Confederate Flag Vs. The Confederate Flag

The issue of the confederate flag has been an important cultural discussion point for some years now, but has recently taken on even greater importance in light of recent hate crimes in South Carolina, as well as rampant police brutality and shootings across the country. Much of the discussion has been an argument between the two schools of thought being that either the flag is a symbol of cultural heritage and nothing more, and the other being that it is a symbol of systematic and violent racism that has no right being in a place of honor and reverence in today’s society. In a way both schools are correct. The Confederate flag is a symbol of southern cultural history; it also happens that that history is a history of systematic and violent racism, starting from the flag’s creation and on to its popular resurgence in the south at the time of desegregation and the civil-rights movement.

A war which was started by southern slave-holding states in an attempt to cede from the Union because of northern meddling trying to take away their human property- enslaved people. Because without their human chattel southern plantation owners would take severely wound their personal finances. And so these people decided that their own prospects were more important than the human beings they presumed to own. I have tried to emphasize the fact of human slavery here because there are many who would deny it, saying that either slaves were not the reason for the cessation, or that the buying and selling and commodifying of human beings was “not that bad”. That is what the Confederate battle flag, the “Rebel Cross”, stood for in its days of