Re: rebel flag flap in Dixie

[lause@xxxxxxx]

I don't know what it's worth to say that you don't know of African-Americans or
Asian-Americans that like the Confederate flag.  They can be as deluded as
whites, right?

In fact, the statements are simply wrong.  The site of Camp Douglas, a major
U.S. prisoner of war camp is today in the heart of black Chicago.  An African-
American who runs a junkyard on part of the old camp regularly flies a
Confederate flag.  A veteran, he says it is in tribute to those who died there--
generally conscripts into the Confederate armies--and, obviously, not flown to
advocate his own inferiority.

More troubling, around the time that "North and South" was being first
serialized, a number of blacks in cities like Chicago began wearing leather
Civil War kepis--gray ones, because they or their families were from the
South.

Still more annoying, Cherokee, Creek and other older nations in present
Oklahoma regularly use a Confederate flag as part of both identity politics and
a demonstration of their worthiness to participate in the Southern white
universe.  The fact was that the Southern white supremacist Democrats who
removed these groups from the Deep South to an Indian Territory subsequently
invaded and subjugated them in 1861 and coerced formal alliances with the
Confederacy (never reflected in what the Native peoples there actually did).
When the whites finally opened the Territory to their own settlment in 1889,
most came from adjacent Southern states and imposed a Southern identity.  That
the entirely mistreated Indian peoples there would accept it is disturbing, if
understandable after a fashion.

On the related issue of Confederate monumements, historian Eric Foner has very
correctly pointed out that arguments to remove statues of Robert E. Lee puts
the censorship shoe on the wrong foot.  Keep Bobby Lee...he was a legitimate
part of all our history and should be remembered and discussed.  But put one of
Nat Turner and his slave rebels right there on Momument Row as well.

There are many Southern courthouses with a Confederate statue on the lawn in
counties that contributed far more Union than Confederate soldiers.

...but I shouldn't be unleashed on such historical questions.  Still, as I
said, clarity is hard enough to attatin on concrete issues and symbols get us
into a disucssion layered with conflicting meanings.

Solidarity!
Mark



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