Sorry to bring this up so late, but I just saw this post. You’re right that the rectangular “Confederate Flag” could have been the Confederate Naval Jack, but it could also have been the battleflag of the Army of Tennessee
Okay, okay, I heard ya the first time ! 
( I jest.)
Perhaps that quote you used of mine should have been worded differently- you are surely correct. I do not know how most Southerners feel about the Civil War. My comment was based upon hearing some Southerners say that the South Will Rise Again. As you said, the loud obnoxious ones get the attention and tend to allow others not familiar with many, many different Southerners to perhaps form an opinion based upon the words of a few. My apologies.
If most of the people in the South are regretful for the war and not sorry it was lost by the Confederacy, then… who are all of these people who are proclaiming Southern Pride in flying the Confederate Flag? I mean, that’s not a disgruntled obnoxious few. The flag is all over the place in many Southern states- ya gotta admit, it’s not just on a few cars and homes.
Who is in the majority? Those feeling regret over the war, or those who feel the South Will Rise Again?
I think for most people, it’s not really much of an issue anymore.
judging from the paucity of union jacks flown by unreconstructed tories on July 4, it would seem that somewhere between one and two centuries post humiliating defeat, the ashes no longer clog the mouth.
Just piping in to give an example of offending nonintentionally.
I attended V.U.U. Our mascot is the Panther. I wore a Panther tee shirt to work in Virginia and a co-worker was very upset and lodged a complaint about my racism.
Her interpretation of my shirt was that I was a member of the Black Panther Party and that by openly wearing the shirt I was declaring ‘war’ against my non-panther coworkers. Quite a few non-A.A. workers there felt the same way.
I decided that it would be unneccessary for me to wear the shirt to work again since it obviously upset people, even though I was only attempting to show school spirit.
Did I have a legal right to wear the shirt? Of course.
Did I have a moral obligation to stop wearing the shirt to work after I learned how it made certain people feel? Yes.
I wish the flag flyers would feel the same way.
V.U.U. Panther Page
Well, I agree with you. For most people, its not much of an issue.
It does beg the direct question- any Dopers fly that flag, on auto house or place of work? On t-shirt, tattoo or earring? Why do you fly it? What does it mean to you to display it?
Frankly, I think you went way and above what was necessary or decent. I would think that once you explained “it’s a sports mascot” that should have sufficed, since while the Black Panthers are understandably objectionable they have absolutely no monopoly on the panther as a symbol in a way anything like the Confederate flag stands for racism. Did you find it irritating that the woman complained to a manager without first asking you what it meant?
Of course I’ll admit it strikes a bit close to home for me. I was once asked to remove the “Satanic bible” from my desk by a manager who’d received anonymous complaints. The book, which I was reading at lunch, was Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World, which couldn’t be less Satanic. I was also once spoken to about having a picture of my boyfriend on my desk as it was “offensive to some”. The picture in question was taken at a family holiday dinner and my arm was around my brother-in-law, ironically a majorly conservative homophobe IRL and a guy I’ve known since I was 12 years old and who thoughts of sex with make me go “Ewwwwwwwwww” at a sound level that would disturb air traffic (but he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and so therefore must be gay was the logic). I refused to take it down unless everybody took down pictures of their family and, for that matter, the Bibles off their desk.
By this time I was irritated as all hell by constantly being the focus of idiotic objections: the Dr. Zaius doll (that was a gift, ironically, from my boyfriend) was racist (yeah… an orangutan played by an English Shakespearean actor… I can see it), the ring I wear (an ankh) was occult (I actually had to remind my supervisor that even if it were occult then I’d still have as much right to wear it as co-workers wearing cross necklaces or who wore “God is Love” T-shirts on casual Fridays), etc…
There were major complaints very soon after when the company passed a “same sex partner benefits” policy and added sexual orientation to their anti-discrimination policy. (The company, EDS, was opening several locations in San Francisco and this was a requirement of their SF contracts.) E-mails about what people dying of AIDS were going to do to employee health insurance costs and how Sodom started with a similar act or whatever actually managed to trump the e-mails about Oprah bitchslapping Tommy Hilfiger while putting Liz Claiborne in a headlock over racist comments or how Columbine happened because God wasn’t allowed in the school and other such crap. Totally as a manner of principal, I brought in a little handheld sized rainbow flag, which pissed off the person who knew what it was then pissed off others when they were told.
