Josh Moon: Confederate flag plan reveals racist motives
Thank you, racists.
No, I mean it. The Tallassee chapter of Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Tallassee Armory Guard and the First Capitol Flaggers deserve a bit of gratitude for their plan to erect a Confederate monument across from Alabama State University. In true redneck style, this effort to incite the black kids who had the nerve to go learn has blown up like a trailer park meth lab.
It has provided the one thing that’s so often absent in any debate about the “Confederate flag”: Truth.
This little stunt, which is still just halfway to reality, has stripped away the heritage façade that is so often applied to that flag and laid its true meaning bare for everyone to see.
The “Confederate flag” is nothing more than a thumbing of the nose to the ideas of equality and peaceful, happy coexisting.
Truthfully, this is something we all should have known, since the flag that is slapped all over pickup trucks and waved during marches isn’t the real Confederate flag anyway. It was the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. And it later marked soldiers’ graves.
Of the three official flags of the Confederate States, the flag most commonly known as the “Confederate flag” today wasn’t one of them.
If you wanted to honor heritage or if you actually had some loyalty to a mindset that made peace with one human being owning another, you’d go with the ones that actually represented those states.
But that’s not what you want. Not really.
The kind of people who seek to erect such a monument in such a place isn’t interested in heritage or education. They want rebellion.
Groups plan Confederate monument, large flag across from ASU
They want to cheer the Northern Virginia Army’s flag being placed across from a university whose only existence was required by the racism and hatred for which that army fought to protect.
They want to let people know they don’t buy into the lovey-dovey, equality BS. And for that sort of statement, they need the flag that rose to popularity in the 1950s – the one that served as the giant middle finger to Robert Kennedy, the U.S. attorney general, when he came to the state to talk about integrating the University of Alabama.
That’s how that flag ended up on our state capitol building for decades.
Because some other group of racists wanted to be cute, wanted to let that Yankee AG know that we do things different down here, wanted to let the world know what they thought of equal rights for blacks.
Yeah, it was a proud time for the state – one that we still haven’t gotten over, primarily because of people like the Sons of Confederate Veterans, First Capitol Flaggers and Tallassee Armory Guard. They seem stuck in a Rhett and Scarlett world of cotillions and balls, where blacks only learned to pick cotton or pour sweet tea.
They use little phrases like “the good ol’ days” and “back when people knew their place.” When they’re called out on their racism, they take offense, and they actually mean it. Because while they whine incessantly over inconsequential things like historically black colleges, affirmative action, BET and pretty much anything that begins with the word “black,” they somehow fail to recognize how statues and monuments and flags dedicated to the men and women who fought to enslave a race of people might be a tad bit offensive to people of that race.
These same people have fought throughout the years to whitewash the cause of the Civil War, to scrub textbooks of details relating to the cruelties of slavery and to shield their children from understanding the awful crimes committed against other humans by men who carried the flag they hold such honor for.
But maybe this little display by these obscure groups will help put an end to it all – finally. Maybe those reasonable few who are still somehow left on the fence will understand what many of us have known for quite some time.
The “Confederate flag” represents racism, bigotry and hate. Nothing else.