The president’s speech at a South Carolina church did not go over well with the GOP candidate.
Joe Biden gave a speech in South Carolina on Monday, and Nikki Haley isn’t happy about it. Specifically, she’s not happy about the part where the president called her out for her extremely cringeworthy comments about the Civil War, saying, “Let me be clear, for those who don’t seem to know: Slavery was the cause of the Civil War.”
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The issue of the Civil War—and her commentary on it—has come up for Haley in the past. While running for governor of South Carolina in 2010, she described the war as a matter of two sides fighting over “tradition” and “change,” adding that the Confederate flag was “not something that is racist.” She also claimed there was no reason to take the flag down from the statehouse grounds (until five years later, after the mass shooting at the Charleston church). After Haley’s gaffe in December, Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said that her failure to mention slavery was “not stunning if you were a Black resident in SC when she was Governor.”
Yeah, but until relatively recently, white folk didn’t think that way. At all. For young people back in the day, it was, “Yee haw! I’m a rebel!” For most, it was merely a symbol of the South, not of the Confederacy or slavery or any other such bullshit. We thought nothing of it, if we thought about it at all.
Somewhere along the line it evolved into a racist dog whistle. And that’s fucking sad. I flew one back in college, now I won’t do business with a place selling Confederate paraphernalia.
The whole controversy kinda caught us off guard. I never once heard anyone complain about the Confederate flag, call it racist. In the 80’s or 90’s, I can imagine asking my few black friends and coworkers what they thought of it, and I imagine they would simply say, “Man, no one gives a shit about that hillbilly crap!”
Later, people pitched a fit, on both sides. And these were sides that seemingly hadn’t existed the month before!
Some, like me, took a moment to reflect on how it might make black folks feel, thought about how the symbol had changed over the decades. Well, times and symbols change. Judging the past through a younger, more modern lens, might mislead a bit. See how that goes both ways?
Same goes for the American flag. Dad was a Torpedoman, 3rd Class, in the Pacific Theater. Jesus, the shit that ship was involved in… Anyway, we only brought the flag out on appropriate holidays, and while he didn’t sit me down and teach me the US Flag Code, he got the points across. Now it’s basically a symbol of right-wing nuts. Think on that. I won’t fly an American flag on the 4th of July. Imagine explaining that to my father.
tl;dr: Sharing my experiences in the hope of sharing understanding. LOL, like that’ll happen.
I didn’t downvote you, but you’re speaking of your particular upbringing and experience. Your experience wasn’t that of all white people. Mine was different.
I liked watching the TV show Dukes of Hazzard when I was a child in the early 1980s. I wanted a toy General Lee car. Similar to the picture below:
My parents explained who General Lee was, and what the Confederate flag on the roof of the car meant. I was too young to understand all of the implications, but I clearly got the idea that black people found the Confederate flag offensive because it represented slavery. I had black friends in school and at church. The thought of me owning a toy that would made them feel bad embarrassed me.
I asked if there was anything offensive about the KITT car from Knight Rider. I was happy to find out there wasn’t and got that one instead.
I think the dukes of hazard is a nice example, and would add Lynyrd Skynyrd as well.
Not everyone was fortunate to learn the full story about the Confederacy when growing up and, as the poster above you wrote, for a lot of people it was a rebelious symbol of the South. Which is the context why both the creators of DoH and Lynyrd Skynyrd used to identify with it.
We’re growing further and further away from it, but there were families where great-gramps fought on the wrong side. Not because he was the Supreme Racist but because he happened to be born there at the wrong time. Those people grew up with a very different view of that flag than the one we have today.
So with that context, I personally have no problem playing with a car from DoH. I even enjoy watching a vid from an old live performance from Lynyrd Skynyrd more because I know how that flag got there and what it meant for them at that time. The band didn’t believe or wanted to promote that black people should be slaves. It’s part of innocent folklore understood by those who were there in that place and time. But alas, the nuance will fade away with time, and the images will remain.
Although I agree with you that the use of the confederate flag back in the day isn’t necessarily proof that people doing so were dyed-in-the-wool racists, I think it’s an overstatement to say with such confidence that their use was something other than that. As a Southerner myself, I’m well aware of the vast difference in scope between what some folks (especially older folks) think counts as racism and what it actually is in objective reality.
I wouldn’t think that way about the Dukes of Hazzard: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/21/dukes-hazzard-actor-john-schneider-biden-execution
Your parents should have gotten you this toy instead:
Yeah, it’s super easy to how it’s a symbol of racism by how hard the racists defend it. Most people that had any affinity for it simply let it go when they realized it hurt people. So now the hatred under the banner is, in quite a real sense, distilled.
Lol I see someone downvoted you for giving your honest pov
After the civil war ended it’s important that the North chose to rehabilitate the South as opposed to, well, killing them all. Part of this was forgiving them for seceding and fighting. And their flag was put in the bracket of folklore rather than that of the nazi symbols etc. Which explains people from the South continuing to use it as you describe : “proud to be a hillbilly!”
Over the last couple decades, however, the stench of its origin has gotten harder, with a positive feedback loop because those clinging to it only do so not because of some rebelious folklore but because they honestly believe the Confederacy was right in their white supremacy bs
And as you very poignantly add, the same is starting to happen with the stars and stripes as people are starting to realise ‘patriotism’ is mostly a cover for nationalism
But they gave their honest pov as a representation of white people in general.
Edit: Also, to be clear, what we currently call the “confederate flag” wasn’t associated with the entire rebellion. It was the battle flag of a specific army, the Army of Northern Virginia. It was mostly moved to irrelevance by everyone other than confederate apologists until the civil rights era when old-school racists started to put a bunch of confederate statues up everywhere and promoting the flag as a symbol in an attempt to frighten Black people fighting for their rights.
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I say, f that noise. Reclaim that flag for us. Don’t let the bastards take that from us. Let people know what actual patriotism means.
I’m surprised and sorry to hear this. We have had a similar issue up north from you. The Rona idiots in our country have taken our flag on as their symbol of being an idiot.
We would only really flag ours on Canada day or for sporting events. Now they drive around with it on their cars windows and out the back of their trucks like our American cousins. Usually they will add a Fck Trudeau flag to the mix. I now no longer want to fly it due to a minority that have ruined it for now