Red Flag

Following a short social media post I made about the Confederate flag, a friend, who is not African-American, commented that for her, the flag has always symbolized hate and bigotry. Well, that wasn’t always the way it was for me, and I suspect I am not alone.

To me, as I said in the post, the Confederate flag was always a fun, quirky Southern thing. You could see it at high school football games. One of its most famous uses was being painted on the hood of the General Lee, the iconic car in “The Dukes of Hazzard.” That was a popular TV show once. I had no idea that if I watched it, saw the car and smiled or laughed, I was supporting bigotry and hatred.

The Civil War, as many writers have pointed out, was more than just about slavery. It was about states’ rights in general – their ability to decide what was legal within their boundaries, and supporters even used the U.S. Constitution to back this right. Was every Confederate soldier fighting to support slavery? Was every Union soldier fighting to abolish slavery? I don’t think so.

I’m sure all of us know a Civil War buff, somebody who can tell you the name of every general that fought in every battle, and where all the battles were fought. In many parts of the country, there are Civil War re-enactments every summer. If the Civil War was just about slavery, does that mean our friend the “buff” has turned an atrocity into a hobby, and the re-enactors have turned it into a game?

I was always a little scared of handling the American flag because of all the lore associated with it. At summer camp, when it was my job sometimes to raise and lower it, I was mortally afraid of dropping it. I thought if it touched the ground you were supposed to burn it because you had desecrated it by being careless. But in the ‘60s, the American flag meant something else to many people. Vietnam War protesters burned it. Some people wore it on the seat of their jeans. To them, it represented policies they disapproved of.

Fast forward to the South Carolina situation today. The Confederate flag has flown over the state capitol and other public facilities, and now there’s a demand it be removed. It seems the Republicans are being dragged kicking and screaming into supporting this view since the AME church massacre, and now “Should the flag come down?” is a litmus-test question for Presidential candidates.

It could very well be argued that the young man who shot up the Charleston church and killed nine people, in one single action, drastically narrowed the meaning of the Confederate flag. It’s now all about bigotry and oppression. Perhaps it has been for a long time for African-Americans; the rest of us may be slower to catch on, and we can only ask forgiveness.

But a flag is only a symbol, like a word. The meanings of words can change over time. If this is what has happened here, we have no choice but to demand that the Confederate flag be removed from our national consciousness. All I’m saying is that it hasn’t always meant what it now means, here in the summer of 2015.