Please Explain Confederate Pride to Me

A symbol represents the heart of the viewer. As a yankee I used to think the Confederate flag was a symbol of hatred for the north, for the right to own people (my last name is very common among African Americans so some of my relatives were probably owners). I came to the conclusion after reading the Biblical laws for slavery that southern slavery was not Biblical and therefore, false religion.

Looking at a the flag or any historical monument could in fact bring pride to a grandchild of a slave if seen as a gauge of what is NOT. I am half Hungarian and while my family was probably communist, I have pride in those in Hungary who rebelled and were a pain in the backside of their oppressors.

I have come to realize that even though I was born in the Bronx, I am a country girl at heart and can also live anywhere. Anywhere, because I know that without my skin, I am a human and only born here because this is where God put me. I often used to thing about being born in China or Russia (come to think of it, never Africa-I don’t like the hot sun but I do love animals and it is too flat).

Pride is an interesting subject. Pride in self or anything outside of God is a sin, right? I think of Jerusalem as the city of the Great King and love it for that, but all else is moot. I love my son, a former Marine, and am proud of who he is. But how often do I remember His true Creator? I had nothing to do with the meiosis process that gave him the best genes of his parents, IMHO.

So, with a vision of what really matters, glorifying God and remembering that this life is temporary, I say keep it all and use it right. Remember the good, prevent the evil, but we won’t. The Jewish people are evidence.

I am half Yankee and half Cajun, if you look at my genealogy I am a mutt. I thank GOD that my Yankee father was hurt in WW2, and was sent to Houma, Louisiana to recover. That is where he met my mother, a Cajun girl from Bayou Dularge. My father hated living in New York City, and he fell in love with the South. I have been around the world, North, East, West, and South. There is not enough money in the world to make me move out of Louisiana. If you have never lived in the South, you will never understand. It is not Confederate Pride, it is love for the greatest place in the world to live. Yesterday me and my wife went to eat at a local restaurant. When we opened the door, it was full of black men eating their lunch. Everyone of them smiled at us and said hello or good morning to us. There was no racial hatred or ill feeling. We were just welcomed in the good old Southern way and made to feel at home. I feel sorry for the people who live up North. I can walk the street at night without fear, I can go hunting, or fishing. If it wasn't for the heat during the summer, the South would be paradise.

However none of that could succeed if the proclivities of their ignorant followers weren’t so disposed to believe and endorse them.

Yes, but that disposition--both among Whites & Blacks--took a long time to develop. And that is where one really should look at the efforts to indoctrinate the susceptible into a distorted view of history, the dynamics of human interaction, etc..

Consider what Booker T. Washington had to say about the social dynamics of the Old South in 1895, as a starting point:

Booker T. Washington Address.

I am a 60-something Caucasian Yankee, born and raised in Michigan. My mother was British. My father was the first in his Canadian-immigrant family born in the USA.

This is the reason you do not understand Confederate pride or anything else about the Southern culture. You are not Southern. Nobody in your family fought and/or died in the Civil War trying to protect their home. Go back to Michigan and STFU.

We will actually be flying both of these flags at our July 4th deck party. No Yankee liberals invited. :=)

The issue of state secession is serious and goes to the core of this republic. It shouldn’t mystify anyone.

Reread my post. I am mystified by the lingering resentment of 150 years' duration.

All Confederate generals were great AND good!

Braxton Bragg was a mediocre general at best. He left the field of his only victory (Chickamauga) before the fighting was over, leading to an incomplete victory. General Longstreet (who was both great and good) said of him he was more interested in the victory parade than the victory. But he was a friend of Jefferson Davis, so he was promoted to Chief of Staff where he could do no more harm.

Grant was no tyrant, but a good man who gave Lee better terms than he had any right to expect. He is also IMHO was the best general in US history, including Lee. The first truly modern general in history.

After all is said & done; more is said than done. - Relax all. “Everyone” will be moving on to another topic once some other surprising thing or the other happens. - The Confederate flag will be removed here & there; retained here there, as well. Dust will settle, as it always does & MOVING RIGHT ALONG ! Most of my ancestors were Confederates, later American soldiers in WWII. Time marches on.

