I am expanding my horizons and i'm realizing that racism is more alive then I thought. Many blacks today live in bad neighborhoods and dont wanna help themselves because white america puts them down and wants them to stay at the bottom.. Its out of fear.
I'm sorry but nothing will change the fact that its a symbol of racism.. to some its a symbol of home or "heritage" (A southern state is still in the usa.. how is that a heritage but whatever.. ) Due to not being fully informed of the history behind it Nothing will change just my opinion.. but what the facts remain as. It was to keep slaves.. no official rule or piece of history has changed its official meaning.
Cher, I'm skipping your restatement of things you've been shown are wrong, and also in passing merely noting that you haven't bothered to address the questions I posted... and get a little educated.
It is a symbol of racism, yes. But it's also a symbol of a culture that had a certain grace and elegance the U.S. has never seen again, a symbol of standing up against strangers who want to run (or ruin) your home, a symbol of having fought for your home against invaders who wanted to burn it down, a symbol of having chosen to stand by your white neighbor and fight for your common home, and more. Expanding your horizons means recognizing that simplistic, one-dimensional answers to things is something done by the intellectually lazy, oft on behalf of the ignorant.
On the matter of heritage: California was arguably never quite its own nation, but there's still a sense of heritage of the "Bear Republic"; Texas was its own nation only briefly, but when many Texans say "the Lone Star State", by "state" they mean closer to "sovereign nation" than anything else; "New England" has never been anything but a regional designation, but I have relatives there who would shed blood over the notion that it's merely a label, in defense of a New England culture and heritage; people along the Mississippi share a heritage festooned with steamboats, anchored by the river....
I could go on, but the fact is that any time there's a shared identity, of whatever sort, however briefly, it can be seized on by people, can stir loyalty and pride, and even if they have to be invented after the fact, it can inspire a culture. In short, any shared identity can produce a heritage. Sharing another identity with someone else won't eliminate that heritage.
You haven't bothered to guess, but I'll give the answer here: that black university history major who knew far more about all this than you could dream of flew a Confederate battle flag for several reasons, but partly because it totally pissed off the redneck latent racists in his fraternity (from Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, and Michigan, among those I can recall). Quite deliberately he obtained one larger than the ones some of them flew on their 4WD trucks -- and some of them flew it partly out of reasons you've been asserting are universal, and he knew that, and purposefully bought his own flag.
He could sit and recite the history of the "glorious South" better than the ones who clung to that heritage, he could list more atrocities to blacks than were ever set out during "Black History Week" on campus; his ancestors included slaves, blacks who had no slavery in their family tree (yes, there were free blacks in America with no slave ancestors), and black slave-owners -- and blacks who had fought for the south, not having even been slaves.
Are you going to try to tell me he suffered from self-loathing? Excrementum!
This guy could sit there and tell his fraternity brothers that his ancestors had suffered both under and for that flag -- and, btw, what had theirs been doing? His ancestors had shed blood as both victims and heroes of that flag, and in his view, if anyone had a right to fly it, he did, because its history was his history, all the way around: he was inheritor of free, slave, and slave owner.
The amount of education and expanding of horizons he accomplished because he, as a black, flew that flag, was beyond astonishment. He could make tough rednecks cry because he sat, by his heritage, on all sides of the issue (he claimed black relatives/ancestors who fought for the Union, as well), and could appreciate and value it all. He wasn't ashamed of his slave heritage, but took pride that those ancestors had survived it; he wasn't ashamed of his slave-owner heritage, either, or his anti-slavery heritage. He didn't have to put anyone down to express his pride, either.
And when he and others took their trucks out mudding, battle banners snapping smartly, and whites he and his brothers didn't know cursed at him for that flag, he'd give a yell, "Eat my dust!" -- because he wasn't ashamed of anything, embarrassed by anything, or angry at anything.
In passing, his heritage yields an answer to one of my history questions: in 1860, over two-thirds of all black slaves in Charleston were owned not just by blacks, but by black women. His great-something grandmother was one of them.
