from that should not be embraced. But it seems like I've encountered a lot of people in the south that have a blind sense of allegiance to "where I'm from." And equally strong is a fear of any intrusions into this history and it's preservation. This means keeping out "others", whomever the others are. I've heard a lot of hatred towards yankees and other for foreigners. It's always struck as odd the amount of time spent thinking about yankees and hating them, when I've never heard much talk when I'm north about the south.

well uh... is it really surprising that the losers of a war are more resentful than the winners?

But still??

these sorts of easy-to-blame-somebody-else historical grievances tend to stick around. cf balkans etc

I have genuine sympathy for Southerners in that regard but it has not nor will it do them any good to defend an indefensible past and if they resent being lectured at by 'others' just put two or three good ideas together and reform of your own volition.

http://www.academicearth.org/courses/the-civil-war-and-reconstruction-era-1845-1877

if y'all have 27 hours to kill you HAVE GOT to get into this

ps fuck the south, sherman didn't do enough lol

Everything awful thing you need to know about the American South is there in the lyrics to "Simple Man" by Lynyrd Skynyrd. It's not in "Sweet Home Alabama." No, it's this epic, triumphant paeon to being stubbornly uneducated, stubbornly religious, indeed stubbornly stubborn, that really captures the mood and attitude of the American South.

When you lose a war that bloody and brutal, you really LOSE the war. The South lost the war so badly that generations later, there's no forgetting. I imagine that at some point not too far into the war, it ceased to be about economic and human rights issues, and just became about a big bag of "fuck you." You killed my wife, you burned my babies, you stopped at nothing and left us with nothing, and fuck you. Yeah, they're still angry about it. I almost understand.

It can't help that they started it, too. It's one thing if the Mongols waltz in and fuck you over, but when you start a war with your cousins and your cousins kick your ass...

I hate it here so much.

It can't help that they started it, too. It's one thing if the Mongols waltz in and fuck you over, but when you start a war with your cousins and your cousins kick your ass...

'cept civil wars are the worst

ever seen an Afro-American with this flag on his bumper/or whatever?

a related question - do you get African Americans from the South going "I love the South", or do they all go "I hate where I am from"? Put another way, is regional pride not an option for them?

When you lose a war that bloody and brutal, you really LOSE the war.

the funnny thing is that there are countries that fought bloody and brutal civil wars where the losing side (and everyone else) just decided to pretend it never happened afterwards. I am thinking here of Finland and Nigeria, to pick two very different examples.

uh dude there are plenty of african americans that love the south

do you get African Americans from the South going "I love the South", or do they all go "I hate where I am from"?

You absolutely get African-Americans from the South saying that they love it there. Conventional wisdom is that even with the legacy of the Civil War hanging over their heads, it's the southern States that have mobilized faster in terms of black-owned businesses and black politicians; generally speaking, the sense of community and support is stronger there, ergo it is easier to succeed. (I can't say whether data backs that assertion up.)

both in the south, and elsewhere.
x-post

My wife, for example, has wanted to move back to Tennessee pretty much ever since she set foot in Massachusetts (at least until she reconnected with some ppl from her high school on Facebook and remembered why she wanted to leave in the first place, lol); her sister moved back there a few years ago and loves it much more than she ever loved living in Ohio or Pennsylvania.

there is also this guy, to answer the confederate flag question:

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5820/830/400/HK%20Edgerton%20and%20confederate%20flag%20asheville%20nc.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._K._Edgerton

(it is possible that i think that he is kind of a nutjob, but just saying the issue is more complicated than you might think. like everything.)

uh dude there are plenty of african americans that love the south

Of course there are. After all the eligible voters and their kids were done killing each other in the Civil War, they still had about a hundred years of fighting ahead of them. But it's like I say; when you fight HARD, you don't take that shit lightly.

xposts

Everything awful thing you need to know about the American South is there in the lyrics to "Simple Man" by Lynyrd Skynyrd. It's not in "Sweet Home Alabama." No, it's this epic, triumphant paeon to being stubbornly uneducated, stubbornly religious, indeed stubbornly stubborn, that really captures the mood and attitude of the American South.

really really hate comments like this, no offense

There's a lot of diversity in the American south, and lots of ambiguity on how to deal with its history. It's not as simple as "all you need to know about the American south"---it's a deep place that in my almost 20 years living there I only began to grasp.

i mean there might be something to the idea that posing the question in terms of "why dont you ignorant cornpone sister-fucking racists just get with the program and ease up on your negative feelings towards northerners?" that might maybe delay the reconciliation vibe, you know?

xpost

really really hate comments like this, no offense

None taken. Broad generalizations about the South are touchy, I know, and I can't imagine it helps to pin them to a Lynyrd Skynyrd song.

simple answer is that racism is the south's heritage

The inconvenient bit is that racism is also the north's heritage.

racism: everyone's heritage!

