[ZULU]

You are wrong. Once the racialists purge the south of all vestiges of the Confederate Flag, they will start on Old Glory, which flew over a slave nation longer than the Confederate Flag did. They will chnage the names of all the Washingtons, Lees, Jefffersons, and Columbuses in the United States to something less "offensive".

[DustyMoment]

Well, you may have a point, but that's a different battle. My whole point is that we should let them "win" this one. As soon as they do, they will find that they have hoist themselves by their own petards and they will have destroyed their credibility for the reparations argument. When they lose that credibility, they lose the credibility for anything else they might decide is "racist", and that, in itself, could resolve a potential issue about the Stars and Stripes. Besides, there are a lot of blacks and other minorities who fought and died for this flag. I don't think that the racists will find much of an audience for this issue if they decided to pursue it.

[lentulusgracchus]

They will chnage the names of all the Washingtons, Lees, Jefffersons, and Columbuses in the United States to something less "offensive".

That is what the "X" is for on all those ballcaps and in those surnames. The "X" is a symbol of annihilation, extolling the individual's act of destruction of something "white", and therefore intrinsically defiling and dishonorable, as his first, enabling act of personal reconstruction.

Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing said it all: burning out the white pizzeria operator was the "right thing" -- because of what the pizza guy endogamously was.

It's subtler, but it's also present in Eddie Murphy's Boomerang. There are four categories of white characters in Boomerang, of whom the last is the most important and most numerous:

1. Furniture,

2. Caricatures (a waitress who "talks white"),

3. People from France, who don't say anything but offer Murphy's character large emoluments for unspecified future services; and finally,

4. People who are simply absent.

Murphy's was a much more eloquent statement of Spike Lee's daydream. The impulse you mention for expunging the names of "slave owners" is connected, I think, to this one. Over time, it will be insensibly extended to many other categories of offending majoritarians.

In "identity politics" as celebrated by Beastwoman, this sort of "offensiveness" inures not to acts or institutions but to the "offensive" groups of people themselves. That's why "identity politics" = essentialism = racism.