Not at all, and that was doubtless the reason. You can also see the symbol in some ancient Viking art- which is likely where the nazis got it. Most of the native American art with swastikas are in museums, I think.
The point is- context is everything. An American Indian blanket from the late 19th century does not prove that tribe was nazis.
Despite one poster here wanting to ban Huckleberry Finn, Sam Clemens was not a racist, just the opposite in fact. The use of the N word in Blazing Saddles was anti-racist, despite posters here wanting to ban that film.
I must have missed that (and searching show you to be the first poster to mention “Huckleberry Finn”) so if you’d be so kind and provide a post number?
And often there is not enough context available to determine unambiguously what the intent of the symbol display is. But that doesn’t automatically mean that there must be no malign intent in the symbol display.
I really don’t see why you’re finding this basic idea so hard to grasp.
Do you really think that if a white-supremacist racist flies the US flag over his house on Memorial Day, or adorns the coffin or grave of a veteran relative with a US flag, that there is zero racist intent in his display of that symbol? Do you think that racists just flip a switch and turn off their intent to send racist messages when performing actions that many other people perform without racist intent?
If a lot of people still wear hawaiian shirts without any white-supremacist intent, for example, then you think it automatically can’t be a white-supremacist symbol if a “boogaloo boy” white supremacist deliberately wears a hawaiian shirt?
Again, you are very naively trying to impose a rigid denial of ambiguity on a phenomenon that by its nature can be very ambiguous. Just because a flag or other symbol is being displayed in a context that you don’t automatically associate with racists doesn’t mean that its display can’t be intended to convey a racist message. Nor does it mean that anybody who is aware of that possible ambiguity automatically has any kind of “diseased sick mind”.
I doubt it. Again, I think all of your confusion and frustration here is stemming from the fact that the real-world nature of symbols and their meaning is just more naturally ambiguous and complicated than you want it to be.
And again, you have my sympathy, but not my acquiescence, in your ill-advised efforts to impose on this issue a simple binary distinction that doesn’t adequately capture the reality of it.
Doc, your commitment to obstinate naivete about the complexities of real-world interpretation has got you really floundering here. Let’s clarify a few points:
Yes, of course the use of the N-word in Huckleberry Finn and Blazing Saddles is a reflection of pervasive racism in societal attitudes in the settings where those fictional works are taking place. That’s the whole reason that characters in those works are using that word. If the works weren’t depicting historically and persistently anti-Black racist societies, the characters wouldn’t be using that word about Black people.
No, of course the use of the N-word in those earlier works was not an attempt by their creators to convey a direct racial insult, in the way that people who call other people the N-word nowadays are trying to do. And nobody in this thread has claimed otherwise.
Nor is any poster here advocating the “banning” of Huckleberry Finn. Recognizing that the N-word is a traditional racist epithet even in the 19th-century context where the novel takes place is not the same thing as calling its author Mark Twain a racist, much less saying that the book should be banned.
None of the poorly-reasoned arguments you’re trying to make here are accomplishing anything except requiring other posters to clean up after your multiple critical-thinking failures.
And how do we know he is a white supremacist? Hell, when he takes a shit he has racist intent. Unless you think that adorning a coffin with a flag indicates a white supremacist?
This is exactly my point: you can’t always tell unambiguously what a given (unknown) individual means to convey by their display of a particular symbol.
But that does not automatically imply that it is in any way “diseased” or “sick” or even inaccurate to acknowledge that the unknown individual might be a bigot, and consequently might be displaying the symbol with bigoted intent.
And that possibility becomes much more salient when it’s known that bigots frequently do choose to display that particular symbol with bigoted intent.
Annnnd your naive absolutism is getting you in logical trouble again. You have just acknowledged that sometimes a symbol displayed by a bigot can be intended to convey a hateful message even when it’s not identifiable as an unambiguously bigoted symbol.
See? Context and intent are complicated issues, and you can’t reliably draw absolutist inferences from ambiguous situations.
But isn’t that the opposite of what the OP is asking? The title is: “Does the display of American flags have some “hidden meaning” these days?” In other words, “Is the American flag unambiguously racist?” (At least, that is my understanding of the meaning of the title.)
By your own logic, the answer is no, it is not unambiguously racist.
Yep, anyone could be a bigot. I used to think bigotry was getting rare in America, but then trump got 74,222,958 votes in 2020, indicating that many people are either bigots or support bigotry.
But you prove my point- simply flying an American flag does not indicate a person is a white supremacist or even a MAGA.
Nor have I sad elsewise, and trust me, I am anything but naive. Of course a bigot can display symbols intended to display a hateful message. Look at the crowd on Jan 6. Plenty of symbols there, and most of them display a hateful image. And we know that because we know those assholes were violent insurrectionist bigots.
So again- context. No symbol in of itself is hateful or racist. Not even the swastika (altho that is the way to bet). So seeing someone fly an American flag does not mean anything about him being racist or perhaps even a civil rights worker.
Exactly. Kimstu has proven my point.
Look at images of the DEMOCRATIC national convention. A sea of American flags. Massive numbers of American flags, thousands, more. Not a group of racists.
Now look at the Jan 6th insuraction- still American flags, but also plenty of trump flags, confederate flags, etc.
Sure, I don’t think anybody here is claiming that it is. With the possible exception of MeanJoe in post #60, and AFAICT we haven’t heard back from him.
The consensus in this thread appears to be that the symbolic meaning of US flag display, as ASL_v2.0 put it back in post #14, “has become sadly questionable”. It’s used by racists as a racist symbol, and by non-racists as a symbol of non-racist patriotism, and there are many, many situations where it can be difficult to tell what meaning is intended by its display.
Pretty much everybody active in this thread, AFAICT, including the OP, is rationally and realistically acknowledging those facts and agreeing that flag symbolism can be ambiguous.
Only DrDeth is continuing to stubbornly insist that recognizing the existence of such ambiguity is letting the racists win and so we all have to pretend it doesn’t exist, or something.