Racism is the nation's heritage, full bleeding stop.

I've met plenty of African-American Southerners who wanted to go back South or who really identified with various aspcts of their Southern heritage.

Also, humans in being shitty since time immemorial shocker!

folks srsly those paul blight yale lectures are unreal, get into it

Even in strict economic terms, the north could not have thrived without slave labor any more than the south could have. The difference was that the north moved into making steel and building railroads and that next phase of industrialization, while the south lagged behind just enough to still not be able to make profit or even survive without slave labor. You think northerners would have made noise about slavery if they couldn't already afford to live without it? They did the math.

Wage-slavery etc...

eh this stuff about the south 'lagging behind' is too neat. they were short on anglo-style industrialism, but so were a lot of places in 1860! slavery was enormously profitable and the men who engaged in it as landowners or speculators were die-hard capitalists. don't believe any of this crap about a slowed-down aristocratic simple mode of life blah blah, that was war salesmanship or a post-war coverup

Look at this calculation here -- if we pay the Irish just enough to buy themselves two potatoes a week and a shovel to dig a shit hole with, we can still make, like, 1000 times what those hicks down south are making!

And there's an endless supply of them! For chrissakes, they're Catholic! They'll NEVER stop having kids!

kenan can you get me a country ham

goole, thanks. I'm gonna check those out.

As someone who was raised in the South and loves it to death I have to completely agree w/ this:

There's a lot of diversity in the American south, and lots of ambiguity on how to deal with its history. It's not as simple as "all you need to know about the American south"---it's a deep place that in my almost 20 years living there I only began to grasp.

don't believe any of this crap about a slowed-down aristocratic simple mode of life blah blah

Yeah, I can't think of many places other than the Union States and a very few western European countries - the UK, parts of Germany, parts of France? - that were at full-throttle industrialization even by 1860, so clearly there were many other viable forms of economy at that time.

People, regardless of color or disadvantage, love their home BECAUSE IT IS HOME. We're not living in the nineteenth century.

that sounds like the nineteenth century to me

does anyone remember in rubbish comic "Give Me Liberty" when feminists stage a revolt in the historic South? They secede from the Union and creat the First Sex Confederacy, with a new verstion of the southern cross flag (emblazoned with the female symbol). Great days.

Anyway, I think southern African Americans need their own regional particularist flag.

The antebellum southern economy - I think the thing people say is that it not merely was non-industrial, but it didn't really have much of anything other than plantation agriculture. So that means little in the way of merchant or artisanal classes. In many ways it was like Latin America was before it went for import substitution industrialisation.

Anyway, I think southern African Americans need their own regional particularist flag.

― The Real Dirty Vicar, Tuesday, August 4, 2009 12:41 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you should probably go to the south and try to popularize this idea

People, regardless of color or disadvantage, love their home BECAUSE IT IS HOME.

sure, but there is a difference between loving The South, as opposed to whatever corner of Tennessee you grew up in.

http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/us-afro.html

just fyi

Man, this is one seriously trippy flag:

http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/images/u/us-afro4.gif

It's giving me a migraine

But it seems like I've encountered a lot of people in the south that have a blind sense of allegiance to "where I'm from."

yeah you never see that with new yorkers or anything like that

xp Yeah, you can't fly that thing. People will have seizures as they drive past it. Thousands will die. Take it down about 25 notches.

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”

-- Robert Frost

Is it true that the stars and bars are actually the battle flag and the proper state flag of the confederacy was something else?

good luck, c.s.a.

Viceroy, actually the 'Stars and Bars' was the first national flag of the C.S.A. and the 'Southern Cross' (or actually the CSA Naval Jack) is the one we see the most today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_of_America#Confederate_flags

"It's one of our boys!"

http://harryallen.info/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/screen17-300x225.jpg

When I lived in Savannah I used to go to a huge weekly flea market where one of the booths sold nothing but flags, mostly confederate flags and variations on them (viking & wench on a harley with a stars & bars sail on a viking ship in the background was a favorite). The booth was run by a black man in his 60s. The South is a complicated place.

yeah you never see that with new yorkers or anything like that

New Yorkers aren't still somehow vaguely bitter about losing a war that even their great grandparents don't personally remember, though. Baseball rivalries are somewhat light in this shit, old as they may be.

Which gets back to the thread question, I think. The Confederate flag is a symbol of very old bitterness and hatred, some of it justified, because of things like, oh, burning down Atlanta, or any of the other tasteful and decorative things Sherman did to the South, but most of it absolutely ludicrous at this point. People who argue that it's not racist but is instead their heritage are really arguing that they are not angry at black people, they are instead still angry about the Civil War. What other heritage could we possibly be talking about? If you still want to fly your bitterness-n-hate flag, go ahead, but once you face that that's all it is, it's a lot harder to argue that it should be flown in front of the county courthouse.

