Confederate flag has meaning to southerners

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By Courtney Warner
Collegian Staff Writer

As soon as my boxes were unloaded from the truck and cluttered the bland room I would live in for my freshman year, I didn’t even bother saying goodbye to my family.

After I hurried them from my room, I moved to my packed boxes and tore them apart.

I was on a mission.

Seconds later, hung in my room was a symbol of pride for my culture and heritage, but a misunderstood symbol that divides races and states within the United States: a Confederate flag.

I remember during my U.S. history class we discussed which government was better, the Confederacy’s or the Union’s.

I debated in favor of the Confederate states, since each state operated separately under regulations unanimously approved by all states within the Confederacy. Then, war and the economy would be contained in separate states.

Also, since approval had to be unanimous, the voices of others wouldn’t be underrepresented.

My classmates knew of my Southern heritage and referred to me as a ‘redneck.’

Redneck, no, I wasn’t.

Southern, I am.

Generations of my family hail from North Carolina, and they worked their asses off to get my family and me to where we are today.

After that history class, a black student approached me in the cafeteria and called me a “n****r hater.”

I was as insulted as ever. I never deliberately burden someone else’s life by mocking them for their alleged stereotypes.

A black student calling me a racial hater? Sorry, but wasn’t it you who just dropped a slur many are insulted by? Can you say, hypocrite?

But that’s beside the point.

Because I proudly display a flag of what America could have been doesn’t mean I’m pro-slavery or support the mistreatment of non-whites, it represents my family’s success over the same battles any other lower-class person had to overcome.

Not every white person owned slaves. Some of the poor even enslaved themselves through semi-indentured servitude, where they worked on plantations to provide their families with necessities like food and shelter. Because they were poor, people like my family didn’t have a valued role in society, even if they were white.

When it comes down to it, would you be willing to do anything for your family, even if it meant slavery or death?

Even though such a contract was voluntary, was it really? The lifestyle might not have been ideal, but it kept the family from getting cold six feet under.

If anything, the Confederate flag should exist as a mere storybook fable or fairytale. It represent something that could have been, but never was.

The flag represented a government, not segregation.

It represented a political system where sovereign states operated separately and followed unanimously approved regulations.

I don’t know if these students slept through the class, but I guess they missed the part where there were five border slave states within the Union, and segregation existed in the North and the South.

But that doesn’t stop people from taking the North’s side in debates or from displaying the American flag.

In the modern South, many households display some symbol of the Civil War-era South, specifically the Confederate flag.

The same flags can be seen in the North, too.

Whether they are flying in the wind, off the back of a Ford truck or hanging alongside the modern American flag in someone’s front yard, these flags aren’t flaunted because those who own them are proud of the negative stigmas and stereotypes associated with the South.

They hang the flag to show their history and lifestyle. Confederate flags are also displayed and sold in Northern states like Pennsylvania and around battlegrounds like Gettysburg.

It’s not a way of proudly expressing the division of the country, but a nod to American history.

Though our families either came from Southern territories, Northern territories or even a combination of both, we are all now united as one nation, under one flag.

Though the South and its seemingly cruel ways were lost in the Civil War, social injustices also occurred in the North. They followed the United States into modern society.

So before you dare label anyone with such detestable slurs and allegations, check your facts.