Is it one of the ones that Monty listed, that are based off the Confederate flag (some more so, some less…)? Not all the ones he listed are, though (Florida, for ex). But it’s Florida, America’s wang, so who cares?
Our (Florida’s) flag is ugly as fuck, anyway. Go ahead and burn it. My campaign to replace it with a skull and crossbones and a pair of tits is gaining momentum.
The Drive by Truckers cover this pretty adequately in their Southern Rock Opera, particularly The Three Great Icons of the South song:
“and ya know race was only an issue on tv in the house that i grew up in. Wallace was viewed as a man from another time and place, but when i first ventured out of the south I was shocked at how strongly Wallace was associated with Alabama and its people. Racism is a worldwide problem, and it’s been like that since the beginning of recorded history and it ain’t just white and black, but thanks to George Wallace, it’s always a little more conveinent to play it with a Southern accent”
Full lyrics here:
Good album with a lot of spoken word songs about what it meant to grow up in the South
Yeah, you go ahead and enjoy your Jolly Boob Roger…until your rightful overlords rise up and take your state by force.
OTOH, I love the fact that your great seal features a Native American woman who’s quite visibly thinking “oh shit, there goes the neighbourhood”.
Speaking of which :
[QUOTE=Omar Little]
I don’t know…one might argue that by giving permission to all of the native American tribes to open casinos for the enjoyment and entertainment of the rest of us, celebrates the white man’s victory over them.
[/QUOTE]
The fuck are you smoking ? The tribes were not “given permission to open casinos”. They were given permission to decide their own laws within their tiny enclaves. In time and quite ironically really, they used this tiny bit of freedom to get themselves a source of revenue consisting in exploiting their oppressors’ endless greed (it’s not like the shit land they were graciously granted is good for much else, anyway…).
It’s perfectly fine to celebrate good elements of history, and I will be happy to do that with you when you (collective you) stop trying to fucking spin the horrendous elements. It makes me feel complicit in your lack of atonement.
Southerns will still argue that “our negroes were happy.” The OP has done similarly in discussing his Mammy in the past. They will say things like “there were no major slave ports in the south.” They will put the fucking symbol of racism on their official regalia explictly to oppose the civil rights movement, and then argue that it has deep historical significance. They will argue that racism was and is equally bad in both the north and the south. (See eg., that shit Scylla just posted).
Yes, interpersonal racism certainly does exist everywhere. It’s just that not only is it at least as bad in the south (with some evidence that it is clearly worse), the south has the additional layers of official, institutional and extensive historical cultural racsim on top of that. They’ve played along as one political party has stoked those issues for political advantage for 40 years!
It’s a bit like saying that ice hockey is part of the culture of both the US and Canada. Well, yes, but…
When southerners choose to drop the butthurt defensive pretenses and to approach me by saying “yes, we’ve really fucked up on this issue but here’s how we’re trying to rectify things” then I’ll be happy to listen to their pride in their grits, or their Coca Cola, or NASCAR or whatever they want to tell me about.
I don’t understand why the public thought it was ok for TV Land to be racist for all these years up until this week.
I’m also having a hard time believing that all these racists, those flying and allowing the racist flag, just suddenly stopped being racists a couple of weeks ago when they’ve been racists for decades. Amazon has been in business since 1994 and they just now stopped being racist? 
Of course the South isn’t uniquely racist compared to the North. The North is pretty damn racist too. But that’s not the point. The South uniquely celebrates symbols of its racist past (and present).
The idea of Southern-ness connected to the Confederate flag, to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, to roads and schools and memorials honoring Lee and Jackson and Davis and Stuart, that idea is a celebration of something evil. Leave that stuff to history books and museums. Stop singing “Dixie.”
There’s plenty of other ways to be Southern that the entire country would not object to. Things with butter in them and deep-fried things, everybody likes that.
No. Amazon decided that last week was a good time for them to stop enabling racism, business-wise. Selling confederate flags is rather different than flying them.
Like any kind of social issue, it’s not that anyone in particular has started or stopped being racist. It’s that the people objecting to blatantly racist symbols finally have some social power to shame people and corporations into taking a small step in the right direction.
Racism is not an on-off switch. It’s also not an identity. We as humans have inborn tendencies to racism and bigotry. We all need to constantly police ourselves and our society to make gradual improvements. We know that this works and that this is possible because, if nothing else, the immense changes in our society in our own lifetimes.
There was a time in the 80s when The Dukes of Hazard were on, where it almost seemed liked we were in a post racist society (or we pretended we were.). Having the Confederate flag on your wallet, or whatever mostly meant you liked Lynyrd Skynyrd, or something. The association with the flag felt rebellious, quixotic, and cool. The overall consensus seemed to me to be that we weren’t ignoring the racist associations so much as that they were irrelevant.