These people are making some pretty good points J

the stars n bars are rather obviously some bullshit as most ppl know but to argue that southern blinkered regionalism is somehow worse than other blinkered regionalism is really kinda stupid, and as Dan points out, racism is an American problem, not a southern one; ppl who wanna feel good about themselves like to pretend it's somehow this southern thing, but that's bullshit. I heard more racist language used by whites during the year I lived in Portland than I've heard in the 7 years since I moved to NC

of course in fairness to any offended NC racists I have become a misanthrope in the years between Portland and today, and no longer abide any human company at all, so the sample is a little skewed

new yorkers are bitter about losing a playoff series over the last decade

a few* playoff series

# of times I've heard clerks in NYC stores, unprovoked by anything other than an apparent urge to share their views with me, launch into a racist tirade about what's wrong with the city: 2
# of times that's happened to me in the south: 0

http://bloggerinterrupted.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/rednecksforobama1.jpg

lol

Yeah, I think even my Dad co-signed onto that. And he listens to Glenn Beck every day.

There is a ton of flat-out overt racism here in the northeast. Don't kill the south for what goes on everywhere.

except jonathan demme movies

My experiences with racism in the south have been, on balance, much more courteous than my experience with racism in the north! (also far fewer but I'm certain that's a combination of luck and duration of stay)

My most WTF story is how a sales clerk in a Twin Cities-area JCPenny (Maplewood Mall IIRC) ignored the shit out of my mom until she was forced to wait on her, at which point she refused to accept any credit card except for the JCP card and demanded to see my mom's ID; when my mom handed over her driver's license, she glanced at the picture and said, "Okay, this is your husband's license; do you have one of your own?" To this day I haven't had a more galling personal experience (although I've seen some shit that was way worse happen to other people).

i think certain areas of socal are the most racist places i've been, tbh

# of times I've heard clerks in NYC stores, unprovoked by anything other than an apparent urge to share their views with me, launch into a racist tirade about what's wrong with the city: 2
# of times that's happened to me in the south: 0

You have to know that your sample size is way too small for this to hold any amount of water. One of the most horrifyingly racist people I've ever heard was a cab driver in Austin, who did what you describe in terms of a racist tirade, then topped it off by making pornographic comments about every black woman that crossed the street in front of him. Not a whiff of irony. But that's not a representative sample, either.

"southern blinkered regionalism is somehow worse than other blinkered regionalism"

it's probably easier to shake or grow out of this blinkering if it's not so entwined as part of the culture. the south minus racism sounds like any other college town. can you imagine a progressive south that doesn't resemble that? purging the south of racism is probably akin to purging crime and griminess from NYC. Some romantic character of the region is also lost. (BTW I have no problem with Southern culture being reduced to charming twangs and fattening food.)

I can't remember if the owen wilson dukes of hazard movie had the flag on the car or not -- did it?

kenan that driver was from Portland tho

I heard more racist language used by whites during the year I lived in Portland than I've heard in the 7 years since I moved to NC

My friend moved up there a few years back and when I went to visit her, I was a little shocked by how white it was. I don't think I feel safe living around so many white people without some diversity.

(haha I left out some details in that story, like how I was present and basically begging my mom to put everything back and not give them any of our money even though we were buying clothes I needed for school; my mom actually got back to the car and was leaving the parking lot before deciding I was right and turning around to return the stuff to the same bitch)

The town i went to jr high & high school in (Vicksburg, MS - AKA "The Gibraltar of the Confederacy") was forced to surrender on July 4th, 1863. From all accounts, the locals did not celebrate the holiday until 1963. But I've got to say - anyone my parents age or younger running around with Confederate flags plastered on their Z 71's, or "Heritage, not Hatred" t-shirts were usually regarded as class A assholes. Or maybe just stupid. Probably some classism at work there, but there ya go.

Probably some classism

i.e, white trash?

I wonder if we could sorta transition those people with something like "Hatred, But Also Heritage" shirts for a while and then "Maybe Not So Much Heritage, You Have A Point" license plate holders

http://i29.tinypic.com/20usi2p.jpg
http://i27.tinypic.com/2s93rtd.jpg

i don't i don't i don't

re: white trash - i'm not really fond of that appellation, but yeah, that's a fairly general otm assessment. thing is, I imagine that (small) portion of these "white trash" folks could have very well come from homes with higher net worths than myself or probably some of my friends.

