If you know ANYONE who doesn't understand why the Confederate flag has to go, show them this

[highplainsdem]

opinion piece by Stuart Stevens of the Lincoln Project.

Found this thanks to a Lincoln Project tweet

Link to tweet

From that piece at the Bulwark:


https://thebulwark.com/my-confederate-past/

-snip-

It’s difficult to explain to a non-Southerner the role the Confederate flag has played in our lives. I suspect that’s more so for a Mississippian than for someone from any other state as Mississippi is the most Southern of the states. Put it this way: If you have connections to the University of Mississippi—the most Southern school in the most Southern state—then your connection to the Confederate flag is what the shamrock is to Notre Dame.

I was born in the 1950s to parents who met at Ole Miss. The role Ole Miss football played in my life was basically what the Catholic Church is to the Jesuits. It was both a belief system and the organizing principle of life. Saturdays in the fall were the Holy Days when the Faithful would gather and reinforce our devotion through the shared communion of ritual.

These were not football games but celebrations of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Only this time our 11 soldiers on the field of battle more often than not emerged victorious. At halftime the band marched in Confederate battle gray uniforms while Colonel Reb led the cheerleaders in unfolding what was billed as the world’s largest Confederate flag. (Even as a 10-year-old I remember wondering, “How big was the second-largest flag?”) Cheerleaders threw bundles of Confederate flags into the stands. We stood and swayed together singing Dixie, always ending in the stadium-shaking cry, “The South Shall Rise Again.”

-snip-

It was just always there; like the way the magnolia was the state flower and Mississippi State had those awful cowbells. At school we pledged allegiance to the U.S. flag and the state flag and it never occurred to me that we were still pledging fealty to the Confederacy. I came from a family of lawyers, judges, and Methodist ministers, not plantation slave owners.

-snip-

Mississippi has the highest percentage of African Americans of any state in the country. I ask myself now why did it take so long for me to realize what it might be like for nearly 40 percent of my state to go to school and work under a flag that represented a cause dedicated to the right to own their ancestors? Why is it that I had written books about traveling through China, Africa, and Europe, fascinated by every cultural quirk I came across, before I looked up at my own state flag and thought about the dehumanizing brutality it represented?

-snip-

Stevens goes on to point out that his indifference to the Confederate flag, his lack of thought about what it really represented, "was just as toxic as active support."

He says he doesn't "have any good answers" as to why it took him so long to wake up, "most likely because there are none."


What he writes is both a testament to how blind people can be to what's wrong in their own environment, and to there not being any good excuses for continuing in that blindness just because of tradition.

This opinion piece won't work with the deplorables who are really quite happy with a flag that represents racism.

But it might help others -- especially Southerners who like Stevens grew up with that flag all around them and never thought about it enough to associate it with racism -- to understand just how toxic it is for them to continue to tolerate that flag just because they're so used to it.



(Btw, as someone who grew up in the Midwest and was mostly interested in Big 8 football, I had no idea how ridiculous the football game rituals at Ole Miss were till I read this opinion piece. Jaw-dropping.)

[highplainsdem]

1. kicking

[Hoyt]

2. Excellent. I think, however, that most people waving/supporting that flag nowadays know exactly what

it represents, and have for decades.

America's Swastika represents a Heritage of Hatred.

[dalton99a]

3. Kick

[highplainsdem]

4. Thanks!