It IS hate, not heritage. symbology of the "confederate" flag, chapter whatever

The BBQ Pit
221

To the best of my knowledge, my neighbors who are immigrants don’t fly many flags. I have not seen any Confederate flags in this neighborhood, so why should they fly Confederate flags? I really just don’t see Confederate flags around Nashville. They are rare. Why do some of you keep making up these fictitious neighborhoods with Confederate flags flying from every other house?

As for the underground railway, of course it ran from South to North. What is the point? The escape route began here.

Terrifel, is that the flag I get for teaching high school in the projects for twenty years? Is that the flag I get for working on burial clothes for remains of Native Americans? Is that the flag I get for providing winter clothing for people at Pine Ridge Reservation? Is that the flag I get for writing letters for Amnesty International?

Learn to read. I’ve said twice that I don’t have the old one. Never have had one. I don’t see why I need a flag at all.

If you want to rid the world of prejudice and bigotry, begin with yourselves and your ideas about Southerners. You are not helping by remaining ignorant and perpetuating a myth..

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[QUOTE=Zoe]
As for the underground railway, of course it ran from South to North. What is the point? The escape route began here.
[/QUOTE]

We’ll never know how many Southerners were active conductors on the Underground Railroad. It was too dangerous to talk about, even after the war, yet without them there is absolutely no way slaves who did not live in border states would have had a prayer of making it to the free states (where, it needs to be remembered, their journey was NOT over as law enforcement and free-lance slave catchers cooperated in returning the slaves to the south; they had to reach Canada before they could consider themselves free.

It’s the flag you get for going along with all those other Southerners and Okies on their field trips to create racial tension in California and Michigan and Chicago and Boston and NYC and other non-southern states where all lived in harmony til southerners and Okies came up and sowed discourse (for Great Dave hath told you it was caused by southerners and Okeys, and Great Dave is an abolitionist man).

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[QUOTE=Zoe]
Terrifel, is that the flag I get for teaching high school in the projects for twenty years? Is that the flag I get for working on burial clothes for remains of Native Americans? Is that the flag I get for providing winter clothing for people at Pine Ridge Reservation? Is that the flag I get for writing letters for Amnesty International?
[/QUOTE]
Of course not. My remark was directed at the notion that “the flag only has meaning that people choose to give it.”

224

[QUOTE=Zoe]
T
Learn to read. I’ve said twice that I don’t have the old one. Never have had one. I don’t see why I need a flag at all.

If you want to rid the world of prejudice and bigotry, begin with yourselves and your ideas about Southerners. You are not helping by remaining ignorant and perpetuating a myth..
[/QUOTE]

Now you’re being deliberately disingenuous, attempting to blunt my point as if I meant you personally own a flag.

Or by trotting out those two old warhorses “You Northerners think us Southerners are dumb,” and “Northerners are racists too!” obfuscation. I’ve been to Georgia Tech, and I’ve been to Cicero, Illinois, and you’re correct on both points, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with this discussion

(unless you want to prove your point by asking where I’m more likely to see a rebel flag: the campus of GA Tech, or Cicero IL? We’ll both bet on Cicero, but that would only reinforce my point that that flag is beyond ideological reclamation)

Everything gets filtered through that chip on your shoulder, doesn’t it?

But since your rhetorical skill aren’t much more than Pee Wee Herman-level “I know you are but what am I?” why yes, I do have a chip on my shoulder against Southern Culture: We as Americans, North and South once had more rights and less outside interference from far-away bureaucrats than you and I could dream of today, but SOMEBODY squandered those rights by insisting that they include the right to deny African Americans of their human rights, which justified in the 1860’s and again in the 1960’s the intrusion of the Federal government in our lives. Its like a policeman who comes to your house to break up a fight between you and your teenage kid, and then moves into the spare bedroom permanently.

As much as some Southerners enjoy how it pisses-off the liberals, defiantly waving a stupid flag isn’t going to make the cop move back out.

225

[QUOTE=Sampiro]
I don’t think most Southerners and certainly not most Southern Dopers would argue that point
[/QUOTE]

Did you read the rest of the thread? There are lots of Southerners, indeed, Southern Dopers, who think the war was about “states’ rights” (in some wider sense than "the right of states to allow its citizens to own the darkies, that is.)