This is an obvious contribution, but: Southern racism is pretty fascinating and not very comparable to other regional varieties, insofar as you have hundreds of years of horrible systematic racism right alongside hundreds of years of lots of black and white people being involved in one another's lives in ways that were way way more intimate and even comfortable than has happened anywhere else in the country. I mean, the whole history and tenor of the south has and had a huge place for black people -- mostly the wrongest place imaginable, but a place -- which is just such a different issue from this stuff in the rest of the nation, you know? So I wouldn't even know how to begin to compare southern racism versus ultra-white Pacific-Northwest racism; on some level they're just whole different entities.

^ok that sentence is barely english. IOW sometimes (racist) redneck mothers aren't necessarily poor. but they certainly do trend ignorant.

xpost to self

the thing is, 'northerners' don't celebrate their 'northern-ness' in any way really. i suppose they don't have to, if northernness is synonymous with the global liberal capital order or w/e

xp to nabisco, who is kinda talking about the same thing!

everyone knows the worst kind of southern rednecks are the wealthy ones.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38839

If the South had won, you can be pretty sure Northerners would be celebrating their Northerness since we'd have two separate countries across the US instead of one.

"Why do you hate the South?" Shreve asked.

"I don't hate it," Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; "I don't hate it," he said I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I don't. I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!

damn xpost to mr que

hi fives steve

you mean shreve

If the South had won, you can be pretty sure Northerners would be celebrating their Northerness

True. But the South was fucked from the start. The North was the only place with the technology to make a gun that could shoot straight, much less not blow up in your hand.

kenan where are you getting this garbage

Old girlfriend's dad was a "buff." I'm quoting him on that one.

So... not right, I take it?

The North is fragmented anyway because NYC claims itself as its own entity separate from New England and the rest of the mid Atlantic, all of which likes to pretend that the Midwest doesn't exist; it's not so much that "Northerners don't celebrate their Northerness" as much as it is "North is the default so the subdivisions happen one level down". It's very analogous in effect and perspective to the white/non-white division of ethnicity in in this country.

you mean shreve

shit!

Yeah if we want to look at the social-organization stuff that matters here, I think the thing is that the "northern" values -- which at least sorta gestured in this egalitarian hard-work Puritan direction, no matter how untrue any of that stuff has actually been -- have sort of won out as the dominant values for the country, right? Whereas the south (and I am sorta borrowing from reading a bunch of Ta-Nehisi Coates stuff lately, but this strikes me as very true) aimed at this more aristocratic organization where there was some sort of god-given nobility to being a white man, something that was only made possible by having a whole race-based caste of servants and workers that was also, like, "divinely" ordained to be there. I mean, this is sort of just basic Gone with the Wind stuff but obviously a lot of the resentment and stubbornness stems from the violent death of this idea, that whatever pride or nobility had been "granted" to white people was gradually eroded into something more egalitarian, over decades and decades of the general culture sometimes being slow to adjust to that, and pining for that old "birthright."

kenan's pretty much right. The South had little in the way of foundries and railway in 1860, compared to the North.

the southern regionalism thing has just as much to do w/ the civil rights era as it does the civil war. the south took a beating at the time (rightfully so) in the minds of the rest of the nation and world and have always been treated as ignorant and hateful. as with any case where a group is demonized for the actions of a few, people got defensive about it. DBT covers all of this fairly well in the Southern Rock Opera btw.

There's truth and bullshit in the 'aristocratic' nature of the Old South. One way it was true was in how very small percentages of wealthy whites owned very large majorities of the enslaved.

Blight makes clear at some point in those lectures that the northern self-conception was equally racist. manifest destiny and all that; god had given a whole continent for free white men to work with their own hands, if they could clear off the savages, but a conspiracy of the ultra-rich old guard could traffic in human bondage to rig the whole game for themselves. the northern protestant/republican ideology was as deeply invested in the "simple man", the individual white small-holder, as the confederacy was

xps

maybe not "equally" racist, but certainly racist.

several xposts: the white birthright that nabisco is talking about got a big boost during the great depression, when the wealthy and powerful looked at how messy things had gotten and decided that the problem was that they were not wealthy and powerful enough to stop it.

6% owned 39% of the total population of the CSA.

unfortunately many of the streets around here are named after that 6%

So is the 39%

I'm not a big fan of pulling down statues of past miscreants - it feels like revisionism and a kitsch version of the past in most cases and there's something facile, if not hypocritical about being mad that a Calhoun or Davis still graces a street when a Washington or Jay or whatnot may be equally or nearly as unpalatable to us, today, but the Confederate battle flag is a more recent fetish than a real bit of heritage and it says way more about the Civil Rights struggles of the 50's and 60's than it does about the 1860's, imo.

