Natalie Allison at The Tennessean has an interesting story about how more Tennesseans are displaying Confederate flag license plates.
James Patterson, commander of the Tennessee Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said he suspects the increase in motorists ordering the plate can be attributed to the organization's focus on promoting the initiative amid "all the anti-Confederate rhetoric that's been going on" surrounding monuments and flags in public spaces.
Allison hints around at the real reason for the increase, but in her efforts to avoid saying it, she’s got one doozy of a paragraph:
The flag became a point of deep division and conflict following the June 2015 killings of nine African-American parishioners at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, S.C. Dylann Roof, a then-21-year-old who had posted online a photo of himself posing with the flag and who cited racial animosity as a motive, was convicted last year in the deadly mass shooting.
Really? That’s when it became a point of deep division and conflict?
Listen, if Allison won’t say it, or the Gannett Industrial Complex won’t let her say it, I will: More people are driving around with that stupid flag on their license plates because they’re racists and it’s become socially acceptable among too many white people to be racist.
No one they care about, or whose opinions they respect, will tell them they’re being assholes, so they keep on being assholes.
And, you know, fine. Most people don’t tell you right up front that they’re racist assholes. It’s kind of a nice change of pace to have a whole bunch of them warn you off of liking them right from the start.
But the thing that makes me laugh and then cringe is that you know, you just know, they’re going to insist that they’re not being racist, that it’s about heritage, not hate. They’re going to insist that we look at their little hate symbol and pretend along with them that it’s about whatever lie they’re gaslighting themselves with.
It hurts their feelings if we point out that the flag that’s been a symbol of racism, hatred, division and treasonous abandonment of the United States since it was invented is, indeed, a symbol of those things. Or they claim it hurts their feelings.
What I really think is going on here is that it makes them feel powerful. They get to feel powerful that they can publicly display a racist symbol and not only can no one stop them, the state supports them in it. And as long as they can insist on people treating them like they’re not racist, they get to feel the power that comes with bending truth toward lies.
There’s not much we can do about the first thing. But we can all refuse to participate in the second.
To say the Confederacy was racist is not controversial. It was literally a white-supremacist state built on the belief that black people had no rights and could be owned. That’s the truth. If you fly the flag of the Confederacy (or drive around with it on your car), you’re showing your support for the Confederacy and thus your support of a white-supremacist nation.
Anyone who insists otherwise is either evil or stupid. And it doesn’t help them or us to go along with their bullshit.
We can all do our part to take the shine off the myth of the Confederacy by simply insisting on the truth of it — it was racist. People who still support it are racists. It’s simple and straightforward.
