True, but those farm boys didn't drive the issue, just as the average German didn't initiate the Nazi land grab that precipitated the second world war. The point I was trying to make is that it's "revisionist" to pretend that bringing up the issue of slavery as a cause of the Civil War is somehow a form of revisionism. It's not. What's revisionist is the attempt by some to whitewash the realities of that causation by the insistence that it was "states rights" or "tariffs" that drove the southern states to secession. "States rights" gets double-duty as a code-word for slavery in the 1800s and segregation in the 1900s.
More to the point, hatred of black folks isn't why people fly the battle flag today, fringe groups with dubious motives notwithstanding.
Perhaps not; at least not in the mainstream. But I think it's incumbent upon people to put themselves in the place of others when deciding how they're going to appear in the public eye. Many black people of middle-age and older have distinct memories of a less-enlightened time in our nation's history. Those memories are highly unpleasant, and they see the flag as symbolic of those memories. Unlike the reparations issue, where the injured parties are long since deceased, these people experienced institutionalized racism, much of it done under the auspices of the same sentiments the flag represented, and worse. But the author of this article, to his credit, wasn't asking that people be restrained from flying the flag. He's simply asking that people take his perspective into mind before doing it.
Fair point, but the issue isn't why the flag is flown today. It isn't about supporting some Fire Eater in the Mississippi Legislature from the 1860s. It's more about people's Great-Great Grandfathers, defying what was seen as external tyranny and 'foreign' incursion. Black people weren't especially well treated in the North either, and Black opinion in the South was a bit of a mixed bag. Even after many years of hindsight, surprisingly, according to the Slave Narratives, collected by the WPA during the Roosevelt Administration.
Also true is the fact that the roots of the whole thing go back to the old Federalism vs. Antifederalism argument, Enmity between the North and the South didn't begin with the issue of Slavery. As with two fueding neighbors, it isn't the final outrage that causes the fistfight.
Perhaps not; at least not in the mainstream. But I think it's incumbent upon people to put themselves in the place of others when deciding how they're going to appear in the public eye.
True enough. I try to conduct myself personally in this manner. However, since pro-Confederate heritage people by and large don't see the banner as an explicit (or implicit) expression of wishing to re-enslave black people, they see vocal objection to it as the usual reflexive carping of the Professionally Offended.
Here you go again - talking sh*t as always.
A State's Right of Self-Determination is what was the driving force behind the Secession of the Southern States in 1860 - 61. Whether the issue was freeing slaves, or tariffs, the basic premise was that Washington DC (or other States) could not direct the Southern States as to what they were supposed to do. It was up to each State to determine the fate of its own domestic institutions (i.e. SLAVERY) and how its money was to be spent. Refer to the ORIGINAL INTENT of the Founding Fathers! Once again, go back and read the Federalist Papers and the Constitutional debates. Learn something other than the tripe you're spewing then come back and discuss things intelligently, not like some mindless robot who can only puppet the party line.
Do you think that's what the author was thinking about? I don't think so. So if he wasn't concerned with being seen teaching his sons to distrust, fear, and dislike Southern whites, which he obviously did right there in the middle of the restaurant, what exactly is our reciprocal obligation to him? He didn't trim or back and fill or make nice -- do you criticize him for that? No.
Many black people of middle-age and older have distinct memories of a less-enlightened time in our nation's history.
By that do I take it that you mean that when Side A is winning, that's ontologically good, but when Side B is winning, that's metaphysically bad? Sounds like you've swallowed some Northern liberal "march of history" progressivism.
Blacks lost as much as anyone when liberal and statist principles advanced on the back of the civil rights movement.
Rather than argue for their POV, liberals have always gone for the power play. They tried using inside politics in leadership forums to install their program on desegregation in the South in the 1950's, and when they encountered significant resistance from people who hadn't been consulted and were never conciliated, they immediately turned to the federal government and the courts. Liberals don't debate issues with scum like us: they just articulate a position and then try to enforce it "by any means necessary", while justifying it by rhetoric and by pointing at whatever the other guy is doing wrong. Liberalism owed its largest debt to the Ku Klux Klan bombers and the liberal journalists who knew how to use them, and there was no justice in any of it, only a power struggle won by the undeserving -- liberal statists. Everybody else lost. Blacks thought they "won", but the rights they won were less than the whites had had before the civil rights movement.
Those memories are highly unpleasant, and they see the flag as symbolic of those memories.
The Klan didn't really use the flag. The segregationists did, and they rallied against (in particular) Eisenhower's stand on enforcing the liberal court decisions on integration, and his sending the 82nd Airborne Division to Little Rock to chase white mobs off the street and away from the schools.
Once the liberals won in court, they put the Executive in a box, about whether to enforce the court decrees. After Eisenhower made his decision, the segregationists were fresh out of luck, out of time, and out of friends. That's when they ran up the battle flag, hoping to inspire a united front against the federal government. They failed, because history put Lyndon Johnson in the White House, who attacked them with all the tools of the "imperial presidency" and broke them by threatening them with mass jailings of school boards and other public officials. That was Leon Panetta's first real public-service job, threatening the slowfooted in Louisiana for Lyndon Johnson. The deal was, if Panetta called someone in, he explained to them that they couldn't even resign their offices or do anything but exactly what he told them to do, when he told them to do it, or they would spend time in a federal penitentiary, and the rest of their lives as felons and ex-convicts. That's what liberalism means, where the rubber meets the road. Northerners loved it, of course.