I kind of agree with that, but surely there's a point at which a monument is so offensive to a significant portion of the living inhabitants of a town that architectural history has to take one for the team?

http://moviesmedia.ign.com/movies/image/article/566/566149/dukes_set1_1100378942.jpg
I like how almost every publicity photo has the flag tastefully out of view.

ha don't tear anything down, just put a mural of this up opposite:

http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/Black%20Soldiers.jpg

I don't think it's racist to admit that I am afraid of those dudes. A lot.

but the Confederate battle flag is a more recent fetish than a real bit of heritage and it says way more about the Civil Rights struggles of the 50's and 60's than it does about the 1860's, imo.

^this is hell of OTM

With all the rah, rah, rah, USA, "American exceptionalism" blather that we all love so much, I think it's fair to point out those times when we haven't been awesome. All of the civil rights struggles of the 20th century stem from the fact that we really, massively flubbed Reconstruction.

which is why we can't hold romantic notions about the Supreme Court either.

I guess there was a time in the 70s - early 80s when folks like Skynyrd and uh Tom Petty were attempting to reclaim it? But I think for the last 20+ years, "cherishing" it is pretty emblematic of a person being an asshole.

I'm sure there are lots of folks who would like to blame this state of affairs on the pc brigade. But then that's often a pretty good indicator of assholism as well.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/10/090810fa_fact_gladwell

^^ read this this morning thought it might be the genesis for this thread~ guess nott

One of the music stores I worked in in Calgary sold confederate flag stickers stickers (no idea why, though). One day a guy came in and asked for one. I was a bit confused (because why should a confederate flag mean anything in Canada ???) so I asked him if he was 'from the south' and he turned a bit red and said 'no, I'm just a bit of a redneck, I want one for my truck.'

Not sure the dude actually knew what it implied, but then again, I'm not sure it would matter. It's not very often you see confederate flags around there, and if this guy's attitude is the norm among locals it seems the confederate flag, in this part of the continent, is just a symbol to mark a person as a gun-totin' truck-drivin' lefty-hatin' redneck. Bizarre!

When I lived in Savannah I used to go to a huge weekly flea market where one of the booths sold nothing but flags, mostly confederate flags and variations on them (viking & wench on a harley with a stars & bars sail on a viking ship in the background was a favorite). The booth was run by a black man in his 60s. The South is a complicated place.

― dramatic, positive, whatever but in an ironic way (I DIED)

this?
http://img12.nnm.ru/c/8/2/6/f/c826f3b221d2fc4c275691931404f27f_full.jpg

I saw one in Germany once

a viking?

or a wench?

http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/01/1b/3f/d1/enjoying-a-viking-s-drink.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vzcN_7MTUlY/SVnCztjZbWI/AAAAAAAAEE0/0jd50WHmpG8/s400/444620377TGEfpQ_fs-719722.jpg

I'm part german, can I put a Swastika on my car to celebrate my German heritage?

http://godzilla.iserv.net/2008pics/slides/IMG_0892.jpg

I also once had nachos in Germany

I don't think there are words in any language for how strongly I recommend against ordering the nachos in Germany

ne of the music stores I worked in in Calgary sold confederate flag stickers stickers (no idea why, though). One day a guy came in and asked for one. I was a bit confused (because why should a confederate flag mean anything in Canada ???) so I asked him if he was 'from the south' and he turned a bit red and said 'no, I'm just a bit of a redneck, I want one for my truck.'

http://img381.imageshack.us/img381/7426/conafeda9xv.jpg

isn't there a sizable portion of alberta and manitoba that want to bail and take the oil with them?

good god, saskatchewan will be done for

or maybe that one too, fuck do i know

here in Ireland, one of the county teams uses the Southern Cross as an unofficial sporting emblem, because they are the (self-described) rebel county.

One interesting thing about this debate is the whole nature of how signs get their meaning. The flag itself does not mean anything, but is invested in meaning by the people who put it up and who look at it.

I don't think there are words in any language for how strongly I recommend against ordering the nachos in Germany.

Prague is pretty bad, too. Eidam, red kidney beans, etc...

this thread is lolyankees

Nabisco's posts on this matter are right on. People in the Midwest or Great Plains complicate the notion of "northern identity". Also I am not from the south, I imagine that within "southern identity" there are many smaller regional or state identities.

I don't think there are words in any language for how strongly I recommend against ordering the nachos in Germany.

Prague is pretty bad, too. Eidam, red kidney beans, etc...

but what about bratwurst in New Orleans?

this thread is lolyankees

― Kerm, Wednesday, August 5, 2009 10:58 AM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

How signs get their meaning is an interesting topic, although I don't know if ilx has the patience for it.

I'd love to see these hardass crackers who think its cool to have the battle flag on their cars roll through the South Bronx or Gary Ind sporting them. Let's see how tough they are then.

