The South Won't Do It Again: Thoughts on the Confederate Flag

Hanging out during Mardis Gras in Pass Christian, Mississippi, a city draped in Confederate Flags, I get a gut feeling that a deep love of old Southern values has not died. Unlike Virginia and Tennessee, Rebel Flags do not accompany American Flags. Rather, they stand alone, proud symbols of a defeated cause, a depressing cause, a cause as pathetic as it is forgotten.

Nobody knows better than these Confederate Flag waving Rebels that the South cannot do it again, that Mississippi, one of the nation's poorest states, has been forgotten. From slavery, to lynchings, to a government that prefers to invest Katrina Relief money into ports rather than people, Mississippi cannot help but view itself as a dying phoenix, burnt to ashes, longing to rise again, clinging to its despicable past to distract itself from the violence of the present, a violence caused by Northern neglect.

The Confederate Flag often causes anger in Northern people who believe their regions excel in social justice. What these self-righteous folks forget is that the North has a history as bloody and violent, as racist and deadly as the South. From police violence in San Francisco and New York to fast-rising hate groups like World Church of the Creator in Chicago,no part of this occupied nation founded in genocide and slavery lacks a bloodbath history and a reprehensibly racist present.

The Confederate Flag symbolizes poor, broken white people's desires to live the lives of slave-owners again. Disturbing? Yes. Threatening. Not particularly.

M ore threatening to people of color are the criminal bankers siphoning the people's money, violent cops, pre-prison schools, and the prison industrial complex. The tawdry impotence of the Confederate Flag and the broke white folks who wave it have little to do with the racism, genocidal tendencies, and violence our system continues to fuel itself on. These Rebels are victims too.