It's been a busy couple of weeks in the world. The Supreme Court of the United States made
a few key decisions on cases around marriage equality, the brutal murder of 9 people in
a church in Charleston and what appears to be a rash of church burnings... along with
these tumultuous events, we've opened a national debate on whether the flag of the Confederacy
is too divisive and offensive to continue to fly it over government buildings in the
US. I want to weigh with my own opinion, and I want to offer a not-entirely tongue in cheek
solution.
I'll start my argument by acquainting you with the six flags that have flown over Texas,
each of which represents a piece of Texas history. It starts with Spain in 1519, the
first European power to colonize Texas. In 1800, Spain ceded to France under Napoleon
the territory of Louisiana, which included parts of Northern Texas, while Southern Texas
remained Spanish. The Spanish flag was lowered over Texas in 1821 following the Mexican Revolution,
where Mexico (which included Texas) declared its status as an independent nation. A scant
15 years later, the Anglo and Mexican settlers in Texas fought a war of independence against
their now Mexican government. This created the Republic of Texas, a nation with its own
flag. It peacefully entered the US by annexation in 1845, and the US flag flew for the first
time over Texas. When the Confederate States of America attempted to secede, Texas voted
to join the fledgling country. You may notice that this flag is not the one being debated,
and it wasn't the only one that was proposed for the new CSA. The flag we are debating
was a battle flag that many CSA military units used. Others have covered this topic better
than I can.
So, Texas has flown six flags, and five of those flags are no longer valid, but they're
all part of the history of Texas. They tell a story about who we are as Texans: we've
not always been on the right side of history and some of the history is muddy and bloody
and bitter. Here's one last flag you might have seen. It was a simple flag made specificially
for the Battle of Gonzales between rebel Texians and Mexican federal troops, the come and take
it flag. Come and take it refers to a small cannon that the Texians had received from
the Mexican government four years earlier, which when hostilities became obvious, they
were ordered to surrender back. The flag was a dare, a declaration of hostile intent by
the Texians. It harkens back to a similar slogan attribued to King Leonidas at the Battle
of Thermopylae.
Now I don't feel anything about the Confederate flag. It's a symbol, and one that has been
partly appropriated by racists. I do have three concerns, though, that I want to share
with you about any move to hide it, remove it or ban it.
The first risk is that we give it more power. Removing and banning can look like fear and
hate to the racists for which it has become a rallying cry. It's a simple matter of psychology.
If you create an ideological dichotomy, two sides with no grey area, more people will
end up becoming radicalized over time. We remove the possibility of complexity, forcing
a crisis of "for us or against us". I honestly don't think progressives will benefit from
a chasm among people who are on the fence.
The second risk is that we run the risk of losing perspective on our history. The battle
flag describes a painful event in the history of the states that seceded, Texas included,
a bloody Civil War that still has the highest casualties of any conflict in American history.
Around 620,000 people died in this conflict, roughly half of all Americans combat deaths
in history. If we toss away the symbols of our failures, we run the risk of editing history
itself. I'm not going to use the hackneyed phrase: "heritage not hate", but I might argue
that history is better with the warts and scars still on it. Discarding a flag that
nearly destroyed our nation because others have appropriated could be a mistake, and
I think we owe the dead a certain debt of remembrance, even if we disagree with the
causes they died for.
The third risk, and the one that really keeps me up at night, is that the message sent by
attempts to remove the Confederate battle flag is that we fail to learn the really important
lessons of American history and the struggles of African Americans for equality and identity.
Slaves came to the United States from Africa under many flags, including the US flag, the
British flag, the French and Portugese and Spanish flags. They arrived at many ports,
and were enslaved in both the North and South until the 13th Amendment was ratified and
became the law of the land. I think it's an emblematic fact that the Commanding General
of the Northern Armies, Ulysses S Grant, owned at least 10 slaves through his wife's family,
and they were freed only by the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865. The day the
Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Abraham Lincoln was probably served by slaves at the
White House.
The greatest danger, I think, in removing the Confederate battle flag is that it implies
that the defeat of the Confederacy by the Union was the defeat of evil slavery by good
and moral people who opposed slavery. The Civil War was unquestionably about slavery,
among other issues, but slavery existed in both Union and Confederacy, and it also existed
for centuries before those two names had any meaning. There was slavery in Boston and Philadelphia,
in New Jersey and New York and in many of these places beyond the end of the American
Civil War.
The US had 150 years of slavery, the last three years of which included slavery in the
Confederacy. For 150 years afterward, African-Americans struggled with inequality, bias, hatred, violence,
lynchings in the night and flaming crosses on their lawns. Shameful policies were voted
on by the American public and ruled on by the Supreme Court of the United States. What
I'm saying is that in 300 years, focusing on the 3 years of the Confederacy is ignoring
a much larger struggle. It's too convenient, too easy, to cast our sins on that single
symbol.
Like the Nazi flag, the lesson of the Confederate battle flag is one we must finally learn.
It's not evil people who do evil things. It's ordinary people following evil ideas who commit
the worst sins. Unlike the Nazi atrocities against Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, slavery
was not a unique characteristic of the Confederacy. It was already an American legacy, one that
was coming to a close more quickly in the North, but the Civil War did not end it, did
not grant equal rights to African Americans. That struggle is much longer and still ongoing.
I want to end with a tongue in cheek proposal. The Confederate battle flag has been appropriated
in recent years as a symbol for white supremacy, and that's really why we hate it. We transfer
our hatred of racism to the symbol itself. We want to lash out at the flag as a proxy
for striking at white supremacists. As an alternative, perhaps we should consider re-appropriating
a part of our history back from those hateful people who use it now.
What we really need is to give it new meaning, one that forces racists to abandon it. My
modest proposal: We need Kanye West to start wearing the battle flag, and to get all his
fans to do the same. It will piss of the white supremacists, and change the meaning of the
symbol.
It so happens that he's way ahead of me. Here's a picture of him wearing the symbol
that he has decided to make a permanent part of his wardrobe.
I'll quote him: "You know the confederate flag represented
slavery in a way thats my abstract take on what I know about it. So I made the
song New Slaves. So I took the Confederate flag and made it my flag. Its my flag now.
Now what are you going to do? Shine on your crazy diamond, but I think Kanye
may have the right idea here. Fight symbolism with symbolism, and take your enemies power
away from them.
Thanks for watching.