Two general points need to be made here:

  1. I think most of us accept that Southerners are no longer inherently more racist than Northerners.
  2. I also think most of us accept that it doesn’t matter if you’re a racist or not; flying a Confederate (naval jack) flag makes people uncomfortable, so if you’re going to do it you should understand and accept that reasonable people will think you’re a racist.

LouisB presented a pretty good defense of why flag-flyers aren’t necessarily racist but completely lost the plot when he said it was a private thing. If you put a flag on your house, car or state legislature, you are obviously attempting to make your feelings widely known, whatever they may be.

226

[QUOTE=LouisB]
And your opinion marks you as a thick-headed jackass.
[/QUOTE]

Please show your work. I’ll restate the basis for my opinion, yet again-

there are two reasons for flying the “dixie flag”

  1. you’re racist. Easy enough- the Confederacy was racist, and by flying the flag that has become associated with it (even if it was just a naval jack or whatever during the actual Confederacy) you are telling the world that you sympathize with the Confederacy.

  2. you’re ignorant. Either of the history as stated above, or you think that flying the flag is a harmless way to thumb your nose at authority. I assert that perpetuating the use of a racist symbol perpetuates racism, and is therefore harmful.

I don’t think anyone has said that there are such neighborhoods. I’ll let you support your own arguments, if you can. And my point about the underground railway seems to have gone right over your head. As you said

I thought you might be confused about geography. And I have no reason to doubt Sampiro that there were many people in the South who helped run the UR, just as there were many resistance fighters under the Nazis, etc.

And get your panties out of a knot, Sammy. I have never said that all racism originates in the South- indeed, there is racism all over the world. There are all sorts of complex race relations in a diverse place like California. But if you want to find the KKK, you go to the south end of the Central Valley, where a lot of migrants settled in the 30s. Michigan is one of the most segregated states in the country, probably. (Livonia, for example, is something like 95% white, and went from 17k in 1950 to 110k in 1970- hmm, white flight, maybe?) I live in one of the oldest neighborhoods in GR, close to downtown and therefore, the most diverse. As a construction engineering tech, I have worked with a number of different contractors, staffed by white working class and Mexican immigrants (if you’re black, you pretty much have to work for one of the two black-owned companies). The white guys are usually surprised when I tell them where I live, and wonder how I can tolerate all the “niggers” (let me be clear that I’m using their word, not mine). I never ask if their family moved up from the South, but a few of them do have rebel flag stickers on their trucks.

There’s no doubt that many poor whites also moved north for factory jobs along with blacks in the first half of the 20thC. Whether they added or multiplied to the existing racism already here, I’m not sure, but racial attitudes didn’t disappear along the way.

Just last weekend, my white friend and his black friend were driving from GR to Detroit. They decided to stop for a beer at the Michigan Brewing Co in Webberville, and were pulled over in the parking lot, a 1/4 mile off the freeway- because of the air freshener hanging off the mirror. Once they got inside, they were told that they were lucky that they weren’t on the way to the old oak tree. That’s also the part of the state to spot rebel flag stickers, etc. Of course, the first time they were pulled over together was in East Grand Rapids (the basis for the American Pie movies), where they don’t wear their racsim so blatantly.

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[QUOTE=Zoe]
Terrifel, is that the flag I get for teaching high school in the projects for twenty years? Is that the flag I get for working on burial clothes for remains of Native Americans? Is that the flag I get for providing winter clothing for people at Pine Ridge Reservation? Is that the flag I get for writing letters for Amnesty International?
[/QUOTE]

I thought this discussion was about a Southern flag. Not a Zoe flag. Individuals don’t get flags made for them. And the South is not equalivant to Zoe.

228

[QUOTE=Great Dave]
And get your panties out of a knot, Sammy.
[/QUOTE]

Nice little homophobic slam, that. (I realize it’s a common expression and may not have been intended to be homophobic, but sometimes when people refer to a gay man’s “panties” it IS homophobic, so by the terms of this thread I think that you just made a homophobic slam, and I resent it.)

