Posted on 06/01/2006 9:07:55 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
Last month, Ithaca High School administrators sent a letter home with students, informing their parents that the flag of the Confederacy had been banned. Ithaca High School students can no longer display the emblem on belt buckles, t-shirts, or anywhere else while on school property. Apparently, the students wearing their Dixie Outfitters t-shirts, in a proud nod to our country’s better half, were white. It is unfortunate that civil liberties apply only to those in privileged groups, such as blacks or Hispanics.
Because the United States Supreme Court has ruled in favor of protecting the freedom of speech exercised in displaying the stars and bars, Ithaca High School had to claim that the flag was creating some sort of disruption in the school that hindered the educational process. No specific instances were mentioned in the administration’s letter.
I found the claim interesting, though, because, were it true, it would clearly indicate that racism is much more of a problem in Upstate New York than in my hometown in Southern Virginia. To think that racial hatred could be stirred up by a high school student’s belt buckle is frightening, indeed. The school’s objection to the battle flag is even more astonishing considering the fact that only 6.7% of the population of Ithaca is black. But apparently the race wars here are far more intense than in my hometown, of which 13.34% of the population was black. And yet, in my public high school, where displays of the confederate flag were common on car bumpers, t-shirts, or belt buckles, and where a significant minority of the student body was black, and even in a state that historically had supported slavery, the flag was never accused of disturbing a classroom, much less of inciting racial hatred.
Ithaca’s black population is proportionately only slightly more than half that of the United States. This is an unusually white city. And apparently race relations here are in such tension that they can be upset by a kid’s t-shirt. Schools in the South, much less segregated, are clearly more at ease and have put issues of racism farther behind them;thus, students there can better appreciate the historic and cultural value of the Confederate flag. It leads one to wonder on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line racism is still prevalent today.
The Confederate flag is not—and was never—a representation of the institution of slavery. The North, in an attempt to glorify its states’ fight to suppress the South’s effort to free themselves from the North’s exploitation, has oversimplified and at times even falsified history by painting the War of Northern Aggression as a war fought over issues of morality. Children in Northern schools are never made aware that there were no more abolitionists in the North than in the South.They are never taught that the North never claimed to want to abolish slavery but merely to stop its expansion to ensure that the free states would not be outnumbered in Congress. Many Northerners do no even know that the majority of Southerners who fought and died in the Civil War did not even own slaves.
In accordance with their favored depiction of the Civil War as a moral battle in which they fought for good while the South defended evil, the North has emphasized the issue of slavery while allowing the issues of representation in national politics, economics, and regional identities which primarily caused the war to recede into the background. Erased from history are the values of self-government, freedom, and honor that led Confederates to fight to preserve their home. This is what the Confederate flag represents, and this is why it is still of the utmost importance to Southerners today. It is why black Southerners will proudly call themselves Southern and will fly the Confederate flag. The South is, above all, a cultural entity. Southerners have a dramatically different culture from Northerners; this culture of chivalry, modesty, graciousness, and hospitality is represented by the stars and bars, and it must be remembered and preserved.
If the Confederate flag has in fact caused the feelings of ill will in Ithaca High School that the administration claims, the blame must fall on the administration itself. No Southerner would be so naive as to equate the Confederate flag with support of slavery. It is a failure of Yankee schools that children are not taught the broad scope of economic, political, and even cultural factors which led to the Civil War but are only presented with a gross caricature of a war between good and evil.
Even more frightening than this restriction of freedom of speech in Ithaca High School is what has caused this common misunderstanding of the Confederate flag. In perpetuating their myth of the North as the force of good in the Civil War, the North has revised history in a way that should frighten all Americans. An emblem of a group of people’s heritage and culture has been banned because others have formed prejudices and misconceptions about it. Moreover, these prejudices and misconceptions are fueled by the public school system itself. By banning the Confederate flag, the state attempts to erase from memory the Civil War. To forget that Americans in the past were capable of such atrocities as slavery robs us of the lesson that can be learned and leaves us dangerously vulnerable to repeating past mistakes.