I’m a child of the 80s and it’s quite possible my perceptions were naive. I realize now that many black people may not have been particularly comfortable with the reclamation of this symbol.
But the 80s were very strange. There may be a connection here, but in hindsight I am struck by how very gay the 80s were. The stated vibe seemed to be anti-homosexual but homosexuality was dominating societ from its closeted stance. I remember watching Top Gun at face value, ignoring the smoldering love triangle between Goose, Mav and Iceman, the Rocky movies, Rambo, and all the quasi-homoerotic action stars. I thought Frankie goes to Hollywood were all about heterosexuality. I thought Judas Priest in their black leather were tough. I liked wearing pastel clothing. I thought it was manly. I thought a Delorean was a really fast car. That was the 80s, to me.
I’m just speculating, but the Confederate Flag may have gained some acceptance as a sort of ironic usage in this context, and in the way of such things that ironic usage may have been interpreted as legitimate by naive young 80s kids such as myself and by general society at large… Hence the flag on the General Lee during The Dukes of Hazard series.
That time though is passed. There really isn’t much ironic usage of the flag by fun loving rebellious types. Now it just means racism.
Yes, there are some people who just think of the flag in the Lynyrd Skynyrd, Dukes of Hazard, fun loving way, who are puzzled and hurt by all the broo-haa. Times change.
It might come around again. So might pastel suits. Fashion and the meaning of symbols, and the context and subtext of popular culture is always changing.
Good to see you back, Scylla.
I’ve lived in Texas for my entire life. I have never heard that the Texas flag is based on the Confederate flag at all. I mean, there’s red and white and blue, and a star, so I can see some similarities, but when I think of red, white, and blue with stripes and stars, I think of another flag first.
OK, I’m puzzled on that one. What’s gay about the DeLorean ?
Oh god, please no.
(also yeah, welcome back, old man. Where you been all this time ?!)
[QUOTE=Ascenray]
Like any kind of social issue, it’s not that anyone in particular has started or stopped being racist. It’s that the people objecting to blatantly racist symbols finally have some social power to shame people and corporations into taking a small step in the right direction.
[/QUOTE]
Also the opportunity. A racist young nut gunned down a black church. Now, by now we know it’s not the time to discuss the availability of guns :rolleyes:, but it’s as good an opportunity as any to tackle extraneous stuff around the event that had been bothersome for a while.
Was Lynyrd Skynyrd the band that told us “The South’s gonna do it agin!”? I always wondered what “it” was - another secession? A return to slavery? The land of the boll weevil, where the laws are medieval?
True, the good people of the South were known for painting the Confederate flag on virtually anything - cars, horse-drawn carriages, horses, small children, outhouses…
It’s a shame when this grand old tradition is being sacrificed for the sake of political correctness.
I just read an op-ed by a Texas academic which argued that removing statues of Lee and other leaders of the Confederacy from public places will shortchange Americans since we would no longer have debate on whether these heroes’ actions were worthwhile. By the same token, how can we consent to removing the Confederate flag from public view since it will stifle the National Conversation On Race?
All the state flags that were adopted specifically to incorporate Confederate symbols or commemorate the Confederacy are using symbols of hate. That includes Alabama (adopted 1895), Florida (adopted 1900, modified in 1985), Georgia (basic design adopted 1879), Mississippi (adopted 1894), and Arkansas (adopted 1924).
But Texas’ flag was not. It did adopt a confederate flag but that one had no relation to the current design.
Right, the Texas flag was adopted in 1839, 22 years before the Confederacy existed.
There’s yer problem, right there!
History teachers in the South are consumed by the Civil War. Yes, they will tell you all the bad things about the Confederacy, but in such a way that each student understands that if the South had won the war, well, just know that things would be a lot different! For both Thomas and Tyrone.
I’m not so sure of this. I have no idea what the State flag design committees were thinking when they made their designs. Maybe there are some minutes somewhere we can read.
But let’s say you and I are going to sit down and design the Louisiana state flag today. We are going to want to incorporate cultural, geographical, historical and heritage elements into.
“Put a crawfish on there, and maybe we should put something from the French flag on there to commemorate the original French Settlers, Louisiana purchase and what knot. They were part of the Confederacy, so we put something from the Confederate flag to show that. Oh yeah, and alligators and pralines… Gotta have those.”
It might have gone like that. Granted it might also have gone like
“Dammit, I can’t believe we lost that war. Can’t believe that happened. Shit. Well let’s put all this confederate shit on our new flag to keep reminding us of how he love slavery so that when nobody suspects it we can kind of sneak it back in, you know maybe as a line item on a sewage development bill,mor something. At the very least it’ll remember us to keep those black people down.”
I really don’t know.