BalrogLord, on 01 July 2015 - 04:50 AM, said:
Question to my american malazites. Up here, as far as i can tell, its perceived that theres a pretty clear relationship between the confederate flag and supporting racism. Yet despite this many hold onto these flags as important symbols. Can someone care to explain this to me, as if the link between the flag and racism was as apparent, why would anyone even attempt to defend the flag?
This phenomenon has quite a few things happening within it. The use of symbols in our consciousness (individual commercial and societal) is really interesting and intersects this too.
The American Civil War was always about slavery. The declarations of secession from most of the states that left the United States baldly states this. As historians and writers are now re-re-re-explaining to us, slaves were like cars. An overwhelming majority of Southern white people with money bought, sold and abused black people who they deemed as property and Southern white people without money worked to get the $ to afford slaves. It was a matter of fact thing and the plundering system allowed people to make huge amounts of money. The people in the Northern states were slowly phasing that mindset out, yet a sizable group up there still believed in the slave system (not a majority though). It wasn't "all people in the North vs all people in the South" over the issue of slavery, but it was pretty agreed upon up North that slavery should stop being a thing Americans did.
The American Civil War was unusual in that the losing side (the slave-owning South) was very quickly able to shift tactics of oppressing black/brown people from outright slavery to the Jim Crow system (using legal tricks and racist gov't/racist police enforcement/racist banks to keep black people from voting, from increasing their social mobility, from protecting their property and rights and so on without actually making them slaves or causing a country-wide black uprising). This was in part driven by the assassination of Lincoln - which gave the presidency to Andrew Johnson. The dropoff in quality of leadership, competence and drive for social improvement from Lincoln to Johnson was enormous. That dropoff led to widespread obstructionism at the national, state, and local levels regarding dismantling the institutions of slavery and oppression of black people. It led to the "Reconstruction Program" being kinda a failure. It led to millions of black slaves being "free", but not actually free. It led to much more too. Lincoln probably wouldn't have fixed everything, but he really did make ending slavery and setting black people on a not-shitty standing a driving purpose for his presidency. A smooth handoff directly to another anti-slavery politician (Ulysses Grant could have been president earlier for example) almost certainly would have had massive positive impacts on the US as a whole.
Add in that the South also very quickly started creating mythology out of thin air about their "noble war", about "Northern carpetbaggers", about a gentle and luxurious for everyone antebellum South that existed only in fantasies. Slavery was/is horrible. The conditions in the American South for slaves were terrible, whether field or house slaves. However, the mythology covered this up and put a rosy light on the "kind slaveowners who taught illiterate, stupid slaves how to take care of themselves and learn the value of hard work despite being lazy". This reshaping of the recent past caught on in a big way (much like German post-World War 1 and other nations in similar situations). White people from poor backgrounds particularly bought into this mythology.
These things (and more) kept feeding each other for decades and decades. The people who cling most to the Confederate flag are the descendants of poor white people who don't see institutional racism as being a thing. They only see "slave-owning" as racism. They don't have the same concept of racism and disadvantage as sane people do. They yell about pride in their heritage and the Great South Before Yankees Ruined It, but that's a heritage and past that they refuse to see as being built upon slavery. It's not even that far back. The last living Civil War veterans died in the late 1950s. The grandsons of important public figures back then are walking around today.
The Confederate States of America (the South) actually had a few different flags of varying design. The "crossed blue lines with white stars above a red background" flag was a battle flag that kinda sorta made it as a non-mass produced Confederate flag. It looks visually interesting and its intent really was to show white supremacy by having the battle flag up in the left corner and a white background around it. But people started chopping off the white background because it looked like a flag of truce/surrender.
Symbols matter in ways that aren't always easy to explain. The flag is a symbol of a way of life in which people intentionally baked in institutional oppression of people who aren't white and aren't Christian. The people who like the flag do mental contortions, school history revising and a whole lot of yelling to avoid confronting that fact. Plus the Confederate flag didn't fly above state capitols until the 1950s and 1960s, when it was put up there as a reaction to the huge black civil rights movements.
Many, many white Southerners are very deluded about what this particular symbol means and have tied the flag symbol to their identities in interesting ways. They use it as social signaling - as in saying "I'm proud I'm from the South", which may mean something more along the lines of "Yes, I'm poor, but I'm still proud" and even deeper "Yes, I'm poor, but we who think alike are all going to band together to keep things going our way and NOT THEIRS and eventually be rich". The "they" buried into that symbol are Northerners, are people who aren't white, are people who aren't Christian, are people who don't do things the way they do, are people who aren't thought about much in terms of being actually human. It is a symbol of purposeful otherization and most people otherize non-Southerners (however idiotically loose a concept that is) with it very comfortably.
All this happens on obvious and subtle levels alike. Kids grow up with Confederate flags on all manner of toys, clothes, advertising and so on. Many never quite face the history producing the deep sting of seeing that flag. They adopt this symbology into their own lives, proliferate it, and even honor it. Some even start to believe it is a good symbol and that what it represents are good things. Some of those people start thinking that yes, black people are sub-human and taking/stealing from whites and so on.
A symbol becomes hate and hate becomes violence (or becomes a way of baking oppression into the lives of others and the advantages of plunder into yours).
Nicodimas 
Help
