Reflections on the Confederate Flag (and More)

There’s been a lot of dramatic news out of the United States recently, including the US Supreme Court’s historic ruling declaring bans on same sex marriage unconstitutional (with a hilariously ironic dissent from Scalia calling the decision an attack on democracy, when the real assaults on democracy came in cases like Citizens United, where he and his right wing cohorts were in the majority), not to mention its ruling against a rather absurd challenge to the Affordable Care Act, its rulings upholding standards for proving housing discrimination and an independent redistricting committee in Arizona, or, on the negative side, their ruling against the EPA’s restrictions on mercury pollution. However, I want to focus on another news item that is unrelated to the Supreme Court, namely the reactions to the mass murder of innocent churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, and particularly the debate over the Confederate flag.

Regarding the murders themselves, there is a lot that could be said, such as how they are yet another piece of evidence showing how disastrous it is for a society to allow guns to be so easily available, or how the reluctance of right wingers to admit that racism was the reason for the shootings just says that they have some of their own issues in that area, but my interest in history leads me to focus on the Confederate flag debate. I will, however, mention in passing that it is ridiculous for many, particularly on the right, to refuse to label these murders a terrorist act when they are exceptionally eager to call any attacks by extremist Muslims terrorism. Yes, Dylann Roof probably acted alone and in that sense was a lone nut, but the same was true of Nidal Hasan, the perpetrator in the mass shooting at Ft Hood in 2009, and yet Ted Cruz and his ilk have been adamant that the latter was a terrorist act. For that matter, even the Tsarnaev brothers seem to have acted alone in the Boston Marathon bombing. In all cases, you had one (or two, though it was clearly the elder Tsarnaev brother who was the driving force) disturbed individual, motivated largely or at least in part by a warped ideology, striking out violently at unsuspecting victims. If any violent act, even by individuals unconnected with a larger organization, intended to strike terror in the hearts of ordinary people in the name of some ideology is a terrorist act, then these three incidents could all be described as terrorism. If we restrict the definition of “terrorist acts” to those that are organized or at least directly assisted by a larger organization, then none of them are (though quite a few actions by governments would still fit the definition). But anyone who claims that the Waco and Boston incidents were terrorism but Charleston was not is quite simply full of it. The truth is, right-wing radicals are much more of a threat to the average American than groups like ISIL, though lone nuts of any stripe are a danger – and much more so when guns are easily available.

Getting back to the Confederate flag and the efforts to get removed from public places all around the southern US, I would first like to note that not only did I myself grow up in Texas, but many of my ancestors, at least on the paternal side, were Southerners, and quite a few fought for the Confederacy. My great-great-great grandfather in the direct paternal line, a German immigrant to Texas just after it joined the US, was an officer in the Confederate army, and several other ancestors fought on the Confederate side elsewhere in the South. The battle of Shiloh was fought at least in part on land belonging to members of one of my ancestral lines, the Cantrells. A number of my ancestors were slave owners as well (it’s also probable that at least one very distant ancestor was a slave himself, though that’s another story – and in any case some of the slave owners and Confederate soldiers in my ancestry would have been his descendants). As a matter of fact, I don’t know for certain of any ancestors who fought for the Union, though it’s possible some on my mother’s side did (most of her paternal ancestors were presumably living in the North at the time of the Civil War, though her maternal ancestors didn’t come until after 1900). So my own heritage is much more closely tied to the Confederacy than the Union.

Does this mean that I think the Confederate flag should be flying at state capitols around the South? Not at all. Though they themselves may have been unaware of it, the cause for which my Confederate ancestors fought was wrong. Despite the nonsensical arguments of pro-Confederate apologists, that cause was clearly slavery. Or as someone put it the other day, claiming it was about states’ rights is at best an incomplete statement of the reality, as it was about a particular “states’ right”, namely the right of states to keep slavery legal. This is clear from not only from the history of the years leading up to the Civil War, which were full of struggles between the North and South over slavery (the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and so forth), but the articles of secession of the various Confederate States, which repeatedly cited slavery. Then there was the Cornerstone Speech of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, in which he talked of how founders of the US like Thomas Jefferson considered slavery “wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically” and an “evil” that would disappear over time, then went on to say that they were “fundamentally wrong”, because their thinking “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races.” Stephens (who ironically opposed secession before the war and worked for peace in the later years of the war) declared this to be an error, and that “our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” Since the Confederate leaders explicitly stated that slavery was a major – even the major – motivation for their rebellion, claiming otherwise reflects either a complete ignorance of the history Confederate apologists claim to honor, or else a highly disingenuous attempt to whitewash history.

Of course, the North didn’t necessarily treat black people all that much better than the South did, and that was still true long after the war. Their ways of mistreating them were just different. My mother often cites an African-American saying that reflects this: “In the South white folks don't care how close you get as long as you don't get too big. But in the North they don't care how big you get as long as you don't get too close." As late as the 1970s, Randy Newman could still skewer this Northern hypocrisy in his song “Rednecks”. But the fact that many Northerners were both racists and hypocrites doesn’t change the basic fact that the Confederate flag is the symbol of a rebellion that was fought for the right to keep other people as slaves, and even in later years it was used as a symbol of racism (after all, South Carolina only raised it over their capitol building in the 1960s as a symbol of defiance against efforts to end segregation). It isn’t just that Dylann Roof “misused” the flag; the flag itself is inherently steeped in racist ideology. And it isn’t enough to say that it’s “part of our history” either. After all, the flag of the Third Reich is part of Germany’s history, but that doesn’t mean that Germans (other than neo-Nazi idiots) raise it in public. Even when I was young and ignorant (i.e., politically conservative), I found it vaguely disturbing that a popular show like The Dukes of Hazzard (which to be honest I never really watched) prominently featured a car named the “General Lee” with a big Confederate flag on it. If people in the South want to find a symbol of resistance against oppression by corrupt government officials, they can surely due better than a flag that itself stood for the oppression of an entire people in the interest of wealthy landowners.

Finally, I should note, as many others have, that just removing the Confederate flags is far from sufficient. The racism, both subtle and blatant, that still exists throughout the US (not just in the South) has to be addressed as well, as do the many other problems faced by African-Americans in particular due to the legacy of slavery and discrimination. Even if we’re only talking about historical symbols, aside from removing the flags, Southern states would do well to start changing the names of all the roads and buildings named after some of the most notorious pro-slavery leaders. But removing the flags, while a very small step, is nevertheless a step in the right direction.