The Confederate flag is back in the news again. NASCAR announced on Wednesday June 10, 2020 that it would ban the confederate flag at its properties. NASCAR said in a statement, “Bringing people together around a love for racing and the community that it creates is what makes our fans and sport special. The display of the Confederate flag will be prohibited from all NASCAR events and properties.”
Now you might be asking yourself, why now? That’s assuming NASCAR’s decision to ban the Confederate flag from all NASCAR events shortly after the killing of George Floyd by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin wasn’t “purely coincidental”.
It’s not like Derek Chauvin was wearing a Confederate flag on his uniform or did a rebel yell to drown out George Floyd’s cries for his mother while he suffocated under Chauvin’s knee.
What does one have to do with the other?
The Confederate flag is an interesting symbol, isn’t it? Communication requires mutually understood signs and symbols. MUTUALLY understood is the key. White supremacists know exactly what it stands for. That’s why they use it. They use it to send a message to black Americans who aren’t confused in the least about what the Confederate flag says to them.
Officially the Confederate flag represents the seven southern slave-holding states that seceded from the United States of America (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) because they felt threatened and betrayed by the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of the United States simply because he publicly opposed the expansion of slavery in the United States.
To suggest that we should honor the Confederate flag because there were American heroes that fought on both sides of the American “civil war” is to assert that what the Confederacy was fighting for was inherently “heroic”. You can’t have a hero that isn’t fighting for a heroic cause. Only a white supremacist would believe that fighting for white supremacy and the subjection of blacks to a condition of slavery is “noble”.
Those who claim that the Confederate flag simply represents southern heritage are EITHER ignorant, willfully or legitimately, of the very purpose of the Confederacy OR they are being disingenuous and simply “dog whistling”.
Dog-whistling is when people use language to talk about something that for most people is benign, that at the same time has very strongly implied meanings for a very specific group of its intended recipients. People who dog-whistle often claim to be ignorant of the messages being received by their intended recipients.
Unfortunately, President Trump has been dog-whistling throughout his entire presidency.
His latest dog-whistle was in his tweet on the evening of May 28th, 2020 “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” quoting Walter E. Headley, the police chief of Miami, Florida who famously said, “we don’t mind being accused of police brutality”.
It’s called dog-whistling because actual dog whistles emit sounds beyond what humans can hear but some other animals, particularly dogs can hear.
A lot of my black friends and family think the concept of dog-whistling is funny because we ALWAYS hear it. That’s because we are also the intended audience. Dog-whistling isn’t meant just for the White Supremacist but also their intended victims. Us.
So, my question is, who are these people who aren’t getting the message? I am specifically talking about whites who argue that the confederate flag is simply a vestige of their southern heritage and not a racist symbol at all.
On March 21, 1861 then Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens gave what would become known as “the Cornerstone Speech” in which he said, “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. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth”.
Read that as much as you’d need to get that to sink in. That flag represents the first government in the history of the world based on the great moral truth of white supremacy.
If they wanted to use something that symbolized southern heritage, they could use boiled peanuts. That too would check off all the boxes. Both black and white Americans who have spent their entire lives in the south eat them. That’s practically the only place that they do. They’ve been eating them down there since the 19th century when it was introduced to the south, like so many other things, by way of their enslaved Africans from West Africa.
But you and I know that boiled peanuts would be a poor substitute for the Confederate flag because boiled peanuts don’t say everything that you are saying when you slap a Confederate flag bumper sticker on your car or fly the Confederate flag.
In 2020 one can arguably find as many Confederate flags anywhere in rural Michigan as there are anywhere in South Carolina. Most people (excusing a few southern transplants) living in rural Michigan have no historical reason to fly a Confederate flag.
In fact, just the opposite is true, if they had ancestors who were even in Michigan in 1861-1865, their relatives were fighting AGAINST the Confederacy in American Civil War.
They fly that flag here in rural Michigan for the same reason they fly it in South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama or Los Angeles, California. They fly it because of what the Confederate flag unofficially represents, what it unequivocally says to anyone who isn’t going out of their way to be willfully ignorant, that they are supportive of White Supremacy.
This is why the state of South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from its state capital in 2015 after Dylann Roof ruthlessly murdered nine black Christians during a bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Why remove the Confederate flag if it is just a symbol of southern heritage entirely sanitized of white supremacy?
Because it isn’t. Never has been. Never will be.
Dylann Roof was a self-proclaimed, internet radicalized White supremacist who killed nine people as a statement of White supremacy. So by removing the Confederate flag, the most recognizable symbol of White Supremacy in America, it sends a very public message to anyone who isn’t intentionally covering their ears with their hands and humming to tune out the actual meaning and use of this particular piece of symbolism.
Here is a fair question. Is it even possible to celebrate “southern heritage” separated from its deeply embedded cornerstone of White Supremacy and black subordination?
Is it possible to have a museum, let’s say, dedicated exclusively to the history, culture and heritage of the southern United States, celebrating its beautiful sprawling plantations without acknowledging that the wealth that built the houses came entirely from the brutally enforced labor of enslaved Africans?
How would you “celebrate” the distinguished southern statesmen without mentioning that they were virtually all either slave owners themselves or at the very least staunch defenders of the institution of slavery and their god given right to own blacks, in particular? And then post-civil war, how do you talk about “southern heritage” without mentioning Jim Crow laws which rigidly defined social, political and economic relationships between whites and blacks for nearly a century after the conclusion of the American Civil War?
And if you could manage to do that, would it reflect the experiences of the majority of black Americans living in the south?
Like I said, if you were interested in celebrating some benign version of southern heritage with all its white supremacy bleached out of it, what would you have left?
Boiled peanuts.