Pride and Prejudice

While driving through the rural nowhereland south of Raleigh, a sight of the trip outnumbered only — perhaps — by neglected cotton fields and ceramic yard animals stoked the train of thought which follows.

The secession of the Confederacy was not merely about slavery; regional pride and economics were very large factors and it seems this is the justification most Southerners use for displaying the flag despite its association with slavery, murder, oppression, and of course a bloody civil war.

To draw a parallel however, the rise of the Third Reich wasn't only about exterminating non-Aryans; it was also very much about regional pride and economics. So then, how many swastikas can you find flying in southern Germany? You won't find them on license plates and state flags. Nor on blue-collar bumper-stickers or the roof of iconic, high-flying, Polizei-confounding muscle cars. You'd be lucky — especially Teutonic cleanliness being what it is — to even find it scratched in the anonymous bile forum of the public toilet stall, as you not infrequently will in the US.

Seeing the Dachau camp first-hand reinforced my opinion that they are right to be ashamed and certainly not to celebrate this part of their history. Unfortunately, unlike post-war Germany the postbellum South's campaign to leave behind its dark past has been more battle of attrition than Blitzkrieg. (Alabama's anti-miscegenation law stood until 2000!) Perhaps we need more reminders such as the Civil Rights Museum that recently opened in Greensboro to put our nostalgic icons in context? Slave ships and burnt crosses haven't had quite the permanence or tourist-trap quality of barracks and brick ovens after all.

Like the Red Scare-era fit of piety that brought about the addition of "In God we trust" to US currency, the current popularity of the battle flag of the confederacy has not been a constant but rather was a reactionary response to desegregation in the '50s. With our singular propensity for historical amnesia both of these facts have been smoothed over by our assumption that 'all is as it has ever been' in regard to the traditions we rely on for stability. The painfully cliche adage admonishing those who would forget history applies here. Worse even than repetition we doom ourselves to a moral numbness when we close our eyes to the origins and context of the identities we embrace in the name of tradition, community, and belonging.

Please don't be so simple as to think I am calling Southerners Nazis. Neither am I by any means asserting that the South was solely responsible for the slave trade or has nothing to be proud of and so should hang its head in shame. No more than I would deny pride to the beautiful, history-laden Bavaria. No, what I denounce is the choice of the confederate flag as a rallying icon and the particular hateful spirit that it represents, whether its proponents choose to acknowledge this or not.