Even if someone was initially flying the flag out of pride in their homeland, why wouldn't they take it down once they realized it was hurtful to others? Sheesh. And you can be sure these people consider themselves "Christians."

it's this epic, triumphant paeon to being stubbornly uneducated, stubbornly religious, indeed stubbornly stubborn, that really captures the mood and attitude of the American South.

So...we've basically agreed to most of the things that Kenan suggested yesterday. Just pointing this out.

I've seen them in Indiana, where urban meets rural in odd ways. Usually those who have a confederate flag on their pickup truck just get an "are you for real or are you just being corny" stare.

it's this epic, triumphant paeon to being stubbornly uneducated, stubbornly religious, indeed stubbornly stubborn, that really captures the mood and attitude of the American South.

So...we've basically agreed to most of the things that Kenan suggested yesterday. Just pointing this out

^ no, its fine up to this part which is a gross over-generalization "that really captures the mood and attitude of the American South."

I'm pretty sure regardless of your stance on the confederate flag you can agree that this is taking it a bit far:

http://www.kissmyrebelass.com/designs/confederate/thumbnails/tnR1054.jpg

gary is such a funny name for a town

Curtis that is appalling. I won't argue with any idiot who thinks it isn't.

I'm all up for a thread on how signs get their meanings, seriously. That is kin of what I had in mind in starting this thread.

Kith and kin?

You're talking about what meaning it has now? Cause how it got its original meaning is fairly straightforward, I would think.

Even if someone was initially flying the flag out of pride in their homeland, why wouldn't they take it down once they realized it was hurtful to others? Sheesh. And you can be sure these people consider themselves "Christians."

― Beth Parker

So you're going around telling immigrants to take their flags down?

Could you specify which groups of immigrants fly battle flags, and which nations' battle flags are considered inherently hurtful to us, due to having been constructed primarily around the cause of enslaving Americans?

I am not good at history, so I might be misremembering one -- is it Ireland?

best is dudes who have both a confederate and a U.S. flag - you can't be both!! though to be fair the U.S. flags don't have 33 stars

Why would people be proud of a flag which represents their forefathers horribly failed attempt to break away from the US by force, espousing a doctrine of states' rights and a decentralized central authority (which some argue helped the CSA lose the war) and all so that 6% of the region could continue to own as chattels people stolen from another continent who represented 39% of the total population? It's not just a regional flag for Dixie, it's a political statement for losers and racists. If you love the South, learn a few lessons from its history, and apply those to encouraging progress. Like the loony rump of the GOP (how how ironically), they'd rather cling to their bitterness than allow their self-image to be affected by reality and humility. As was said of Jefferson Davis, he could be broken but he could not bend. Lot of good it did the confederation over which he presided.

(Perhaps there is some tension somewhere about south- and southeast Asian immigrants who use the swastika in its original sense)

Did the South's Scots-Irish identify with the 'x' crosses of Saints Patrick or Andrew?

Usually reversed though, iIrc, no, Nabisco? (Not that that would assuage many camp survivors or their children.)

st. andrew i think

St Patrick would have been ironic, his having been captured as a slave by the Irish...

Seriously though I am pretty sympathetic toward the idea of southerners having a sense of pride and maybe even limited nostalgia concerning the whole of the region's history and culture, vexed though it may be, like anyplace else -- but for pretty much the simple human reasons Beth notes, I'd totally love to see that pride/heritage, umm, bad choice of words but "reconstructed" in terms of attaching to better icons and more optimistic feelings. This is a very non-weird thing to ask, insofar as you can easily find loads and loads of people in the south who have great pride in the region and a great interest in its history as a big vexed history of white and black both. Pride and heritage and moral regret are not mutually exclusive in the least.

xpost - I think they can go either direction, M, but it was just a bad joke anyway

Scroll down for some Saltires

I'm down with boiled peanuts becoming the new and only emblem for southern culture.

in its history as a big vexed history of white and black both

Conceivably one of the world's richest areas of multi-racial co-existence. Much of what is uncontroversially admired or beloved in the Southern tradition comes from an admixture of native, European immigrant, and enslaved African cultures and traditions.

Sorry if that was unclear, but that is what I was pondering, if this was originally a St. Andrew cross, or what does the red mean, and what does it mean that the blue and white colors needed to be minimized (cf wikipedia) but I hate getting into all of this because this is something for students.

How about okra in corn meal fried in bacon fat? Africa/America/Europe right there. ;)

Like I read the wikipedia entry thinking this is a St. Andrew's cross but apparently this too has to be the source of controversy with lots of arcane arguments that I find tedious. Like I find it sinister that it has so much red but someone else might find my impressions offensive or biased....

Like the original Stars and Bars (which was later ditched for being too similar to the US Flag, it contains the red, white and blue of the Union flag of the two kingdoms that were iconic to British colonists. (Pedants beware, I know the Unions Jack w/St Patrick's cross only went in in 1802.)