If the Confederate flag calls to mind slavery, and schools wish to erase from common memory all remnants of this dark period in American history, why stop at the flag? Perhaps next, Ithaca parents will receive letters requesting that their children be sent to school clothed in only synthetic fabrics because cotton was once produced through the slave labor of blacks. Or, in order to really be free of uncomfortable memories of our national history, maybe Ithaca High School will ban all black students from school property.
You're not beginning your FR career in a very positive way.
You are completely wrong in your assumptions.
like all too many DUMB-bunnies from "the DAMNyankee coven" of REVISIONIST/statist/ignorant lunatics, your mind is made up & you aren't bright enough, evidently, to understand that you've been LIED TO & made a FOOL of by the LEFTISTS out of the northeast. PITY!
free dixie,sw
Definitely not with the "Dixie will rise again" crowd, that's for sure. Of course that's not much of a big deal. Those folks are on the fringe of society glamming onto an illegitimate resentment from over 100 years ago.
You're wrong but I can live with it. The rebellion lost, can you get over it?
Look kid, you 'assume' that anybody that displays Confederate symbols is a racist and white supremacist.
I assume that anybody that engages in hate speech and name calling is a liberal.
You have made no compelling arguments against the Confederacy. You've only resorted to impassioned name calling and the standard issue liberal rhetoric.
If you sincerely want to have intellectual dialog about the War Between the States, then I suggest that you:
1) spend some time studying the non-PC, pre-revisionist history of that period, and
2) give up your membership in the DNC
Sure. Here.
But every one since then. And the first 13 are bound by the same Constitution as the remaining 37.
Article I, Section 9, Clause 5: "No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State."
Care to elaborate on that taxation you claim the North was pumping up on Southern exports?
There was. Slavery.
Only a complete and utter imbecile would believe that. Slavery was guaranteed to the states by the federal Constitution, and President Lincoln helped to get the Corwin Amendment passed in Congress, which would guarantee that slavery would be FOREVER. The Supreme Court (those gods you worship) had previously held 7-2 that all of the territories were open to slavery. If ALL the Confederacy wanted was to expand slavery, then they should have remained in the union.
Obviously that was not the case, they wanted to be free from the pestilence that had infected the land - LIBERALS that do not believe in the rule of law.
You've been using this one a lot lately. You really need to freshen up the act.
But what the Corwin Amendment didn't do, and which the confederacy made sure was included in their constitution, was to specifically guarantee the free expansion of slavery into the territories, regardless of the wishes of the people living there. Supreme Court (that institution you don't understand) decisions could be overturned by future courts. There was no guarantee, short of amending the Constitution, ensuring free expansion of slavery. It was a real fear with the southern leadership - why else would the compromise amendment proposals floated by Toombs and Davis and Hindman specifically protect slavery in the territory if they were so all fired sure that Taney's tortured decision would never be overturned? And with Lincoln and the Republicans coming into office with their anti-slavery expansion platform it was pretty certain that another Constitutional test would come before the court. Since that protection was left out of the Corwin Amendment the southern leadership couldn't accept it. And that's why the launched their rebellion. And their constitution pretty much guaranteed slavery would last forever, too. So having provided themselves with their cake and a chance to eat it too, why end their rebellion because of Thomas Corwin and his silly amendment?
Like it or not, the school has a right to set a dress code.
Personally, I think that "free speech" is not relevant to school, either. Students are there to learn, not to make some sort of political point.
That's always been my contention, but the Confederate flag doesn't really bother me unless someone in a pointy hat is waving it.
But when you get into the specifics of what "rule of law" was threatened, it turns out that it overwhelmingly means abolitionists who would not silently go along with the expansion of slavery.
Well, no. Once a state seceeds from the union, the "established government" is the one in their own capital.
So you do admit that it was a political entity before joining the union and that political entity desolved itself voluntarily at that time. I rest my case.
So they had no prior government at all?
Then you rest too soon. I'm not sure what you mean by "desolve", but if you're claiming that "the State of Missouri" existed prior to admission to the union, then you're wrong. It was a territory with arbitrary borders established by Congress out of the Louisiana Purchase. It had few aspects of sovereignty, if any. Although US citizens, the residents had no representation in Congress. It was as a territory that it asked permission to form a state and be admitted to the union. Do you actually claim that US territories are the same thing as states? Guam is US territory. Is it a state?
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