The Confederate Flag From My Childhood
When I was 16 my cousin got married and I was part of the crew tasked with decorating the getaway car. As Gen Xers we thought that dressing it up like the General Lee from the Dukes of Hazzard was a cool idea.
After the ceremony the groom took one look at the car and asked us to remove the Confederate Battle Flag we had affixed to the hood (the car from the show had it on the roof, but this was a convertible) to avoid offending anyone. At the time, I found this annoying because what remained of our decorations, the numbers “01” on the doors, didn’t do much to suggest the image of the car that we admired so much as children.
To me the car symbolized never ending chases with the corrupt police (which now feels very topical) and impossible-seeming stunts (actually they were impossible which is why more than 200 were destroyed over the course of the series). It never symbolized racism in any way to me.
But of course I was a white kid from the west coast, this wasn’t about me. The Confederacy was born to defend the right of white people to subjugate black people. One cannot divorce the symbol of that movement from the movement itself. Even if you ignore the flag’s origin, it’s prominence since the end of the Civil War was in large part a deliberate message to black residents of the South to know their place.
And Robert E Lee himself may have been a man of extraordinary military skill, but his most notable role in history was to deploy that skill in defense of our country’s greatest atrocity when he could have simply walked away.
It’s true that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson also owned slaves, they were far from perfect. But monuments in their honor are dedicated to their efforts in founding our country as a democracy, whereas monuments in Lee’s honor are an affront to those who are still feeling the effects of slavery’s long shadow.
It is unfortunate that a piece of my past is tainted by racist symbology, but that doesn’t mean it should be preserved. It was wrong then, it is wrong now, and we should stop celebrating it.
Plus, I was a bigger fan of Knight Rider.