In the flag to which I refer, the red is for St. George and England and the blue for St. Andrew and Scotland.

I think the original Stars & Bars was not ditched as such, just replaced by the Southern Cross as the Confederate battle flag. The Stars & Bars remained the CSA's national flag.

Did the South's Scots-Irish identify with the 'x' crosses of Saints Patrick or Andrew?

Identifying with St. Patrick = out past unlikely and into the realms of the fantastical

but what about bratwurst in New Orleans?

I can't think of one instance in my 25 years of living there when I had an opportunity to eat bratwurst. Where'd you try it? And was it really so horrible? When New Orleanians want to eat sausage we generally opt for the amazing Boudin.

Pride and heritage and moral regret are not mutually exclusive in the least.

your are wm. faulkner & I claim my five bucks

mmm boudin. fetchboy have you tried cochon/ butcher?

Sadly not, will. I gave up meat before I ever really had the opportunity. But my ex-gf's hometown hosts the legendary Cochon De Lait Festival.

i respect your convictions, but man that is really sad.

Not as sad as not being able to find decent nachos. (haven't yet exhausted every avenue, tbh)

Hooray! As always, all roads threads lead to Rome food.

http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp_t3#/video/us/2012/04/25/dnt-girl-denied-prom-rebel-dress.wmc

rip proms

My middleaged coworker, whos from and lives in North Carolina, wears a grey rubber bracelet that said "Deo Vindice" and which I did not notice til heading on a service trip with him this week. Mentioned he really doesn't really like change, used to hang out with neo-confederates, lives in a small town.

Great stuff.

dayo vindice

- do you like change?

- do you live in a small town?

- how do you ignite the crosses?

I still see this image on a daily basis, and south east texas is such a racially mixed part of the state that I feel like maybe people don't even see it anymore?

I was behind a guy in line at a Burger King in the Florida panhandle a couple years ago wearing a t-shirt with the Stars n Bars on the back of it and the words "If this flag offends you, you need a history lesson." It took every ounce of restraint I could muster to lecture this guy on how that flag stood for the preservation of a way of life that enslaved human beings, broke apart the United States of America, killed thousands and thousands of earnest young men on both sides of the argument and finally resulted in the assassination of a president.

So yeah, that flag offends me.

to *not

hahaha

"oh my god, it's taking every fiber of my being to give you this Civil War lecture"

I hate confederate flag so much. Mostly because I've never lived anywhere near the south and whenever I see it it's on the giant pickup truck of some backwoods good old boy in Michigan or Idaho who also has never lived anywhere near the south and sports it specifically because of the racist connotations while still giving them the "IT'S HISTORY" cop-out if necessary.

There's no doubt that the Confedrate flag is a racist symbol. The major causus belli was the enslavement of blacks, and no amount of denial can change that fact. And we must not forget that Jim Crow and virulent racism was the dominant note of society in the ex-Confederacy right up to a few decades ago, and that flag was flown as a defiant banner of triumphant racism for a hundred years after the Confederacy ended.

The complication arises when you understand that a symbol can be and often is complex, bearing many meanings at once. In this case, it is also a symbol of many hundreds of thousands of men who died under that flag. If the southern states were to repudiate that flag, it would be required to reject that massive sacrifice of its sons.

This emotional attachment will die very hard, even as the harshly violent brand of racism it upheld slowly fades into something less cruel. Southerners are probably going to feel protective (and conflicted) about that flag for at least another century. But eventually, it will become a hollowed out symbol with very little emotional power left in it. Hasten the day, O Lord.

Yeah I'm not particularly well traveled but I've been to both Pennsylvania & Missouri and seen two different trucks with confederate flag paraphenalia, both with in-state license plates.

Did mention that he thought "1000 year of Anglo-saxon tradition was changing so fast" and I restrained myself from letting him know how much of appalachia and bits of the south were settled by scots-irish who'd spent generations actively doing whatever they could to kill as many anglos as possible.

But I held off. I'm a proud drunk socialist protestant pac-nor'westerner now; I'm fine in my position.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/24/lynyrd-skynyrd-confederate-flag_n_1909135.html

What a poorly written article.

I saw more confederate flag bumper stickers when i lived in New Jersey than I do here in Atlanta.

scots-irish who'd spent generations actively doing whatever they could to kill as many anglos as possible.

Saxons, maybe, but Scots-Irish have an extensive Anglish heritage.

My thought is that it's racist.

