On the road with a few friends this weekend, we pulled into a town that, from the highway, had a giant Rebel flag waving. One of the guys in the car said, "Well I guess we know how this towns feelings about minorities are," which we all laughed at, but then it sparked a debate. What does it actually stand for?
His position was that it stood for racism and waving the flag showed support for that idieology.
My position was that the flag has been adopted as a symbol of rebellion and didn't actually represent racism or support for it in all cases. I made the point that bands like
Pantera, who's lead singer is latin, waved the flag. Their reason was that of rebellion.
So who is right?
I did some research and found that it was one of many flags flown by the south during the Civil War, and this particular flag was their "fight" flag. After that it became synonymous with a variety of things, one being racism, the other being rebellion by youths, some of which are racist but not it's not exclussive.
My other point was that other flags, like the US flag could, if one wanted to, be said to represent the slaughter of native Americans - regardless of how many there were. Also, for example, the Cuban flag could be said to represent communist Cuba but, someone like my dad would not agree with that, arguing that it still, for him, represents a Castro-free Cuba.
So who is right?
Can symbols like flags represent many things individually or does everything they represent get lumped in depending on where you're from?
- Oni
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