I have no delusion that people are waiting on the edge of their seats to find out my opinion about Governor Haley's decision to call for the removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds. But I do hope that my thoughts will contribute something to the conversation. My position is (naturally) nuanced. I have neither a strong affection nor repulsion for the flag. In fact, I had ancestors fighting on both sides of the war, so in that regard, I'm almost ambivalent about the flag; that being the case, I believe I can see the sentiment behind both sides of the argument. Maybe that puts me in a fairly unique position to comment on it. Or maybe it disqualifies me. Either way, I'll provide my thoughts and leave it to the reader to judge.
I regret the timing of the revival of this issue in the sense that, at least for a time, it diverted attention from the nine people whose brutal murder provided the impetus for it. I also regret that bringing the flag into the conversation had the effect of politicizing a very real and personal tragedy. Nonetheless, the issue has been raised and it must be dealt with. I wonder if perhaps dealing with the flag issue is part of the healing process. Either way, I do hope that it can be resolved in a manner that will preserve the unity that has emerged within our state in dealing with the tragedy in Charleston.
Secondly, I want to point out the fallacy that I've seen most prominently since the national conversation has turned to the Confederate Flag. Sadly, there are still those, I hope few in number, who raise the flag as a symbol of white supremacy and hate (those who do so only demonstrate that they are "superior" to no one), but not everyone has this motive. Just because someone supports the flag's presence on the Statehouse grounds does not mean they are a racist. To claim otherwise is, well, intolerant. Before addressing the the flag itself, I wish to deal with this issue.
WHY SOME SUPPORT THE FLAG
One major reason that some southerners revere the flag is that it is a means of honoring their ancestors who fought in the Civil War. The soldiers who fought on either side of the war were not all evil; most were individuals who were called upon by their respective countries to defend their homes. Probably most of the soldiers in the Confederate rank and file never considered their struggle to be about slavery or any other such issue. Obviously, as in any war, some were cruel with cruel intentions, but not all. As in any war, many died, leaving widows and fatherless children, many were horribly maimed, and the rest carried emotional scars with them for the rest of their lives. For their descendants to want to honor their memories is not only understandable, but laudable. Family honor is strong in the South, just as it is in many other parts of the country. We can argue about whether the flag is an appropriate means for them to do that, but the sentiment here is one of honor, not one of hatred.
A second reason for revering the flag among some southerners is because they view it as a symbol of identification with the South. (Before those in other parts of the country dismiss this, all parts of the nation practice similar sectional identification, albeit in different ways and with, obviously, different symbols.) Again, whether this is an appropriate symbol for representing southern pride can be debated, but impugning all who hold this view as hateful or as supporting the negative aspects of the region's history is not correct.
A third reason that some southerners revere the flag is as a symbol of states' rights, which, rightly understood, is not in any way a racial issue; I will discuss this more further down. Yet again, whether the Confederate flag is a good symbol for states' rights can be debated. While I am an ardent supporter of states' rights, I would personally question whether this flag is the best symbol for this purpose.
SOME HISTORICAL CONTEXT
One historic note that I've noticed a lot of people, particularly in the news outlets, get wrong: the Battle Flag that is the focus of the current furor is not the "Stars and Bars". That nickname refers to the first national flag of the Confederacy; this is what that flag looked like. The flag currently flying on the Statehouse grounds was never a national flag. That, by the way, will be relevant to a point that I will address later.
Some have taken the position that the Civil War was never about slavery, or at least not primarily so. To be sure, there may have been other issues involved (for example, tariffs that disproportionately economically impacted the southern states), but one only need read the Declaration of Causes of the various Confederate states for secession as well as speeches by Confederate president Jefferson Davis (here are two from Davis when he was a US Senator before the war), or numerous other documents from other prominent Confederates to see that slavery was indeed a major issue, if not the preeminent issue, leading to secession and ultimately to war: The states claimed the "right" to determine for themselves whether slavery should be legal within their borders rather than that determination being made at the federal level.