― pon de floor (HI DERE), Tuesday, August 4, 2009 8:43 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

who the fuck flies a confederate flag at a 4th of july parade in NEW MEXICO

(obvious answer: a racist asshole)

anyway, that's as far as I got into the article before I ragequit

Scared Anglos who feel the need to reaffirm their tribal identity and wave their totem pole in the face of their minority status

I just wiki'd it & I guess there were some battles fought there as part of the western campaign but honestly who gives a flying fuck. hey racists: CUT IT OUT

Also, I found out that one of my remote coworkers wears a grey rubber bracelet says "Deo Vindice" on it. Says he got it b/c he was pretty involved in the Neo Confederates in NC some years back. Openly cops to hating change.

Rossington would do well to remember what Ronnie Van Zant said about the flag in 1975: "That was strictly an MCA gimmick to start us off with some label. It was useful at first, but by now it’s embarrassing except in Europe, where they really like all that stuff because they think it’s macho American."

Also, Tom Petty used the flag on his 1986 tour; R.E.M. publicly gave him shit for it (along the lines of, "We're proud to be from the south too, but we're not racist shitbags about it.")

in NEW MEXICO

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6b/Confederate_States_of_America.svg/250px-Confederate_States_of_America.svg.png

Van Zant always seemed a lot smarter than the rest of the band (Ronnie Van Zant that is).

Wow, people like that stuff in Europe? My experience with Europeans is mainly through tourists and exchange students (obv they have money and education), who ask me lots of questions about black people - what is life like for black people, what are white people really like in USA, etc.. Used to drive some people NUTS. But I'm not the expert here.

Racist Southern heritage!

http://gawker.com/5952285/tough-guy-pulls-gun-on-elementary-school-students-after-they-make-fun-of-his-confederate-flag?post=53574731

funny to see texas, of all places, being put in the position of turning down confederate flag license plates:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/supreme_court_dispatches/2015/03/confederate_flag_on_texas_license_plates_supreme_court_considers_free_speech.html

re op question why can't it be both?

otm

maybe "both" would kinda mean "they are the same thing"

anyway according to my mom, our longtime neighbor across the street in my hometown (who lowers his Packers flag to half mast when they lose and has occasionally left threatening signs to those who have knocked over his mailbox, which unsurprisingly has led to a noticeable increase in his mailbox getting knocked over), has raised a confederate flag alongside his american flag in his driveway.

notherners who pull this shit make me especially furious but it's not w/o a long history

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copperhead_%28politics%29

http://www.journalnow.com/news/local/southern-comics-tears-up-battle-flag/article_7fb49252-3589-11e5-95e5-835bcea30608.html

The Beverly Hillbillies are next. pic.twitter.com/FUvbE3N8N6

— Dennis Perrin (@DennisThePerrin) August 17, 2017

....odd:

This pro-Confederate group's statement on Snooty the Manatee is one of the weirder things I've read this week. https://t.co/dxVkSRxk47 pic.twitter.com/17kuSMZrGG

— Antonia Noori Farzan (@antoniafarzan) August 17, 2017

Didn't want to start a new thread about it, but: I've got about a week and a half to go till I graduate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where the Confederate memorial that I used to spit on each time I passed it was pulled down by student demonstrators back in August. Last week, just as final exams were beginning, the administration* responded with an enormously unpopular proposal to 1) erect a $5 million freestanding 'campus history center' that will securely house the statue, and 2) head off future student actions by spending $2 million annually on a "mobile police force" for the UNC system. This has brought existing tensions between under-resourced graduate students & administrators to a boil, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 grad student TAs have gone on a grading strike.

(For reference, the statue at the heart of this debate was erected during the Jim Crow era; you can read a speech from the dedication ceremony here.)

-----

*Admittedly, this decision was really taken out of the university's hands by the North Carolina General Assembly**, which went on the defensive in 2015 after a decade-long campaign of pressure on said university administrators succeeded in getting the name of Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan leader William L. Saunders removed from a place of honor on campus; the NCGA responded by passing a new law "that prevents removing, relocating, or altering monuments, memorials, plaques and other markers that are on public property without permission from the N.C. Historical Commission." Re-installing it in a place of comparable honor somehow gets through a loophole here; otherwise the university would be forced to put it back up in its original site, where it would just be torn down again with maybe some unnecessary bloodshed into the bargain. BUT ALSO: several people, including the state's (Democratic) governor, have taken the position that the law on the books is probably not enforceable against the university, so their hands may not be quite so tied as they want to pretend.

**... who you may remember from such news stories as "NC voter ID law struck down by judge for 'target[ing] African-Americans with almost surgical precision'"

Shit's fucked up, is what I'm trying to say; and I need to vent about it here, in semi-anonymity, because I can only get so much pleasure out of wading into local news comments sections and telling "law and order" types who are working themselves into a lather over a grading strike's potential impact on students that I support the strike even though it directly affects me.

that is so fucked up

ps fuck the south, sherman didn't do enough lol

yup