Mikey Barbs Barbato – 2/3/2011 Wall Post Comment
There’s a difference to people using the flag for racism (KKK) and people that arent. HK and his supporters are clearly not racist. Maybe your view of the flag is that it’s racist, John, but others believe it is a symbol of heritage. With your logic, the American flag, which I love dearly, would be racist, because it flew over slave ships and held slavery for decades longer than the Confederate flag has. Take a look at Mississippi. In Mississippi, their current state flag has the Confederate flag in the upper left corner. The people of Mississippi voted in a landslide to keep it the state flag, rather than using a different proposed flag that omitted the Confederate flag. Many blacks voted to keep the state flag the same. Do people use the flag as a racist symbol? Yes, of course. Did the south have slavery? Yes. Does this mean the north was venerable? No, because they had what I like to call industrial slavery, where immigrants worked in rough factories for little pay, no meals, 12 hour shifts, in dangerous conditions. The South paid around 80 percent of taxes and were only around 30 percent of the population of the country. Furthermore, Lincoln believed that blacks were inferior and wrote that if he could save the union without freeing the slaves, he would. In conclusion, you are correct that many people use the confederate flag as a symbol of racism, which I feel, is an injustice to the flag. Those people should be condemned. My view of the confederate flag is that it is a symbol of the south, past and present. I feel it is a large injustice Mr. Schwartz to condemn the flag while his non-slave owning ancestors risked their lives to protect their homeland. Most of the people on HK Edgerton’s page are NOT racist, but rather have connections with the flag due to their ancestors brave duties and their sheer pride of being a southerner.
