Why are so many Americans defending the confederate flag, monuments and statues right now?

[CousinIT]

I found this on Nextdoor and figured I'd share it in case it is useful to anyone else here:

“If you are confused as to why so many Americans are defending the confederate flag, monuments, and statues right now, I put together a quick Q&A, with questions from a hypothetical person with misconceptions and answers from my perspective as an AP U.S. History Teacher"

Q: What did the Confederacy stand for?

A: Rather than interpreting, let's go directly to the words of the Confederacy's Vice President, Alexander Stephens. In his "Cornerstone Speech" on March 21, 1861, he stated "The Constitution... rested upon the equality of races. This was an error. Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone 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."

Q: But people keep saying heritage, not hate! They think the purpose of the flags and monuments are to honor confederate soldiers, right?

A: The vast majority of confederate flags flying over government buildings in the south were first put up in the 1960's during the Civil Rights Movement. So for the first hundred years after the Civil War ended, while relatives of those who fought in it were still alive, the confederate flag wasn't much of a symbol at all. But when Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis were marching on Washington to get the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965) passed, leaders in the south felt compelled to fly confederate flags and put up monuments to honor people who had no living family members and had fought in a war that ended a century ago. Their purpose in doing this was to exhibit their displeasure with black people fighting for basic human rights that were guaranteed to them in the 14th and 15th Amendments but being withheld by racist policies and practices.

Q: But if we take down confederate statues and monuments, how will we teach about and remember the past?

A: Monuments and statues pose little educational relevance, whereas museums, the rightful place for Confederate paraphernalia, can provide more educational opportunities for citizens to learn about our country's history. The Civil War is important to learn about, and will always loom large in social studies curriculum. Removing monuments from public places and putting them in museums also allows us to avoid celebrating and honoring people who believed that tens of millions of black Americans should be legal property.

Q: But what if the Confederate flag symbol means something different to me?

A: Individuals aren't able to change the meaning of symbols that have been defined by history. When I hang a Bucs flag outside my house, to me, the Bucs might represent the best team in the NFL, but to the outside world, they represent an awful NFL team, since they haven't won a playoff game in 18 years. I can't change that meaning for everyone who drives by my house because it has been established for the whole world to see. If a Confederate flag stands for generic rebellion or southern pride to you, your personal interpretation forfeits any meaning once you display it publicly, as its meaning takes on the meaning it earned when a failed regime killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in an attempt to destroy America and keep black people enslaved forever.

Q: But my uncle posted a meme that said the Civil War/Confederacy was about state's rights and not slavery?

A: "A state's right to what?" - John Green

Q: Everyone is offended about everything these days. Should we take everything down that offends anyone?

A: The Confederacy literally existed to go against the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the idea that black people are human beings that deserve to live freely. If that doesn't upset or offend you, you are un-American.

Q: Taking these down goes against the First Amendment and freedom of speech, right?

A: No. Anyone can do whatever they want on their private property, on their social media, etc. Taking these down in public, or having private corporations like NASCAR ban them on their properties, has literally nothing to do with the Bill of Rights.

Q: How can people claim to be patriotic while supporting a flag that stood for a group of insurgent failures who tried to permanently destroy America and killed 300,000 Americans in the process?

A: No clue.

Q: So if I made a confederate flag my profile picture, or put a confederate bumper sticker on my car, what am I declaring to my friends, family, and the world?

A: That you support the Confederacy. To recap, the Confederacy stands for: slavery, white supremacy, treason, failure, and a desire to permanently destroy Selective history as it supports white supremacy.

It’s no accident that:

You learned about Helen Keller instead of W.E.B, DuBois

You learned about the Watts and L.A. Riots, but not Tulsa or Wilmington.

You learned that George Washington’s dentures were made from wood, rather than the teeth from slaves.

You learned about black ghettos, but not about Black Wall Street.

You learned about the New Deal, but not “red lining.”

You learned about Tommie Smith’s fist in the air at the 1968 Olympics, but not that he was sent home the next day and stripped of his medals.

You learned about “black crime,” but white criminals were never lumped together and discussed in terms of their race.

You learned about “states rights” as the cause of the Civil War, but not that slavery was mentioned 80 times in the articles of secession.

Privilege is having history rewritten so that you don’t have to acknowledge uncomfortable facts.

Racism is perpetuated by people who refuse to learn or acknowledge this reality.

You have a choice.”

- Jim Golden

https://cloakinginequity.com/2021/07/17/the-confederacy-you-have-a-choice/

[usonian]

1. Short: stands for racism.

GOP aligned with racism with the "Southern Strategy" of Lee Atwater.

[Eliot Rosewater]

4. Yes, but we could've avoided it all this time

If the incredibly stupid fucking people who used Gaza as an excuse didn’t do the terrible thing they did on election day.