By this time my “big boss” (my supervisor’s supervisor, who was also big boss in the sense he weighed about 350 lbs), who was a devout So. Baptist and not particularly liberal but a fair supervisor, literally told the anonymous complainants du jour to “GET THE HELL OVER IT! I’M TIRED OF THIS! IF YOU CAN’T WORK WITH PEOPLE WHO DON’T SHARE YOUR VIEWS ON EVERYTHING THEN GO WORK FOR YOUR CHURCH OR A FAMILY BUSINESS OR SOMETHING!” I was very appreciative and I actually think it softened his views on the “gay agenda” thing seeing the crap you had to put up with just because it was known you were gay (I was never an “in your face” with it type and never hung pics of Johnny Depp or Advocates or any other identifiably gay symbol in my work space until that flag; I just didn’t lie about it.)
Of course this is the job I came to hate so much that I faked epileptic seizures to get to go home early. The great thing about that excuse is that you can reuse it at a moment’s notice, but I digress. In fact this whole thing is a major hijack, but the point is that the panther was something that no reasonable person should have found objectionable once it was explained and that in fact the assumption that you were wearing it as a show of support to the Black Panthers was racist. (If I had worn the shirt over my rotund milky white body, they probably would have said “What team is that?”) You’re a nicer guy than I am for not wearing it.
[Homer Simpson]
Mmmmmm…rotund milky white bodies…Mmmmm…
[/Homer Simpson]
My High School mascot was a Panther. Ironic- Reggie Jackson attended my High School. I guess that means that a famous black athlete from the 1970’s wore a Panther. What does that make him? :rolleyes:
I have a confederate flag on top of my car, 54 inches in length. When I first bought the car and it had faded red paint and no graphics on it, I had several white people say “You’re not going to put the flag on it, are you?” To me, it seemed that they were scared of how black people would respond to the car. In reality, I haven’t gotten any bad feedback from any of my black neighbors, acquaintances, or even strangers. It’s usually white people saying “Oh, man, [black] people aren’t going to like that.” I live in Wisconsin, by the way.
What bothers me about this issue is that when a person is bothered by the flag, it’s because their mind snaps to a couple of conclusions. Usually it’s “This person is a racist” and “This person is a dumb redneck.” To me, that’s hypocritical. If you make a knee-jerk conclusion that a person is a racist, you are essentially accusing them of being such a bigot that they judge people at a glance, even though, by making that accusation, you are judging people at a glance. In the same way that some people (often rednecks) paint all Muslims with the same brush because of the actions of the extremists, many people see those who display the confederate flag as representatives of the Ku Klux Klan. I think of it much like how someone might become racist if they were once assaulted by a black person, and they would conclude that “all of them are like that.” In my eyes, the KKK defiled that flag (and the symbol of the Christian cross) with their extremist, and racist, actions.
I own an actual confederate flag that I rarely display, but I do bring it out sometimes. To me, the flag represents what they showed it as in The Dukes of Hazzard TV series. I grew up with that, and it was a symbol of the poor, hard working class standing up against the greedy and corrupt people in charge. And that is how the South saw itself during the Civil War, as being oppressed by the Northern government and needing to make a stand against “Northern aggression.” Oddly enough, the flag, to me, represents the same type of attitude that civil rights activists had, that of making a stand against an injustice. So I definitely see it in a positive light. To me, the issue of slavery is a completely separate one.
One of the common slogans seen on bumpers stickers regarding the flag is “Heritage, not hate.” Many people tend to overlook the last two words of that saying, and just argue that heritage is not an excuse to display an image that they find offensive. However, the whole point of that is to let everyone know that their decision to display the flag is not to be taken that way. Another one I’ve seen recently (and have considered getting, although I despise bumper stickers) reads “I’m offended that you’re offended.” Which gets right to the point that judging at a glance only widens the gap. I’m offended that people would conclude that I would be a bigot/extremist because a bunch of crazy people commit hate crimes under my “fight corruption” symbol.
There are a lot of people who wish to take the flag back from the Ku Klux Klan and other racial extremist groups and define it the way I do. But the general public gives too much attention to those groups. They are the loud-mouthed embarrassments that make those of us who display the flag look bad. Instead of going after high school kids who want to display their rural upbringings, or the pick-up truck owners who want to show their Southern pride, why not go after the little pockets of civilzation where the few remaining embers of the KKK still exist? We’re all fighting amongst ourselves while the real extremists are dancing around crosses in the middle of fields.
Why isn’t anyone offended by the dixie horn?
It is time to address our state’s flag. This Confederate symbol is an outrage, particularly because we are a northern state.
