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.
the war for freedom was ONLY about LIBERTY from the hate-filled,arrogant,SELF-righteous, intrusive, DAMNyankee-controlled, federal government.
free dixie,sw
I doubt that there were very many million-year-old people resident at the time. Those that were, however, joined voluntarily, or are you saying it was involuntary?
Why stop there? What about the people of a county? Or a township? Does every level of political organization have an inherent right of association and right to form a government or declare its independence of a larger entity? Or does this right only exist at the state level?
Joining the union involved accepting the Constitution, which says that a state may not be created from another state. So this implies that a state would need to seceed as a unit, then disolve if the people wished - including forming a seperate unit that could then rejoin the union. This, in fact, occured when West Virginia became a state after Virginia seceeded.
Legal actions of a legal government. Nowhere in the Constitution does it deny the states the power to seceed.
otoh, he is the ONLY one of the DY coven who has BOTH a brain & an education.
free dixie,sw
Nowhere in the Constitution does it allow a state to seceed unilaterally, either. As the Supreme Court ruled.
Joined exactly what? Are you arguing that as soon as the first man wandered into Missouri, it became a political entity that persists to this day? What were the borders of this area?
But even he can't find a copy of "Yachts Against Subs"
Really? So, if say, Illinois wanted to become ten states, they could unilaterally secede from the union, reorganize themselve into ten new districts calling themselves states, then rejoin the Union again?
Dang, I've been away for awhile, but I see things haven't changed much...woo hoo! Let the fun begin!
I doubt it.
You've been around here long enough to have memorized every argument, pro and con.
However, if we must:
"Secession was based on the idea of state rights (or "states rights," a variant that came into use after the Civil War). This exalted the powers of the individual states as opposed to those of the Federal government. It generally rested on the theory of state sovereignty-- that in the United States the ultimate source of political authority lay in the separate states. Associated with the principle of state rights was a sense of state loyalty that could prevail over a feeling of national patriotism. Before the war, the principle found expression in different ways at different times, in the North as well as in the South. During the war it reappeared in the Confederacy."
Continued on: States Rights
face it, "kidster", you "know NOT & know NOT that you know NOT".
no matter what SELF-righteous, self-serving bilge you've been exposed to in "duh gubmint publick screwls" the WBTS was NEVER about slavery, except in the minds of the 5-6% of persons (north AND south) who owned slaves.
frankly, hardly anyone (north and/or south) CARED about slavery except the slave-owners & a handful of abolitionists. you couldn't have found 10,000 NON-slaveowning citizens, who would have fought a war in 1861 to either free the slaves OR keep them in slavery. (they SHOULD have cared about "the plight of the slaves", but the TRUTH is that FEW people cared.)
for the rest of the country, the war was ONLY about LIBERTY for dixie OR (for the unionists up north) "to preserve the union".
a MILLION dead Americans seems a REALLY high price to pay to "preserve the union" of the UNWILLING. had lincoln, the TYRANT & WAR CRIMINAL, chosen PEACE,rather than war, there would have been NO war & thus no MILLION dead Americans !
those are the FACTS.
free dixie,sw
his eyes & mind appears to be TIGHTLY closed.
free dixie,sw
I have indeed. And I'm constantly amazed at the lengths the southron side will go through, and the hoops that they are willing to jump through, and the myths that they are willing to propogate, all to avoid admitting that by far the single, most important reason for the southern rebellion was defense of the institution of slavery.
Slavery was the occasion. Not the cause. Does that make sense to you?
Do you honestly think that if it was merely about slavery, that 300,000 men, most of which never owned a slave, would have died for keeping slavery and that 300,000 other men, who didn't really give a damn about slaves one way or the other, would have died to take them away?
In addition, if this war was fought strictly about slavery, why did Lincoln wait until two years after the war started to make slavery the central issue?
In the sense that it was over states rights but slavery was the catalyst? Something like that? But semantics aside it would still mean no slavery, no rebellion.
Do you honestly think that if it was merely about slavery, that 300,000 men, most of which never owned a slave, would have died for keeping slavery and that 300,000 other men, who didn't really give a damn about slaves one way or the other, would have died to take them away?
Too simplistic. The Southern men fought for what they saw as their country. Their country rebelled to protect their institution of slavery.
Slavery was far more important to Southern society than simple statistics indicate. You may say that only 8% or so of all southerners owned slaves. That is misleading in that those slaveholders had wives and children, and that family benefited directly from slavery. In some states like Mississippi almost half of all families owned slaves. A large proportion of families who did not no doubt derived economic benefits from those that did. So yes, I find it easy to understand why the Southern leadership saw it as worth fighting for, and why Southern soldiers didn't have a problem with that reasoning.
The Union soldiers, of course, fought to preserve the Union and not to end or promote slavery.
In addition, if this war was fought strictly about slavery, why did Lincoln wait until two years after the war started to make slavery the central issue?
Because slavery was the Southern motivator. For Lincoln and the North is was about preserving the Union in the face of armed Southern rebellion.
You still gloss over it and speak glibbly. I won't change you mind and you won't change mine. I'm sorry for any offense and false inferences about your feelings and beliefs about different races. Let's just agree to disagree and leave it at that on friendly terms.
we southrons have heard all the SELF-serving LIES & KNOWINGLLY false myths out of the DAMNyankee, REVISIONIST, spin machine.
to the LEFTISTS, the WBTS was "a crusade to free the slaves", though FEW of them, today, are actually DUMB enough to believe that LIE. the LIE "sounds better" than "we made war on the CSA, ONLY for $$$$$$$ & increased POWER".
to the southrons the war was ONLY about FREEDOM from a government that southerners, by 1861, believed was NOT acting in their interests & would become ever more despotic.
free dixie,sw
we southrons have heard all the SELF-serving LIES & KNOWINGLY false myths out of the DAMNyankee, REVISIONIST, spin machine.
to the LEFTISTS, the WBTS was "a crusade to free the slaves", though FEW of them, today, are actually DUMB enough to believe that LIE. the LIE "sounds better" than "we made war on the CSA, ONLY for $$$$$$$ & increased POWER".
to the southrons the war was ONLY about FREEDOM from a government that southerners, by 1861, believed was NOT acting in their interests & would become ever more despotic.
free dixie,sw
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