I see the thread on the continuing series of racial issues in Warwick has produced the inevitable argument that the confederate flag isn’t really about racism at all, it’s about heritage and pride and etc. etc. etc.

There is maybe, perhaps a grain of truth in this if you are in fact from the south. But I see one of the posters is saying her grandfather moved south in 1868 - that would be three years after the Civil War concluded - and is now trying to claim the “heritage” argument.

Nope. No dice.

Because at this juncture, to try and “adopt” southern heritage as your own absolutely has a tinge of racism to it. Some try to pretend now that the Civil War itself wasn’t all about slavery; it absolutely was, though not in the way we think about it.

War then, as war now, was what the elites wanted. The elites in the south were the planters, those who benefitted immensely from the slave trade. The trick was getting rank and file southerners to fight for a system that, frankly, really didn’t benefit those rank and file southerners, may in fact have devalued their own labor. (Betcha don’t know who Hinton Helper was; realize that there’s a reason that the Populist Party, which reared its head in response to the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, had deep roots in the agrarian south).

So then, as now, higher ideals were invoked. Poor whites went and fought for a system that benefitted mainly the rich planter class. And part of the rationale was freedom from tyranny, blah blah blah - the same thing we always fight for, the same things the British and French and so many other nations fight for. It’s always about that, right?

But in the south, it was also about keeping the Negro in his place. That is absolutely wrapped up in the frag; that is one of the threads that bind the flag together.

So if you come from the south, you can look back and say your ancestors fought for, perhaps died for, these grand ideals. But if you are not from the south, to invoke the stars and bars now absolutely has a racial component to it. You try and claim it means something to you; the meaning, at it’s basest level, is racism.

Ask, too, what was happening in the south in 1868. Reconstruction - and the vehement, violent reaction to it, particularly a few years later. Think the confederate flag was invoked then? Think that those who invoked it talked about “freedom from tyranny,” perhaps even as they were burning blacks out of their homes, hanging them from trees?