Local View: Confederate Flag Never About Upholding States' Rights

The heinous killing of George Floyd has forced an overdue conversation about the deep-seated racism that pervades the United States. Some of this racism takes the form of outright bigotry. But much of it is structural, the result of centuries of colonization, dispossession, enslavement, discrimination, and segregation. There is no quick, easy fix to this problem. It will take radical but necessary change.

Yet, as a historian, I have recently found myself bewildered by a more overt form of bigotry. I’m thus not talking here about the lower incomes, shoddier housing, and fewer educational opportunities experienced by people of color. I’m also not talking about the impassioned objections to refugee resettlement by scores of self-identified “patriots” wrapping themselves in the American flag. Given the Trump administration’s stoking of racist xenophobia, a fifth-grade teacher unashamedly telling St. Louis County commissioners that he’s “a Republican and would not be nice to any refugees” sadly didn’t surprise me. And I’m not even talking about the pathetic spectacle of white reactionaries crying “liberate Minnesota” amid a pandemic that is disproportionately killing black and brown people.

No, I’m talking about the Confederate battle emblem. This may seem a strange concern to raise in one of the northernmost outposts of the lower 48 states, but I trust I’m not alone in noticing a growing number of people sporting sweatshirts or driving pickup trucks emblazoned with this repugnant marker of the slave-holding South. Yet given the modern Republican Party’s capture by racist demagogues, its increasing appearance makes perfect sense.