Monthly Archives: August 2017

One thing I never understood was how Confederate flagwavers could still be considered American patriots. Isn’t the Confederate flag by its very nature incompatible with the U.S. flag? Now even though I am from Maryland – technically a Southern state— my public school system didn’t have a pro-South curriculum, and in my county we never considered ourselves Southerners. So maybe I just don’t get why the Confederacy by definition hasn’t been widely treated in our history books as an act of treason and why we today do not consider its symbols and monuments as symbols of its treason.

Earlier in the month, Ta-Nehisi Coates, apparently back from a long hiatus, had this to say about the Confederacy (not in relation to Charlottesville, but to HBO announcing its plan to air Confederates, a TV show about what the South would look like today if it hadn’t lost the war):

For while the Confederacy, as a political entity, was certainly defeated, and chattel slavery outlawed, the racist hierarchy which Lee and Davis sought to erect, lives on. It had to. The terms of the white South’s defeat were gentle. Having inaugurated a war which killed more Americans than all other American wars combined, the Confederacy’s leaders were back in the country’s political leadership within a decade. Within two, they had effectively retaken control of the South.

. . . Nazi Germany was also defeated. But while its surviving leadership was put on trial before the world, not one author of the Confederacy was convicted of treason. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg. Confederate General John B. Gordon became a senator. Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.

[emphasis added]

As Coates reminds us, four million blacks were enslaved in the South, comprising 40% of the Confederacy’s population, “the South’s indispensable laboring class, its chief resource, its chief source of wealth, and the sole reason why a Confederacy existed in the first place,” people clearly not honored by the Confederacy’s flags or monuments. And the Confederacy caused a war that killed more Americans than any other war in our history. So if you are not a white Southerner in America, how comfortable are you in 2017 living in a country that publicly honors a bloody war of treason and oppression? Can’t we put the flags and statues in a museum where they belong and use our statues to memorialize our shared values? Those Western ones we’re always bragging about.