[usonian]

8. With all respect for your opinions, "woulda, coulda, shoulda" aren't going to get us where we need to go.

And yes, I totally agree about the Harris/Biden holdouts, and have even posted about Russian bots which inflamed it.
I saw it with my own eyes, and argued against it.

Here. Enjoy.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/13243851
People want confirmation of their ill-informed/brainwashed prejudices and fairy-tale conspiracies rather than any benefit to themselves or their peers.

That said,

Want to know the roots of this mess?
Ask Thomas Jefferson.


(1776) The Deleted Passage of the Declaration of Independence
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/declaration-independence-and-debate-over-slavery/

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE DEBATE OVER SLAVERY

When Thomas Jefferson included a passage attacking slavery in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, it initiated the most intense debate among the delegates gathered at Philadelphia in the spring and early summer of 1776. Jefferson’s passage on slavery was the most important section removed from the final document. As a compromise, it was replaced with a more ambiguous passage about King George’s incitement of “domestic insurrections among us.” Decades later Jefferson blamed the removal of the passage on delegates from South Carolina and Georgia and Northern delegates who represented merchants who were at the time actively involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Jefferson’s original passage on slavery appears below.

He [King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

I save my best posts for Activist Headquarters and The Way Forward.
And parodies for the rest. Just hoping for the day that one hits the Bismark.

Join me there.

[Eliot Rosewater]

9. Where? Link?

https://thewayfwrd.com/

?

Ok

Looks like there’s a hefty fee to belong, I won’t do that but if it organizes opposition etc. OK

[usonian]

10. Hidden in plain sight. On DU. Please contribute to the conversation and effort.

Activist Headquarters
https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1011

A lot of easy to find posts here about protests around the country with specific instructions.

The Way Forward
https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1324

Welcome aboard.

[Eliot Rosewater]

13. I thought they were separate entities and websites

[MerryBlooms]

12. Down to the knitty gritty

You're one of the best here 👍

[Eliot Rosewater]

14. BTW. What you called could've would've should've

We actually tried to explain to people for years just how bad it could get just who this was, many of us tried and we made predictions of the insane things that would happen and then they did the insane things and we asked everybody please don’t trash Kamala the way you did Hillary etc.

[usonian]

15. It has instructional value, of course.

WE knew, and my argument to people was that Kamala was open to compassionate ideas, and was influencing Joe Biden in positive ways, and you saw the somewhat ill-fated relief effort at the time.

The "other" never did a good work in his life, but bamboozled people with the racist garbage, outright lies that people wanted to believe, and a massive propaganda campaign against Joe, with proven assistance by a deluge of Russian bots.

It's in my "editorial"
https://www.democraticunderground.com/13243851

Those who voted against "Genocide Joe" guaranteed the massacre and destruction of Gaza by Bibi and his right wing ally Trump. Those who believed the utter bullshit of lower prices guaranteed higher prices, fattening the fatcats, and consequent destruction of social services and national security by Donald Chamberlain.

Now, how do we improve this situation?
Some tentative ideas in my "editorial"
A lot is about getting out the vote, and spreading the message RIGHT NOW is what Bernie and AOC have been doing, and which I believe is the key to winning. Put ideas in peoples' minds before the hate cannon fires endlessly.

But that's the nut to crack.
People ignored the obvious and the lies.
They were told the garbage they wanted to hear.



I am open to ideas how to move forward from this awful situation.

[markodochartaigh]

2. Unfortunately,

using facts and logic to argue with someone whose world view is based on deeply indoctrinated belief is an exercise in futility.

[Bread and Circuses]

3. Thanks. Racism and Oppression for Profit

[ITAL]

5. The beginning "quote" misrepresents Stephens

Last edited Mon Aug 18, 2025, 09:08 AM - Edit history (3)

Stephens never said the US Constitution rested upon the equality of the races....which what he was actually arguing was the North's view of what was meant by the Founders (that the Constitution rested upon the equality of races) was wrong.

But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew.

Obviously I'm not defending Stephens. However, in trying to use his words to prove what the Confederacy meant, they actually didn't give the full context of what he was saying and in fact seemed to be saying that he was arguing since the Constitution was about equality, the Confederacy had to break away...whereas he was arguing the Constitution was about equality of white people, but also inequality of other races races, and since the northerners were making waves about changing the relationship between races, the South had the right to break away to be true to its original intent.

[CousinIT]

7. You are no doubt correct.

I won't change the OP because that's how it was written at the source, but you are likely right.

[SheltieLover]

6. They identify with racist, traitorius losers

[TnDem]

11. My neighbor made a fortune a few years ago

Walmart announced they were stopping sales of all confederate flags, and he went on AliExpress and ordered 200 of them. I think he gave $3 each from China... He had a roadside stand and sold them for $20 all day long until he sold out.

The strange thing was, more were sold to people visiting from NY than locals?