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Callaloo 24.1 (2001) 10-11



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American Stars and Bars

Madison Smartt Bell


Around twelve years ago, while researching a novel, I read a book called Bloods, by Wallace Terry. Bloods is a work of oral history, in which twenty black soldiers serving in Vietnam tell about their experiences. One of them, a soldier in a very active combat unit, described this situation: It was not uncommon for squads and patrol groups (LURPs, especially) to give their group some special name and to add special patches to their uniforms. Some members of this black soldier's unit (white Southerners, these men were) wore Confederate battle flag patches in such a way. Here (to the best of my twelve-years-old recollection) is what the black narrator and his friends had to say about that. We knew it didn't mean they were against us. It just meant they were for the South. But we still didn't like it.

That, I think, says everything that needs to be said about the place of the Confederate battle flag in the United States today, though of course it would be possible to use a lot more words to say it.

Like most symbols, this flag can signify different things, depending on where it is displayed and who is looking at it. It may stand for the goals of white supremacy sought by the many neo-Nazi and other such groups that have enthusiastically adopted it. It may stand for regional Southern pride and pride in Southern history . . . which sometimes but not always (less and less often as the years go by) may be a violently resentful pride. It may represent the standards of military honor and personal courage to which both Yankee and Rebel soldiers held themselves. There are other possibilities too, but I think these are the main ones.

In one case I know of (in my home state of Tennessee), white people have been attacked and killed by black people apparently provoked by the whites' display of the Confederate flag on their vehicle. For my own part, if I were to see the Confederate flag as a patch on the uniform of any policeman, I would be inclined to remove myself as inconspicuously and as far as possible from the vicinity of that officer. I feel this way as a white person, and I think I'd feel the same way even more strongly if I were black. If I were to see the Confederate flag flying from a government building, be it a school, state house, or whatever, I would be inclined to suspect that some form of racial discrimination is likely to go on inside. My suspicion might well be completely wrong, but I would still feel it, even as a white person and still more strongly if I were black. Government offices at any level have no business to fly the Confederate flag or otherwise use it as an emblem of their current function (the incorporation of the design into state flags is a different matter). However, I see no harm, in fact I see good, in displaying the flag within the context of historical exhibits (in or out of government buildings), at war memorials, and the like.[End Page 10]

The Confederate flag, and everything it stood for during the Civil War, is part of American history whether anybody likes it or not, and for that reason it would be a mistake to try to expunge it completely from view. It's when history is rendered invisible, one way or another, that it most easily begins to repeat itself.

No one in the North or South has any reason to be proud of slavery, which would never have rooted itself in the South to the extent that it did were it not for the textile mills of the North. Scarcely anyone was entirely innocent in this arrangement, except of course all those people who were captured and sold out of Africa. Concerning the affair of slavery there is a general, national complicity which is very seldom acknowledged. I am a white Southerner...

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