Heard this on the radio this morning.
Selected comments:
Source: http://www.npr.org/2014/10/21/357576237/six-words-must-we-forget-our-confederate-ancestors
NPR continues a series of conversations from The Race Card Project, where thousands of people have submitted their thoughts on race and cultural identity in six words.
Jesse Dukes does not have Confederate ancestors. But in the time he's spent writing about Civil War re-enactors, he's met many who say they do.
Their perspectives on the Confederate flag and the legacy of their ancestors prompted Dukes, a writer and radio reporter, to share his own six words with the Race Card Project: "Must We Forget Our Confederate Ancestors?"
Dukes, a Southerner himself, embedded last year with a group of Civil War re-enactors at the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, and wrote about it in a piece for the Virginia Quarterly Review.
"I just wanted to see the spectacle of the thing," he tells NPR Special Correspondent Michele Norris. The event, a re-enactment of one of the Civil War's most famous battles, "was going to be like the Woodstock of re-enacting, is what everyone told me. ... I wanted to sort of understand what they got out of it."
Part of his motivation, Dukes says, was to connect with re-enactors "in an environment where I thought people would be comfortable talking about things like the legacy of slavery, and the legacy of Jim Crow and the legacy of racism."
As it turned out, the people he met weren't particularly comfortable talking about those themes, Dukes says. But they did talk when prompted, and "everybody was kind and everybody was very welcoming," he notes.
Many Confederate re-enactors understand, Dukes says, that the Confederate flag is associated with segregation, the KKK and lynchings. "And invariably people would say, you know, racism was so terrible. It was an abomination. ... But that's not what I'm here to connect with,' " Dukes says.
Instead, the re-enactors were there to connect with their ancestors, he says. "And maybe not run up that exact same hill, but a simulacrum of that hill with the same sounds and the same shouts and the same visual stimulus — minus the blood and dying. And it still seemed to define their identity."
"I think people tried to distance their ancestors from the guilt associated with slavery, and I also think they tried to implicate everybody else," Dukes says. "So, pointing out, very accurately, that slavery — the economic system — relied on the markets and the textile factories and places like that in the North."
While reporting, Dukes met Sara Smith, a Confederate re-enactor from Dayton, Va. Her great-great-grandfather, Harry N. Smith, fought for the Confederacy at Gettysburg and was wounded in battle.
Sara Smith has Confederate flag stickers on the back of her truck — and says those who see it as a symbol glorifying racism or segregation don't understand the meaning the flag holds for her.
"I think people need to realize ... it's a history, not a hate issue," Smith told Dukes. "I think too many people get caught up in the symbol. You know, for us, it doesn't mean the same thing it means to other people. The flag that they get so upset over, was actually not a flag. It was a battle flag. It was what you formed off of to know you were on the right side" in battle.
Smith doesn't think her great-great grandfather was fighting to preserve slavery. To her, it's "the flag her great-great-grandfather carried up that hill in a desperate attempt to maintain his state's freedom from government interference," Dukes says.
And "if her great-great-grandfather was a good, noble, brave person who was wounded, and then came home, and still lived to be something like 80, and showed so much bravery on the field, and he could carry that flag, why would it be wrong for her to put it on her vehicle?"
Dukes describes that perspective as "willful innocence." It's a logic "that says, 'OK, I have the right to love my great-great-grandfather and to admire those things in his life that are admirable, like bravery, like loyalty, like accomplishments, like survival. And because he must have been a good person, then the cause he fought for and the flag that he held must not have been a bad cause.' "
Dukes says that perspective led some of the re-enactors to make the following assertion: "People who are offended by [the flag] just don't understand what the Confederate flag really means."
The Confederate flag holds different significance for other Americans, as well, Dukes says. While some Southerners are well aware that the flag is often perceived as racist — and display it anyway — others display it to demonstrate their mistrust in federal government and as a symbol of resistance to federal regulation.
And for others, Dukes says, the Confederate flag signifies an awareness that rural white Southerners, and rural Americans more generally, are often stereotyped as backward.