Capitol City Legislator on The Simpsons
I understand what you’re saying, but to me it’s not knee jerk to see as racist a flag that represents an army that killed 300,000 people in a war to keep slavery legal. Granted there were other issues, but the importance of slavery and white supremacy as a MAJOR issue simply can’t be denied. It’s everywhere in the documents of the Confederacy. If you were to wear or display an upside down American flag then it wouldn’t be kneejerk you are making a negative statement about America- that it’s in trouble or that it’s wrong, whatever.
Ironically, the “greedy and corrupt people in charge” (GCPC) were exactly the ones who manipulated people like the Dukes, white yeoman farmers who didn’t own slaves, into a bloody war to protect the interests of the GCPC. Bush/Cheney/the Oil Lords weren’t the first or the thousandth people concerned enough with their self interest to take a nation to war. While only between 10%-25% of the population of the southern states owned slaves, the lopsided majority of southern policy makers did own slaves, the majority of their legislators owned slaves, and the Dukes of the south were (and really quite understandably so) terrified of suddenly having to compete with millions of newly freed black people. To many of these people, being free and white was the only thing they had going for them: they had no money, no slaves, if they owned land at all it was barely enough to keep them alive, millions were illiterate, they had no prospects, and now the one thing they had- a place on the bottom rung of the top section of the pecking order- was being taken away with the presto-chango freedom and threatened land distribution among slaves.
Now a better argument could almost be made as to “was slavery worth going to war for? Did the south really have a choice? If you were an anti-slavery southern policy maker, how would you have proposed ending slavery in a way that wouldn’t automatically redistribute the wealth and destroy the economy?” It would quickly devolve into a shouting match with accusations of racism flying all around if you tried to argue it from a purely logical viewpoint (i.e. could a centuries old institution be removed and anything but financial disaster occur), but that’s not the point of this thread.
It’s a pick and choose heritage. That’s wrong. Here’s part of that heritage, taken from Confederate VP Alexander Stephens’s famous Cornerstone Speech of March 1861, a speech about the founding of the CSA government and constitution! Read the whole thing and it’s even more clear:
Dixie existed two years before the Civil War and was extremely popular in the north and in Europe. It was not uniquely Confederate, it doesn’t mention slavery or downgrade blacks, it’s simply a catchy ditty. It’s full lyrics are a parody almost of the melodramatic botched romance songs of the era. I can see Dixie as “heritage not hate” long before the Confederate flag.
As an aside (this isn’t directed to Charger), but something that irritates the tar out of me whenever this is argued in the south is the number of letters to the editor and accounts you get in counter argument of “my great great grandpa died for that flag!” or “my great-great-great grandpa was a great man with 32 kids and a wonderful man by all accounts and he fought under that flag”, yadda yadda blah. Uh… so? To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the fact that somebody died for a cause doesn’t validate it. I had relatives who were absolutely wonderful people that I loved very much who were openly racist or thought the world was the center of the universe- I don’t love them any less but the fact I loved them and that they were good people* doesn’t mean they were right about everything. Good people can be absolutely and quantifiably dead wrong- happens every day.
*Though racist they were good people even to blacks, which is hard to explain. To those who have never lived in the south it’s hard to explain racism down here- there’s nothing remotely simple about it. I’ve known racist southerners who not only had black friends they loved very much, they would have shared their last crumb with them or beaten the hell out of anybody who tried to do them a disservice and thrown their arms around them in public if seeing each other after a long separation, but at the same point said black friend had to come around to the back door when visiting and called them “Miz Rose” til they’re dying day. It’s changed a LOT just in my lifetime, and not always for the better. Today when southerners are openly racist, it often regrettably is a lot more simplistic- the white supremacist kind of flat out hatred. Odd.
Not really relevant, but back in the 1950’s my grandfather (of blessed memory) used to attach a little Confederate flag to the roof of his Oldsmobile. This, despite the fact that grandpa was a Jewish guy from Brooklyn whose family arrived in the U.S no earlier than 1885, who was active in the civil rights movement, and who generally dislike Southerners due to some unfortunate encounters he had in the South Pacific during the war (it seems as though certain good-ole-boys didn’t fancy serving alongside Jews; eventually, they learned the hard way not to pick a fight with a guy from Brooklyn. According to grandpa, the court-martials were totally worth it).
No-one knows why he flew the flag. Maybe it was out of some strange Talmudic irony (grandpa was studying to be a rabbi before the Depression ended that), or out of the same perverse streak that made him a Yankee fan in a Dodgers family. My dad suspects, however, that his father didn’t associate the flag with anything at all - it was just a colorful trinket he used to help find his car in the Idlewilde parking lot.