In the century following the end of the war and Reconstruction, former Confederate states practiced the wholesale institutionalized repression of blacks in the form of laws such as Jim Crow, which required racial segregation, and voter suppression laws such as white primaries and the "eight-box" law (which required ballots for separate offices to be placed in the the appropriate box in order to be counted, which was designed to prevent votes cast by blacks, who were largely illiterate at the time, from being counted). Given this history, one can certainly understand why many blacks, and others, view the Confederate flag, which was the banner under which these laws were carried out, with disdain (ostensibly, the flag was first placed above the Statehouse dome by Governor Fritz Hollings in 1962 as a protest against desegregation).
This gets to why I don't see the Confederate flag as a good symbol for the cause of states' rights. For a century, Jim Crow and similar laws were defended as being within the purview of states: the "right" of the state to determine for itself who within its borders can enjoy liberty and the rights of citizenship and who cannot. This created an unfortunate association in the minds of many between the issue of states' rights and segregation that persists today; the Tea Party for example is frequently panned by the Left as being racist, not because it advocates any racially discriminatory policies, but because they advocate for states' rights (note how a quote by Sarah Palin is characterized in this 2010 article on the Tea Party). Use of the Confederate Battle Flag, the symbol used by the segregationists, as a symbol of states' rights only serves to perpetuate this association.
However, the very purpose behind states' rights (i.e. seeking to preserve the Federalist system established by the Framers of the US Constitution) is to provide a check and balance against the power of the federal government and to diffuse power to the state and local level for one purpose: to preserve personal liberty against the overreach of a too-powerful national government. The idea, as outlined for example by James Madison in Federalist #46, was that such diffusion of power placed government closer to the people where they could have greater influence and thus prevent a distant, impersonal national government from becoming oppressive. Therefore, using states' rights as a shield for laws limiting people of a certain race from exercising their rights of citizenship is completely antithetical to the very purpose of states' rights.
STAY OR GO?
One factor that must be taken into account in this debate is this: There are two flags currently flying over the Statehouse dome (since the Battle Flag was removed to its current location in 2000): the Flag of the United States and the South Carolina state flag. These are flags of sovereign political entities - the nation of which we are a part and the state of which the Statehouse serves as the capitol. These flags therefore have special standing to fly on Statehouse grounds; in a sense, they kind of have to be there. This is why the argument that it would be hypocritical to remove the Confederate flag and not the US flag, which flew over a nation that allowed slavery for much longer than did the Confederate flag, is not valid. The US flag is the flag of our nation. The Confederate Battle Flag is not, nor has it ever been, a national flag, and the nation which it represented on the battle field no longer in exists. As such, while this fact alone does not exclude its being flown on Statehouse grounds (although I did believe this was one reason why it was correct to remove it from the Statehouse dome 15 years ago), the Battle Flag can be removed without regard to the US and SC flags.
It's a funny thing about how a single symbol can represent vastly different things to different people. Obviously, such things can be taken to the ridiculous extreme: the past few weeks have seen the attempted wholesale scrubbing of all Confederate symbols from the public arena, including the discontinuation of computer games containing Confederate flags by Apple (which partially relented a few days later), or the recent announcement of TV Land's cancelling of "Dukes of Hazzard" reruns due to the image of a Confederate flag on the car used in the program. We cannot erase the past by eradicating all reminders of it, nor should we wish to. Edmund Burke's famous statement seems to apply: "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it."
So the "what's next" concern is certainly a valid concern, but we cannot use that as an excuse not to deal with an issue. So we must be careful keep the current debate on focus. The question at hand is not whether we should scrub all reminders of the past; it is about, and only about, whether the Confederate flag should fly at the seat of our state's government. The relevant question here is not "what does the flag mean to me?", but what is the flag's actual historical meaning and does its flying at the Statehouse constitute official state endorsement, intentional or implicit, of those policies that the flag was used to represent throughout its history?
Most people are aware of our past sins; all too aware, in fact. South Carolina still bears the stigma of its past in the eyes of many - I believe unjustly so, given the progress that the state has made just during my own lifetime. Sadly, much of the nation is unaware that, regardless of whether the Confederate flag is on the Statehouse grounds or not, the state is now far different from what it was in those days. Perhaps the real tragedy of the Confederate flag's presence there is that it serves to perpetuate this image of the state as a haven for institutionalized racism. This is not the South Carolina that we have seen since the tragedy in Charleston, and it is not the South Carolina that I love and am proud to call my home. This is reason enough in my eyes to justify removing the flag. It is time for our state to move forward to a thriving future, not to linger in a checkered past.
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