[QUOTE=Great Dave]
I have never said that all racism originates in the South- indeed, there is racism all over the world. There are all sorts of complex race relations in a diverse place like California.
[/QUOTE]

Another way of saying this I suppose is that

[QUOTE=Great Dave]
My experience is limited to California, where most of the “racist areas” (Kern Cty) were settled by Okies, and Michigan, where a lot of people, both black and white, moved up from the South to work in factories.
[/QUOTE]

First time I ever knew that Watts was settled by Okies or that it was Southern factory workers, not LAPD members, who beat Rodney King. I guess Jules Roth, the owner of Hollywood Cemetery who allowed dogs and convicted murderers to be buried there but not Oscar winning black actresses, was a former fry cook from Bayou la Batre, Alabama. (You do know that segregation was employed throughout the nation and not just in the south, neh? Ever read how many luxury hotels not in the south were integrated by pressure from Frank Sinatra (who was livid that Sammy Davis, Jr., and other black members of his troupe were denied rooms) for example? For that matter Jack Benny refused to stay in hotels in NYC and Chicago that did not allow Eddie “Rochester” Anderson- amazing how many upscale hotels are owned by Okies and Southern factory workers.)

Your argument is simply not valid. Racism in California is NOT caused by Okies and Southerners looking for factory jobs (or for that matter their 3rd generation descendants who would be there now).

[QUOTE=Great Dave]
There’s no doubt that many poor whites also moved north for factory jobs along with blacks in the first half of the 20thC. Whether they added or multiplied to the existing racism already here, I’m not sure
[/QUOTE]

Then don’t speak to the issue, which you did, and not in hypothetical terms. I think the north and the west are quite capable of manufacturing their own racism. Last I heard Custer was a Union general and very few hillbillies owned factories that routinely and unapologetically paid black workers less wages.

[QUOTE=Great Dave]
Just last weekend, my white friend and his black friend were driving from GR to Detroit. They decided to stop for a beer at the Michigan Brewing Co in Webberville, and were pulled over in the parking lot, a 1/4 mile off the freeway- because of the air freshener hanging off the mirror.
[/QUOTE]

My guess: the cop was the son of a Tennesseean who went their looking for factory jobs and when he saw a black guy and white guy riding together he thought he was watching a flagrant violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. Hadn’t gotten the memo and all.

You really think all of them are from the south? Or were making a historical statement about honoring the Confederacy? Or could it be that they using the flag (one which, you’ll note in this thread, I have agreed constantly is offensive, historically inaccurate, and should not be displayed on public buildings) in a manner different from the reason others might fly it in a land that was formerly part of the Confederacy? Rather the way that Catholic penitents and anti Catholic racists might use the same tailor?

I’m against the rebel flag being flown on a personal level (I’d never ban it as I consider that censorship), but I am absolutely serious when I say that the ignorance and anti-southern bigotry of these threads really and truly does help me understand why some people display it a whole lot more than I understood it before, both inside and outside the south. I can imagine people who had to put up with such attitudes everyday finally saying “Oh fuck it! Got the name, play the game!” and waving it as a mark of pride, much like gays have reclaimed the word queer and some blacks the n-word for the defiance, pride and empowerment it provides in the face of hostilities.

[QUOTE=GreatDave]
Of course, the first time they were pulled over together was in East Grand Rapids (the basis for the American Pie movies), where they don’t wear their racsim so blatantly.
[/QUOTE]

And where boys probably learned to fuck pies from Okies and Southerners coming to look for factory jobs and “enjoying” a nice piece of tater cobbler during lunch breaks.

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Originally posted by Great Dave:

I am neither racist nor ignorant and to the best of my knowledge you have not been appointed as the official motive determinator and until you are willing to concede that other motives for displaying the idiotic flag in question exist, you will remain, IMHO, a thick-headed jackass.

And, so long as you refuse to learn even a tiny little bit from Sampiro and/or Zoe, your thick-headed jackassness is even more self evident.

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[QUOTE=LouisB]
And, so long as you refuse to learn even a tiny little bit from Sampiro and/or Zoe, your thick-headed jackassness is even more self evident.
[/QUOTE]

Oh, how sweet! Kissy kissy.

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Oh, c’mon people, let’s be reasonable here.

Displaying the Confederate flag in public is just a way of saying “The South’s gonna do it agin!!!”
Whatever “it” is. :dubious:

232

Out of curiosity, why aren’t there more criticisms of St. Patrick’s Day parades as events celebratory of car bombings in Belfast and the legacy of the Winter Hill Gang and other Irish crime families?

