Flag Follies
Here's something I've been waiting for for a long time.
The article is about the NAACP's boycott against South Carolina over its Confederate flag. The boycott is basically a flop, but the NAACP won't give it up. This failure is good news, but even better news is the Memorial Day weekend anecdote that leads the story:
Hooray for them! The best way to disarm a symbol that you feel is used against you is to embrace it. Look how homosexuals have sucked the vitriol out of "gay" and "queer" and "fag" by embracing the words.
I've often thought the best policy for southern blacks would be to take literally the rhetoric of the Confederate Battle Flag's defenders, that it is a symbol of Southern culture, not of race. Wear it! Make it everybody's X -- at least, everyone with Southern roots.
The NAACP, needless to say, doesn't see things that way. It started the South Carolina boycott in 2000 to get the Confederate battle flag off the South Carolina statehouse dome. The legislature gave them that, but the NAACP kept it up because the South Carolinians, recognizing that the flag had some place in their history, allowed it to fly at a memorial on the statehouse grounds. The NAACP would prefer to see the flag banished from the universe.
Seriously. The group's anti-flag resolution is absurdly bombastic: "WHEREAS, the tyrannical evil symbolized in the Confederate Battle Flag is an abhorrence to all Americans and decent people of this country, and indeed, the world and is an odious blight upon the universe," and so forth.
The NAACP insists the boycott is still having an effect, the AP reports. But it can produce no numbers to verify that. Tourism-related tax receipts rose $3.5 million during the boycott.
Others have pointed out that the honoring of the boycott by certain institutions, such as the NCAA, hurts blacks in South Carolina. It's interesting that one of the sports groups that plans to break the boycott is the Eastern Intercollegiate Athletic Association — a conference of historically black Southern colleges.
At Black Bike Week, interviewing young men and women raised in a desegregated America, the AP found plenty of the same sentiment.
"Most of the people working in these hotels, cleaning the rooms, sitting at the front desk are African-American," one man said. "So if we don't come down here, then we're taking money out of their pocket and food off their table. How's that helping us as a whole?"
One of the girls in the bikinis, a criminal justice major in a North Carolina college, said the NAACP should be focusing on more important things, like educating poor black youth.
"It's silly. It's a new millennium. Everybody's not worried about a flag."
But the NAACP is mired in the old millennium, where it once was relevant and essential. Dwight James, executive director of the NAACP’s state conference, is still obsessed with the idea of "confederate mentality." He sees Confederates in the woodpile everywhere in the South.
As an example of "Confederate mentality" still allegedly rampant in the South, he pointed to the black biker festival itself.
Horrors!
Which is not to say the flag carries no baggage. Clearly, it does. The Southern legislators and governors in the mid-1950s, when the old Confederate flags returned to prominence in state capitols, were rabid segregationists. They threatened to dissolve the public schools rather than integrate them. Furthermore, the Battle Flag had been run up by the "Dixiecrats" at their convention in Birmingham in 1948. Both groups made their appeals to the people on the basis of states' rights and resisting federal control, and on the example of Reconstruction.
Yet the segregationists and the Dixiecrat convention did not invent a symbol; they took one that had existed for decades, and gave it their purpose. Just like the Klan did when it marched under the Stars and Stripes. For the previous 80-some years, the CSA battle flag had been the veterans' flag, used almost exclusively at CSA commemorations. Most of the Confederate leaders owned slaves. Most of the soldiers did not. The battle flag was the flag of the soldiers, not the CSA government.
People who support the validity of the Confederate battle flag as a regional icon, and who are capable of articulating their reasons, often do so because the flag stands legitimately for the soldiers and common folk of the CSA, who were by anyone's measure a valiant and determined people embodying much of the best of America, North or South.
They may also see it as representing many of the qualities that the Southern soldiers fought for (as historians have determined them from contemporary writings), such as resistance to tyranny, regional distinctiveness, honor, and republican virtues. This approach sees the flag as a historic symbol, rooted in the Civil War experience of Southern people.
The NAACP has it exactly wrong, and Crystal and Marquita, the girls in bikinis, have it exactly right. At bottom, this is just ink on cloth. It has meant one thing in one generation, and another in the next. Symbols are endlessly pliable. They can be infused with new meanings.