"I think the flag has transcended Southern identity to become [linked to] a kind of rural impoverished identity, too," says Dukes, who says he's even seen people display the Confederate flag in rural Maine.
"I think there are poor people in the rural South, and North and all over the country, who do feel like they're stereotyped and they don't have everything ... including respect ... that's due to them.
"I'm not sure that waving a Confederate flag is a great way to get that respect back — and often it is enacting the stereotype that they're trying to escape — but I do think it's a legitimate complaint nevertheless."
Dukes says he enjoyed meeting re-enactors like Smith, and doesn't "begrudge them their weekends clad in gray, remembering their ancestors, hoisting libations, and waving the battle flag," he writes in Virginia Quarterly Review.
But, Dukes writes, "better to roll the flag up at the end of the weekend and leave it in the trunk until the next reenactment. This is the 21st century, and the Confederate flag has no place in our time."
Selected comments:
Being black (AND a history/political science major), I could never quite grasp the whole "remember the South" mentality among these people. Granted, there were concepts like "personal honor" and "Southern Gentility" that were embedded with Condeferate culture, there was also extreme classism (the "plantation class" vs. everybody else) and the institutionalization of racism in the culture. The whole thing is akin to a German trying to reminisce about the "good" 'ol times of the Third Reich, but not the bad that it represented.
(note, above comment is not me, I'm not the only person living in VT)I've had to deal with this issue about symbolism in my classes (remember from my name I live in Vermont-- go figure) and one day a kid came in wearing a shirt with a Confederate Flag. He directly challenged me:
"Does this offend you?"
I replied-- "Do you support the Army? Marines and other soldiers who will and have laid down their lives for you?"
"Of course! I want to join the Marines out of high school."
"How do you feel about terrorists who are killing American soldiers in Iraq now?"
"Hate them-- that's why I want to join!"
"You know I served, right"
"Yes."
"And many of my friends are now in combat, right?"
"Yes."
"Well, the people who carried that flag during the Civil War did the same thing that the terrorists in Iraq are doing right now-- they fought against and killed United States Army soldiers and United States Marines in combat. You're wearing a flag of a group that killed members of the very organization you want to join."
"But they were Americans too!"
"No, they were not-- they didn't want to be Americans anymore. They wanted to Confederates. The men who fought for that flag killed American Soldiers Marines and Sailors, period. We can debate states rights, slavery, modern day interpretations, yada, yada, yada. But to me, those who carried that flag in the Civil War willfully killed American military personnel and that's why it bothers me."
As a german who lives in the south, here is my take on it.
As a german I think you can inherit responsibility (to not allow certain thing to happen again), but not the guilt for what happened (before you were born).
The germans still take some silent pride in what they see as "neutral" acomplishments. The rocket technology that later brought the US and the Russians into space and to the moon is the prime example.
As someone living in the south and volunteering as historical interpreter (not military reenactment, we do the civilian life around 1775) I met many people who do the interpreting and the reenacting. I never experience any kind of racism there.
I also met plenty of people in daily life who had rebel flags on the clothing, cars or as tattoo and who never showed any signs of racism (but a lot of local pride).
And then there are the racists. People who clearly judge you by the color of your skin, your ancestors and your country of origin. I seen them with and without rebel flags, with or without southern pride.
In the end you need to look at the individuals and judge them by their actions and not get distracted by people using the same symbols.
As an American, as a woman of color, and as one who grew up in the South in the mid-twentieth century, I do not want to forget any of the history of this country for the convenience of those who do not appreciate it. Revisionist history is a lie. Why lie? If you begin to lie about this, you will distort the truth about anything. Once you delete the Civil War, you delete African slave contributions to the building of this country. That then deletes the requirement to correct the injustices that have kept people who have suffered here 400 years under forced labor, in terms of monetary and/or legal means. So be careful, black folks, what you wish for.
Source: http://www.npr.org/2014/10/21/357576237/six-words-must-we-forget-our-confederate-ancestors
