The Confederate Flag IS Racist & Excuses For It Are Wrong

(These photos of Confederate flags at Trump rallies are from pinterest.com.)

It's obvious to any reasonable person that the Confederate flag is a racist symbol. It represented a country created solely to protect the institution of slavery, and whether they admit it or not, the people who fly it today are unabashedly flying a racist symbol. They have come up with all kinds of pathetic excuses to deny that racism, but none of them pass the smell test. The flag stinks of racism, and those who fly it are racists.

James Schlarmann has written an excellent article for Modern Liberals, in which he debunks the most popular excuses for flying that odious flag. Here is most of that article:

I want to talk some more about the Confederate Flag, and some of the more idiotic excuses I’ve seen for embracing it. . . .

“Slavery Was On Its Way Out Anyway!”

I bet that would bring much comfort to the slaves of the time.

“Hey man, just hang in there with that whole ‘being someone else’s property’ thing, we swear we’ll be done with slavery…soon…ish.” Because nothing says “we know it’s wrong to do what we’re doing” like keeping right on doing what you’re doing and breaking ties with an entire nation to protect that wrong behavior’s “tradition.”

Also the European slave trade had already been abolished nearly thirty years prior. Slavery, like socialized medicine, was a subject that Americans were just woefully behind the Europeans about. Yet, it’s not like it took 30 years for news to travel the Atlantic; people here knew. Of course they knew. They fought over slavery in the first Continental Congress. It was morally reprehensible then, whether the Southern powers that be wanted to admit it or not.

And all of that is just noise anyway, because the fact still remains that the Civil War was started after Southern states left the union in order to protect their slave trade industry. The confederate flag — any version of it — is a symbol of people who fought to preserve slavery, and it doesn’t actually make them more sympathetic to say slavery was out on its own anyway. It just makes them look like racist, backward, unevolved assholes who knew what they were doing was wrong, but they kept doing it anyway to preserve their little sphere of power.

“The Stars and Stripes Are What Was Flown On Slave Ships!”/”What About The Mistreatment of the Native Americans?”

Oh yay! It’s Deflection Time!

1. Yes, some truly terrible shit was, has been, and still is perpetrated under the good ol’ stars and stripes.
2. That’s why people that share my point of view don’t tend to put a lot of meaning behind any flag because they’re, well, fucking flags.
3. None of this excuses the South’s role in trying to further spread slavery and more importantly…
4. None of this means the confederate flag today, doesn’t still symbolize the confederacy, which again, is historically provable to have been fully committed to the cause of slavery.

“It Was About States’ Rights!”

Sure it was. The states’ “right” to “own black people as property” was threatened by the election of Abraham Lincoln, or at least that’s what the scared Southern power structure believed, and so they started jumping ship. You can try and obfuscate the details of history in any way you please, but applying a modern filter of “states’ rights” on this issue is just a neat little history revisionist’s trick to try and distract everyone from the plain and simple truth the only “right’ the states in the south were fighting to protect was the right own slaves. Ergo, the confederacy was truly about slavery’s preservation at its core, and you flying your goddamned confederate flag does indeed put you right on the same side as the slave-owning bastards who sent southern boys who’d never owned a slave but sure were under the impression that they should be allowed to off to war with their fellow Americans.

“It Was About Economics!”/”Irish Immigrants Were Abused in the Factories of the North!”

Again, these kinds of arguments are only meant to deflect away from slavery. But you cannot extricate slavery from the secession of the confederate states, from the importance it played in this country’s founding from the very beginning, or from the fabric of history that so plainly shows what the tipping point was. Sure, there have been times since that I myself have felt the Federal government was overstepping its bounds — marijuana laws being chief among them — but that doesn’t mean that the fight to legalize pot and end the War on Drugs is even in the same universe as slavery, and if you need me to explain why, just please go get spayed or neutered now so the derp in your bloodline can be quickly snuffed out.

The Irish immigrant thing is cute and all, but it doesn’t mean that your confederate flag isn’t racist. All you’ve pointed out is another era in which Americans were very terribly shitty to foreign immigrant. How the Irish were treated does not in any way negate how black slaves were treated, and again I have to ask that you sterilize yourself if you need me to explain why that is. Oh, and no, they weren’t enslaved like Africans were; that’s white supremacist mythology.

Bottom Line Time: Today Flying That Flag Is Racist

In the end, the facts just stack up this way: slavery was a racist practice. Racist Southern plantation owners practiced slavery (yes, even Thomas Jefferson should be put in that category; dude knew it was wrong and kept right on doing it). When those racist slave owners decided their economic prosperity built on one of the worst abject and gross violations of a populace’s civil rights in history was worth leaving the country for, and ultimately starting a war over, they permanently imbued all iconography associated with their cause with the dark shadow of racism.

Maybe you’re a naturally rebellious person; God knows I am. Maybe you have an irreverent streak in you that says “Fuck the man, I’m my own person!” None of that is bad. In fact, I admire the vocal rebel as much as any other creature of American mythology. But you can be all those things, and declare yourself as such without latching onto the symbols of a truly heinous and disgusting part of our shared history together. The point is that we all should feel shame for the slave trade; not some misplaced anger that people of color have a genuine grievance for how their ancestors were treated and more importantly, how they’re treated to this day.

The way society works is that over time we have these long conversations with each other; we hash out issues like this. And the overwhelming majority of people these days rightfully attribute the flags and other elements of the confederacy with the abhorrent practice of the slave trade. All the hemming and hawing over some other filtration of the data just doesn’t matter. Feel free to fly that piece of racist shit if you want, but don’t piss on our legs and tell us it’s raining.

Your confederate flag represents racism.