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[QUOTE=Sampiro]
Out of curiosity, why aren’t there more criticisms of St. Patrick’s Day parades as events celebratory of car bombings in Belfast and the legacy of the Winter Hill Gang and other Irish crime families?
[/QUOTE]

Because Americans don’t give a shit about anything that happens or happened in Northern Ireland because “Whee! The Irish are drunkards! Let’s be drunk too!”

What the hell does the Winter Hill Gang have to do with anything? St. Patrick’s Day somewhat preceded them, you know.

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[QUOTE=acsenray]
Oh, how sweet! Kissy kissy.
[/QUOTE]
What the fuck does this mean? Are you trying to qualify for the thick-headed jackass association? If so, you passed the entrance exam quite a few posts previously.

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[QUOTE=Jackmannii]
Oh, c’mon people, let’s be reasonable here.

Displaying the Confederate flag in public is just a way of saying “The South’s gonna do it agin!!!”
Whatever “it” is. :dubious:
[/QUOTE]
You gotta do a lot better than that to join the thick-headed jackass association; I’m sure you can qualify eventually because you do show a lot of promise of meeting their membership requirements.

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[QUOTE=LouisB]
What the fuck does this mean? Are you trying to qualify for the thick-headed jackass association? If so, you passed the entrance exam quite a few posts previously.
[/QUOTE]

Since you believe that symbols of communication mean only what you secretly intend them to mean instead of what people who see and hear them understand them to mean, your meaning is entirely divorced from the generally accepted meanings of the words you use. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you’re being friendly when you say things like that.

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[QUOTE=Sampiro]
Out of curiosity, why aren’t there more criticisms of St. Patrick’s Day parades as events celebratory of car bombings in Belfast and the legacy of the Winter Hill Gang and other Irish crime families?
[/QUOTE]

Aw cut us Micks some slack, Sampiro. We didn’t kill as many Blacks in the Draft Riots as you did at Fort Pillow (and not for lack of trying; although we did what we could to make up the balance in the 1919 Chicago Riots).

Tell you what: if you rebs adopt a “get drunk & laid guaranteed” clause at all Southern Pride events on a par with St. Paddie’s, we’ll force General Mills to include, along with pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, and green clovers, little red marshmallows shaped like dismembered body parts of the guys who ran afoul of the Westies

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[QUOTE=acsenray]
Since you believe that symbols of communication mean only what you secretly intend them to mean instead of what people who see and hear them understand them to mean, your meaning is entirely divorced from the generally accepted meanings of the words you use. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you’re being friendly when you say things like that.
[/QUOTE]
I never said anything at all about secret meanings; if you ask, I’m sure the people involved in displaying anything at all that embodies the flag that so upsets you, they will be more than happy to explain themselves. Although I know of no particular reason why they should trouble themselves since you have already absolutely decided for yourself what those reasons are.

And, this garbage heap of a thread has long since passed the form of a pitting; it has degenerated into a name calling contest along with the mindless repetition of points made (or not) in the first couple of pages. I’m perfectly willing to abstain from further insults if others will do likewise. Threads like this cause me to lose my temper, as I’ve admitted before now, and I don’t believe in turning the other cheek. So, if we MUST continue this charade, let’s do so with some degree of civility. After all, that is the Southern way.

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[QUOTE=LouisB]
Originally posted by Great Dave:
I am neither racist nor ignorant and to the best of my knowledge you have not been appointed as the official motive determinator and until you are willing to concede that other motives for displaying the idiotic flag in question exist, you will remain, IMHO, a thick-headed jackass.

And, so long as you refuse to learn even a tiny little bit from Sampiro and/or Zoe, your thick-headed jackassness is even more self evident.
[/QUOTE]

I notice you haven’t tried to refute my two points with any of your posts. So, for your benefit, I will add a third reason:
3. You know that some (perhaps most) people think that you are sending the message “I’m a racist” by flying the dixie flag, but you just don’t care. Which may or may not qualify you as an ass.

I’ve never claimed that all Southerners are racist, or that there are no racists outside the South, which seem to be the two points that Zoe and Sampiro have been making. Besides, those points are merely tangential to my assertation that flying that flag labels you as either racist, ignorant, or an ass, and likely all three.

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[QUOTE=LouisB]
Threads like this cause me to lose my temper, as I’ve admitted before now, and I don’t believe in turning the other cheek. So, if we MUST continue this charade, let’s do so with some degree of civility. After all, that is the Southern way.
[/QUOTE]

Mmmmm… chicken-fried civility.