Wild Eyed Southern Boy

Flag Flap, or, Aren't All Racists Southern?

A few weeks ago, Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean made a comment about how he "still want[ed] to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks" (CNN.com, November 2, 2004). Not less than a few weeks later, the same website published another article about what another candidate was saying about Dean.

The author summarized Dean's remark as the following: "he was trying to state his intention to make the party more inclusive and bring poor Southern whites back from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party" (CNN.com, November 10, 2004).
Note that there are some very key differences between what was actually said and what the author of the second article inferred.
Dean made no mention whatsoever about white people or poor southerners. I know that there is a major association people have with 'dumb rednecks' who fly their rebel flags around and hate black people. But this is a damaging and hurtful stereotype that must be stopped.
While it is true that there are racist southerners, I would argue that there are possibly racist Northerners as well. This might or might not include African-Americans, but I haven't decided yet. (The evidence as of yet is inconclusive.) But it should be stated that some of the worst hate crimes towards blacks in the past have been in the south, perpetrated by southerners. If you look at a map of the amount of lynchings that there have been in the past, nearly all of them occured in the south.
But how do we escape this? There haven't been any lynchings in many, many years.
Is it possible, though, that the rebel flag is merely used as a weapon, not by southerners, but by those who want to rally around anti-racism?
While it has been universally denounced as a symbol of antiquated ideals and hatred, the rebel flag will, I think, always stick around only because of the perception that it symbolizes racism. If the rebel flag were eliminated from the minds and discourse of today's politicians, there wouldn't be anything to aim their rhetoric at. The flag has changed hands into those that hate it the most.
It now represents a past evil. I can tell you that many people here in the south identify with the rebel flag. I would say that most couldn't tell you when the Civil War started or ended, and for them it is a sort of 'screw you' to the old Man of government and all those trying to dictate their 'freedom of expression.'
The rebel flag has been charged with a negativity such that if anybody associates with it, they are immediately labeled a racist or a bigot. This probably isn't a bad thing. As long as anti-racist leaders continue to pay attention and empower the rebel flag as a racist symbol, it will stay as such and people will always hang the 'stars and bars' from their CB whips, trailer doors, four-wheelers and backs of trucks.
The other issue that this brings up is a matter of the southern stereotype. This is one that I feel more personally, because it strikes more at home.
I think that as long as the media and the powers that be present poor southerners as bare foot, slope foreheaded, mouth breathing yokels who play banjoes on dead trees chewing Beech-Nut tobacco, wearing a straw hat, they will always feel they have to aspire to that.
There is a certain sense of pride we southerners feel in our being 'southern.' It's certainly not a racist thing. We identify with the land and traditions that we are born in. And if everything we see on TV and movies and on the news depicts us as the above description, I'm sorry, but that's what we'll see ourselves as.
So you see, 'racism,' as the anti-racist leaders will have you believe, will never cease to exist as long as harmful stereotypes are aimed at southerners and their misunderstood ways. They will always be perceived as backwards moron racists as long as they are presented as such.