So look — it may sound like a canard to Northerners, but I get the “Southern heritage” flag thing. When you grow up around Civil War battlefields, it’s impossible not to identify with the locals. Many a monument bears the names of Louisiana regiments, or those of Mississippi, Georgia, or Texas. The wrongness of the Southern cause notwithstanding, Southern kids just aren’t going to identify with the soldiers of New Jersey. The North is an unknown, vaguely frightening country. Sure, Yankees have Deliverance to draw from for cliches, but the visible dyspepsia that accompanied the term “Yankee” as uttered by the crustier Southerners of my youth conjured plenty of cartoonish pictures of the industrial wastelands and cold comforts of New England.
Those Southern Civil War soldiers, of course, fought under Confederate flags. (Not just the famous one, which was only the battle flag, never the official flag of the CSA.) For a lot of Southerners, including this one, the battle flag doesn’t automatically bring to mind racism, but rather the many facets of our native culture.
But like a lot of things, you learn as you grow up. You learn that the region to which you feel a sense of loyalty was wrong in at least one enormous way. Just like how the U.S. writ large was unforgivably horrible to Native Americans, the Confederates were despicable in their ideas about and treatment of African-Americans. I don’t love the South any less, but it’s a complicated love. I’ve come to see that if — for anyone — the battle flag stands for the South’s defense of slavery, its usefulness for anything else is over. If I want to remember the best of Southern culture, I’ll fly the Texas flag instead, or the Dairy Queen logo.
The South needs a new banner. The Advocate staff has proposed a few potential replacements. And I’ve done my best to keep Northern prejudice out of these flags — no need to rouse the whole Civil War bit again. We’ve drawn from NASCAR, from barbecue, and politeness, among others. Let us know on valleyadvocate.com if you see a winner or have ideas of your own.•