Certainly a whole lot of trouble could have been avoided if, in 1948 or 1956, the many Southern white people who felt a strong sense of regional heritage and historical pride had objected to this hijacking of their flag. If it had been kept as the soldiers' flag, and not the politicians', the case for keeping it today would be obvious. But the mistake was made; partly, I think, because the Dixiecrat pitch to the voters was put in terms of defending the state from Northern hegemony, rather than as pure race-baiting.
But now, it seems to me, much of the angry noise on this battle flag issue comes from non-Southern leadership in the NAACP. Running short of examples of institutional bigotry in the South, to put in its fund-raising appeals in the North, it turns to divisive attacks on symbols.
And to the NAACP, I'd say, you fought the good fight. But the essential difference between a warrior and a berserker is knowing when the fight is over.
On the other hand, I think the situation in this photo could be improved:
The caption reads:
Blunt's sentiment is sound. To banish the Confederate flag from a graveyard of Confederate dead is an unnecessary insult. We have re-integrated the South into the union since 1865, but while these men lived and died, it was a nation. An American nation. If the old flag of the South belongs anywhere, in the public eye, it belongs here.
Yet this is not quite the right flag. One way to draw a distinction between the old soldiers' flag and the modern segregationists' flag is to bear in mind that the Confederate Battle Flag was square, like this:
This is the true flag of the South's heritage, conceived by Beauregard and stitched by the Cary sisters, derided by the politicians and embraced by the soldiers. Some few Southern regiments carried a rectangular version, but for most of the infantry it was a straight regulation square, four feet on each side. And they died for it in the tens of thousands.
But the flag in the AP photo looks more like the Dixiecrat flag, the Jim Crow flag, the flag of Thurmond, not Lee.
The article is about the NAACP's boycott against South Carolina over its Confederate flag. The boycott is basically a flop, but the NAACP won't give it up. This failure is good news, but even better news is the Memorial Day weekend anecdote that leads the story:
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (AP) — If Crystal Hunt and Marquita Jackson were looking to draw attention, they succeeded. Wolf whistles and honking horns followed the bikini-clad duo as they strutted down Ocean Boulevard.
Hunt was wearing a red-white-and-blue Confederate battle flag wrap over her white two-piece, Jackson a bra bearing the familiar diagonal blue cross and white stars co-opted by the Ku Klux Klan. You could say the two black women were thumbing their noses at the NAACP's 5-year-old boycott of South Carolina except for one thing: Neither of the 21-year-old North Carolina women had any idea there even was a boycott.
Hooray for them! The best way to disarm a symbol that you feel is used against you is to embrace it. Look how homosexuals have sucked the vitriol out of "gay" and "queer" and "fag" by embracing the words.
I've often thought the best policy for southern blacks would be to take literally the rhetoric of the Confederate Battle Flag's defenders, that it is a symbol of Southern culture, not of race. Wear it! Make it everybody's X -- at least, everyone with Southern roots.
The NAACP, needless to say, doesn't see things that way. It started the South Carolina boycott in 2000 to get the Confederate battle flag off the South Carolina statehouse dome. The legislature gave them that, but the NAACP kept it up because the South Carolinians, recognizing that the flag had some place in their history, allowed it to fly at a memorial on the statehouse grounds. The NAACP would prefer to see the flag banished from the universe.
Seriously. The group's anti-flag resolution is absurdly bombastic: "WHEREAS, the tyrannical evil symbolized in the Confederate Battle Flag is an abhorrence to all Americans and decent people of this country, and indeed, the world and is an odious blight upon the universe," and so forth.
The NAACP insists the boycott is still having an effect, the AP reports. But it can produce no numbers to verify that. Tourism-related tax receipts rose $3.5 million during the boycott.
Others have pointed out that the honoring of the boycott by certain institutions, such as the NCAA, hurts blacks in South Carolina. It's interesting that one of the sports groups that plans to break the boycott is the Eastern Intercollegiate Athletic Association — a conference of historically black Southern colleges.
"We just need to leave that issue alone," said conference President Willie Jefferson. "We can call for that boycott from now to the 22nd century, and things still will not change."
At Black Bike Week, interviewing young men and women raised in a desegregated America, the AP found plenty of the same sentiment.
"Most of the people working in these hotels, cleaning the rooms, sitting at the front desk are African-American," one man said. "So if we don't come down here, then we're taking money out of their pocket and food off their table. How's that helping us as a whole?"
One of the girls in the bikinis, a criminal justice major in a North Carolina college, said the NAACP should be focusing on more important things, like educating poor black youth.
"It's silly. It's a new millennium. Everybody's not worried about a flag."
