LOL! Who pee'd in your wheaties?
That flag represents a historical heritage that can only be claimed by the south, and most of us do. Even the transplanted Yankee like myself who has taken the time to understand the the significance of that flag to many whose ancestors fought under it, and the significance of history in all it's manifestations.
Ann is correct, that the "stars and bars" was viewed as only a matter of confederate pride and never had a racist connotation until the kluxers used it as a marketing device.
You are to thin skinned, white or black or red, to see the truth of her words. The flag is no more racist than long hair on a boy is feminine or the German cross is Nazi.
This kind of politically correct crap is a disease.
Go spread it on the back forty with the rest of the manure.
Well, it wasn't so much the Klan -- although they did use it from the 40's on, but not in the 20's, when the big Klan marches in D.C., for example, flew American flags -- as did the Silver Shirts in their day (and in 1940, Harvard had one of the biggest Nazi clubs in the world -- I found an article about it in a 1940 LIFE magazine many years ago, while looking for something else).
The Dixiecrats used it to register their dissent from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party about civil rights and racial issues, a split that had been coming since 1928, when urban-ethnic liberals and socialists captured the Party and nominated Al Smith, an Irish Catholic from New York City. This capture incidentally replicated at the Party level the ouster of Southerners from national power in 1860. FDR managed to paper over the differences for a while, but there was never much love lost between Southern Democrats and their urban-minority counterparts, with whom they had very little in common except an enemy.
Most blacks who express objections to the Confederate flag do so because of its display by segregationist politicians in the 1950's and 1960's. Here's a clue: It isn't the flag they object to, it's the people. Bashing the Confederate flag is a way of saying "I will not treat with 'those people'" -- white Southerners. That is an essentially racist attitude, but they can express disapprobation of old Confederate symbols and other political symbols used by whites without having to admit that they're actually rejecting the people instead of the issues. There are a number of issues like this that serve as proxies for this unscratchable itch; and when one listens carefully, occasionally one hears telling references to "people like them" and "we know what they are!" and "we know who's behind this!" -- all code-talk for Southern whites as the Race Enemy, Beast/Ice People (Prof. Jeffries), White Devils (NOI), and so on. The black community has a rich tradition of talking up their own sleeves that the MSM never calls them on, so of course the game will continue to go forward as long as one side continues to receive a pass. This motivating animus is what Kweisi Mfume tapped into when he undertook to revitalize the NAACP and the politics of confrontation. His moral position is very much different from that which Thurgood Marshall, Vernon Jordan, and other predecessors enjoyed, but he has pressed ahead nevertheless, sharpening differences and turning out the vote with appeals to racial animus disguised as seg-purging political-hygiene and anti-profiling campaigns.
Final note: "Stars and Bars" refers to the Confederate First National, with the blue union and ring of seven stars in the corner. The Confederate Battle Flag, which is more correctly the battle flag of the Army of Tennessee (CSA), is just the "battle flag". The "Southern Cross" is a constellation which appears on the flags of several southern-hemisphere countries like Brazil and New Zealand.