A flag, on its own, says nothing and means nothing. It is a mute piece of cloth, as politically neutral as a piece of gingham or silk, and any symbolism that we ascribe to it comes from us, from the meaning that we project onto it.
And from the beginning, the Confederate battle flag has been a symbol of racism and the perpetuation of white supremacy. That’s what it meant when it was first carried into war by the Army of Northern Virginia, fighting for the right to keep black Americans as a subhuman form of property; that’s what it meant when it was dredged up out of relative obscurity in the ’50s and ’60s to serve as a symbol of white defiance against desegregation.
And that’s what the Confederate battle flag meant to Dylann Roof, who last week walked into a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., and killed nine people during Bible study, hoping to start a race war. Any other message that the flag might have to some — as a tribute to brave ancestors, as a symbol of a unique region — is and always will be secondary to its message of racial suppression.
So take it down. Pull it down, and hand it to history for safekeeping.
In a press conference Monday, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, surrounded by state leaders black and white, called for removing the battle flag from the place of honor that it still occupies in front of the state Capitol in Columbia. State officials in Mississippi also announced a renewed effort to remove the battle emblem from that state’s flag, a step that Georgia took in 2001 after a bitter political fight. Walmart, Sears and eBay announced Tuesday that they would no longer sell items with the emblem, following in the footsteps of NASCAR, which banned the flag in 2012.
Those steps, like the flag itself, are merely symbolic. The flag’s removal will not end racism, nor will it bring back the nine people shot down in Emanuel AME Church. But it was adopted as a symbol of racism, it was put in its current place of honor by an act of the South Carolina Legislature in 1962 to symbolize official support for racism and segregation, and it must be removed to dispel any doubt in any minds that such sentiments are still sanctioned or even remotely acceptable.
Take it down. Snatch away the symbol that Roof embraced, and by stripping it from its place of honor, strip it of any remaining legitimacy or ambiguity. The South as symbolized by that flag will never rise again, nor should it. As Haley put it Monday, “that flag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state.”
Of course, the debate won’t end there. Some white Southerners fear that once the Confederate flag disappears, other familiar icons will be targeted for removal, including the stone statues of Civil War soldiers that stand sentinel over so many small towns across the South. I hope that doesn’t happen, and I would argue strongly that it should not.
To use the distinction made by Haley, those statues, like the carving on Stone Mountain, are clearly part of our history. They should no more be obliterated than should the few remaining slave cabins or plantation homes in Georgia. We do not seek historical amnesia or whitewashing of our mutual past, only assurance that what belongs in the past remains there.
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