Why is rebel flag racist

Pipes fill a glass case, and we avoid the curtained adult room. Petite Roslyn Stuart is behind the counter with a swagger like she has seen it all more than once. She immediately brings up Roof. Stuart blames detractors. It turned into one big heckuva mess. She worries that young people now think the flag stands for the KKK.

The Christian flag? So she asked for a new driver and got one. Retired military, Barnes used to attend all the Ole Miss college football games, but he now watches on TV. He wrote the chancellor that he would never buy another ticket after the game ban of the rebel flag. True, but usually for their masters. Many defected to segregated union camps. Barnes has black friends, he says, and points out that African Americans use the N-word. There are trashy white people and trashy black people.

SCV is not racist or violent, he says. We try to help people. Johnson, CEO of the NAACP, says he wishes poor whites would recognize how powerful politicians have long played racial politics with Confederate emblems — a deliberate strategy to divide them from people with shared economic interests.

Johnson would not censor individual ownership or display of Confederate regalia — but also not continue official approval to historic symbols of racial violence and oppression. Ira is in the backyard posing for pictures in front of his Confederate flag.

Lindy has thought about our first conversation overnight and wants to understand why I do not support the flag. Many people were taught certain things. Her sister would exchange clothes with a black friend, she says.

The store specializes in Confederate flag-themed merchandise. Photograph: Kate Medley. Lincoln argued slavery should not be extended to new territories the United States was annexing in the west.

In the aftermath of the war, a longer battle began: how to interpret the war. For years, this struggle has turned largely on the contradiction that although the US fought to end slavery, most white Americans, including in the North, had little commitment to ending racism.

Read more: The Confederate battleflag comes in waves, with a history that is still unfurling. After a decade of military occupation of the South, known as the period of Reconstruction , the US military withdrew its forces.

By avoiding a conversation as to what those rights were about — that is, enslavement — by the s, they remade the meaning of the war. Confederate flags were a powerful symbol in reinterpreting the War of the Rebellion. In the box-office hit feature film, The Birth of a Nation , for example, the central battle scene involves a key character, Ben Cameron of South Carolina, ramming the pole of a Confederate flag down a United States army cannon.

It even became a tool to recruit new members to the Ku Klux Klan. The war, in this telling, was a struggle between white and Black Americans, not between the US and the rebel Confederacy. The Confederate flag featured prominently in Gone with the Wind , another immensely popular film that again glorified the way of life of white Southerners during and immediately after slavery.

The scene shifts only once those soldiers are framed by a Confederate flag, blowing majestically in the breeze. Want more from Teen Vogue? Stay up-to-date on the election. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take! What does the Confederate flag look like? What is the history of the Confederate flag? How was the Confederate flag used post-Civil War? How is the Confederate Flag used today? What heritage does the Confederate flag honor?

Keywords confederacy confederate flag confederate monuments civil war racism u.