But the NAACP is mired in the old millennium, where it once was relevant and essential. Dwight James, executive director of the NAACP’s state conference, is still obsessed with the idea of "confederate mentality." He sees Confederates in the woodpile everywhere in the South.
As an example of "Confederate mentality" still allegedly rampant in the South, he pointed to the black biker festival itself.
When the predominantly white Carolina Harley-Davidson Dealers Association held its annual rally in the beach resort the week before, traffic along Ocean Boulevard was the usual two-way affair. But when the black riders came to town, orange cones went up, and the popular strip was limited to southbound traffic only.
Horrors!
Which is not to say the flag carries no baggage. Clearly, it does. The Southern legislators and governors in the mid-1950s, when the old Confederate flags returned to prominence in state capitols, were rabid segregationists. They threatened to dissolve the public schools rather than integrate them. Furthermore, the Battle Flag had been run up by the "Dixiecrats" at their convention in Birmingham in 1948. Both groups made their appeals to the people on the basis of states' rights and resisting federal control, and on the example of Reconstruction.
Yet the segregationists and the Dixiecrat convention did not invent a symbol; they took one that had existed for decades, and gave it their purpose. Just like the Klan did when it marched under the Stars and Stripes. For the previous 80-some years, the CSA battle flag had been the veterans' flag, used almost exclusively at CSA commemorations. Most of the Confederate leaders owned slaves. Most of the soldiers did not. The battle flag was the flag of the soldiers, not the CSA government.
People who support the validity of the Confederate battle flag as a regional icon, and who are capable of articulating their reasons, often do so because the flag stands legitimately for the soldiers and common folk of the CSA, who were by anyone's measure a valiant and determined people embodying much of the best of America, North or South.
They may also see it as representing many of the qualities that the Southern soldiers fought for (as historians have determined them from contemporary writings), such as resistance to tyranny, regional distinctiveness, honor, and republican virtues. This approach sees the flag as a historic symbol, rooted in the Civil War experience of Southern people.
The NAACP has it exactly wrong, and Crystal and Marquita, the girls in bikinis, have it exactly right. At bottom, this is just ink on cloth. It has meant one thing in one generation, and another in the next. Symbols are endlessly pliable. They can be infused with new meanings.
Certainly a whole lot of trouble could have been avoided if, in 1948 or 1956, the many Southern white people who felt a strong sense of regional heritage and historical pride had objected to this hijacking of their flag. If it had been kept as the soldiers' flag, and not the politicians', the case for keeping it today would be obvious. But the mistake was made; partly, I think, because the Dixiecrat pitch to the voters was put in terms of defending the state from Northern hegemony, rather than as pure race-baiting.
But now, it seems to me, much of the angry noise on this battle flag issue comes from non-Southern leadership in the NAACP. Running short of examples of institutional bigotry in the South, to put in its fund-raising appeals in the North, it turns to divisive attacks on symbols.
And to the NAACP, I'd say, you fought the good fight. But the essential difference between a warrior and a berserker is knowing when the fight is over.
On the other hand, I think the situation in this photo could be improved:
The caption reads:
The Confederate battle flag flies below the Missouri state flag and the U.S. flag at the Confederate Memorial Historic Site near Higginsville, Mo., in this March 3, 1997, file photo. Republican Gov. Matt Blunt has ordered the flag, which was ordered taken down in 2003 by Democratic Gov. Bob Holden's administration, to fly Sunday, June 5, 2005, at the historic site, where a graveside service is planned to mark Confederate Memorial Day, and the order has outraged Mary Ratliff, president of the Missouri State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Blunt's sentiment is sound. To banish the Confederate flag from a graveyard of Confederate dead is an unnecessary insult. We have re-integrated the South into the union since 1865, but while these men lived and died, it was a nation. An American nation. If the old flag of the South belongs anywhere, in the public eye, it belongs here.
Yet this is not quite the right flag. One way to draw a distinction between the old soldiers' flag and the modern segregationists' flag is to bear in mind that the Confederate Battle Flag was square, like this:
This is the true flag of the South's heritage, conceived by Beauregard and stitched by the Cary sisters, derided by the politicians and embraced by the soldiers. Some few Southern regiments carried a rectangular version, but for most of the infantry it was a straight regulation square, four feet on each side. And they died for it in the tens of thousands.
But the flag in the AP photo looks more like the Dixiecrat flag, the Jim Crow flag, the flag of Thurmond, not Lee.
Labels: Confederate flag, NAACP
