No one talked about the Civil War where I grew up. Not outside of class, anyway.
We were content to learn about the build up to the war, discuss the causes, explore the battles in our textbooks and rest happy in the knowledge we had been on the good and victorious side. That’s it for us. No “Sons of Union Veterans,” no statues in every town remembering the sacrifice, no nearby battlefields to visit. There may be memorials to the brave men from Minnesota who died serving the Union Army in Minneapolis, but I cannot tell you where one is.
As a newcomer, seeing the battle flag in the upper left hand corner of the state banner was shocking. Everytime I see it my inner monologue groans “C’mon, man.” I did not see many Confederate flags growing up in a state as thoroughly northern as Minnesota, and when I did see a stars-and-bars sticker on the back of some dude’s pick-up certain words always came to mind: “redneck,” “white trash” and “racist.”
Stereotypes about the South abound where I grew up. I have realized in my time living here that not everyone who flies the stars and bars hates black people and wants to put them back into bondage. I get that. I can even accept that in certain context, the flag is not meant to express any racism at all.
But I’ve never understood the “heritage” argument. I had relatives who fought in the Civil War, and I could care less. I’ll never meet any of them. If my great-great-grandfather fought for some rich dudes to keep their slaves, I wouldn’t talk about it.
It is wrong that the stars and bars is part of the state flag. I can appreciate the flag carrying different meanings for different people, but it is inexcusable to use in an official capacity a symbol many equate with oppression. It’s amazing that displaying a treasonous flag by a state government anywhere in the United States is legal or has ever been since the Civil War ended.
I do not think it should be illegal. I do not think Warner-Brothers is better for taking the flag off General Lee. I’m not going to high-five Wal-Mart, who has global employees in modern defacto slavery, for not selling it. The South should not have to remove statues of Confederate veterans, though let’s be honest, you could spare a couple.
It’s been fascinating to see how quickly state politicians of both parties have rallied behind this. (Well, relatively. It is 2015, and the only reason we are doing this now is because nine people were brutally murdered in an act of racially-predicated domestic terrorism). But let’s not pat ourselves on the back; this is long overdue. There’s still the elephant in the room, that 150 years after the Civil War, black Americans still face discrimination from individuals and institutions.
When the flag changes — and it will change — we’re still going to have to address that.
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