Before I left Virginia, the senate race was turning particularly nasty. The real downward spiral in the race between incumbent Republican George Allen and Democrat Jim Webb began when Allen stupidly referred to one of Webb's volunteers as "macaca," which is either a breed of monkey or a racial slur, during a campaign stop.
Since then, accusations have turned up against Webb as well; someone has come forward to say that Webb once described evenings back in the 1960s, when he and members of his ROTC squad drove through the streets of the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles aiming fake guns and shouting racial epithets of their own.
Through all of the accusations and counter-accusations, several have pointed out pictures of Allen wearing a Confederate flag lapel pin. This, say some, is all you need to know about how racist Allen must be.
And this, says I, is something that needs to be discussed a bit further.
I'm going to let all of you Northerners and Midwesterners and Westerners and all the other non-Southerners in on a little secret: people who "celebrate" the Confederacy are not -- I repeat, are not -- automatically racist.
Some are. There's no denying that. The Confederate battle flag, the famous "stars and bars," has been adopted by groups that are specifically racist. The emblem has come to mean racism for many victims of these people.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who happen to care about their own family ties to the Confederacy, and who wear Confederate flag lapel pins or display in their homes Confederate memorabilia that belonged to their ancestors, but who also happen to have not the first racist bone in their bodies.
To claim that anyone who has any respect for the Confederate flag is like saying that Democrats are "Godless." Both claims are equally untrue and equally outrageous.
There is no denying that the Civil War focused on the question of states' rights, and the main issue in that argument was the issue of slavery. There is no denying that blacks were mistreated during the era of slavery and that these many years later, they're still not treated equally.
But there's a lot of denying that those old Southerners who allow themselves to be caught up in the romantic haze of the antebellum legend must want a return of slavery. When a good many Southerners sport Confederate garb at the myriad Civil War re-enactments or push for Confederate Memorial events, or even when they temporarily lose themselves in a fantasy about the "old South," they're not thinking about slavery at all. They're imagining themselves sitting on the porch of a lavish plantation, sipping a mint julep with a faithful bird dog at one side and a tray of biscuits and sweetened iced tea at the other. The fact that back then, they'd have reached such a point of wealth because of slave labor doesn't enter into their thinking: they don't think it through that far.
And here's another Southern secret: for those people who think how wonderful it must have been to be so "carefree," there's no thought given to who is out in the cotton fields doing all the work. If it was Hispanics instead of blacks, or even whites instead of blacks, by and large, it wouldn't change their image of the fantasy for the simple fact that this aspect of it never enters their mind. Likewise, if the men and women in the fields were on a payroll rather than being chained servants, that would be just as well.
When Ronald Reagan died, my primary blog was over at AOL. I wrote a piece on Reagan's death, and what I perceived to have been an excitement in the air back in 1981 when Reagan took office. I said something to the effect that it would be nice to see the country come together that way again. Some of my readers took extreme exception to this, and they were assisted by an AOL promo headline that didn't really do the message of that post justice, and said that since I thought Reagan was a pretty good president, I must have been against all AIDS research and funding. I was shocked to be accused of such a thing, but then the accusations came from people who had been personally effected by the illness in some way, and who felt (rightly) that Reagan did far too little on that front.
I pointed out to them that no president is perfect, and that it's impossible to agree 100% with everything any president ever does. Whether Reagan was a great president or one of the worst, he made mistakes and did some things fairly well. In any event, time has a way of clouding our judgment when it comes to the harsh realities of the past.
And that takes us back to the Confederate argument. Do you really believe that the people who think they'd love plantation opulence would enjoy giving up modern conveniences like electricity, microwave ovens, radio, television and the internet? It's highly doubtful. And do you really believe those who wear the Confederate flag symbol have really thought that through? I don't.
Prejudice, it seems to me, is based on the assumption of absolutes; if you're A, you must be B. If you're B, you can't be A. All Confederate enthusiasts are not racists. Some are. Some are not. All racists do not bend over backwards to honor the Confederacy. Some do. Some couldn't force themselves to care any less about the Civil War if a musket was pointed at their head.
I don't happen to own a Confederate flag lapel pin and wouldn't wear it if I did. I've seen some Civil War re-enactments, and while there are interesting things to be seen there, they just don't do that much for me. I was particularly happy to see the Confederate flag come down off the statehouse dome in South Carolina because it was no longer a symbol of the government of the state and it was so divisive a symbol that it caused unnecessary tensions that prevented real progress from happening.
But because I don't wear a Confederate flag and because I'm not a Civil War enthusiast, you unfortunately couldn't make the logical assumption that I've never had a prejudiced thought. I wish I could say that I haven't, and I can say that I usually don't have them, but there are times when assumptions pop into my head that I have to stop and reconsider. And I have no doubt that the same goes for most people when it comes to things like race, religion, gender, age, and other labels that divide us.
The question you must ask yourself is this: If you're one to make such automatic assumptions, how, exactly, are you any better than the people you accuse of being prejudiced?
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