She’s the type person we wanted to keep flying the flag for.
Watched it my whole life. Yankees move to a prosperous southern city, because the way of life is so much better than the northern $hithole they came from. As soon as they arrive they begin telling the “ignorant” hicks why it was so much better the way they did it up there, and before long they have turned said prosperous southern city (ie. Charlotte, Atlanta, etc.) into the same $hithole they came from.

Take Comedians doing a show in NYC. The favorite guaranteed go-to joke is the typical ignorant, racist, hick redneck. They all laugh and approve - applaud.

Your example might make a point if the "Good Old Boy" comedians didn't have much the same material.

Great point. Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, Jim Varney, and other Southern comedians have made a staple of that sort of humor. Heck, you can take it back to Andy Griffith and Jim Nabors or to Mark Twain and Joel Chandler Harris.

Southern "rednecks" aren't anything like as prominent in Northern comedy as you think. If a comedian is still working in that vein for forty or fifty years, his routines have gotten very stale by now.

Plus, it's hard to tell where some routine comes from. Robin Williams might have sounded "southern" in some of his characters, but he'd be imitating Jonathan Winters, who might have sounded Southern, but might just have been imitating rural folks he knew growing up in the Midwest.

Reading this thread, you'd get the impression the Civil War was fought because of the personal insecurity of the Southerns. The war was fought more substantive reasons than hurt feelings.

I'd agree. The secessionists were quite confident about what they were doing. The inferiority complex comes from the long decades of poverty after the war.

What's striking now is how many people want to go on viewing themselves as poor victims while they aren't very forbearing of other people who might make similar claims. I guess that's human nature -- something you find in everybody-- but recognizing that people who complain about being looked down on also look down on others might be a step in the right direction.

Yes, and for some reason, the Brits don't understand why the Scots and Irish still hate them deep down.

Someone on an earlier thread compared the banning of the Rebel flag to the banning of the tartan or bagpipes after Culloden in 1745. To a Southerner, the Rebel flag represents a culture, much like that of Scots or Irish culture. To a Yank, it represents slavery, as that is what they have been inculcated to believe, but to a Southerner, it represents their heritage. It is the collective experience of "being Southern" that Yanks just don't understand, and they never will. Even when they move down to the South and have learned to translate the accent and learned to enjoy the food and learned what type of iced tea to order (and what not to order), and they think they have managed to blend in, they are and always will be outsiders, even if they don't realize it. And every time they see that flag and think, "I still don't get it," that outsider status is just highlighted.

I had the experience of growing up in the South with the feeling that I had a foot on each side of the fence. My father's people have been in the South since the Jamestown colony. My mother's family were newer European immigrants to the northern states of the mid-to-late 1800s. However, one branch of her family does go back to a Union Cavalry officer who was shot from his horse and killed during the Civil War. (I did not know this growing up; didn't learn it until adulthood.) But I always felt as if my Southern cousins didn't quite know what to make of me. I always felt like an outsider, and now that I am in the West, I feel like an outsider here as well because of the animosity I have witnessed regarding Southerners. (I also came to the startling conclusion that I preferred Southern men over any other.)

But growing up there, I hated that flag...I used to stick my nose up in the air at the sight of it. I realized later that it served to underline my outsider status, even though, truthfully, I was a half-breed—half-Yank and half-redneck. (LOL...my mother would blanche if she heard me say that!) I understand things much better now after doing about two decades of research on the South and reflecting on my experiences there. I still dream about it sometimes. The fireflies. The thunderstorms. The heat. The sound of the quiet when walking through my grandfather's tobacco fields. The taste of cold, homemade peach ice cream. Finding kittens in the packhouse. Seeing the humidity settled low over the fields at dawn, so thick that you couldn't see the horses but could hear them whuffling through the grass like ghosts. Sitting on some cute guy's tailgate and drinking beer next to a bonfire out in the middle of a fallow field. Knowing that everyone within 15 miles knew exactly who you were and all about your business (even though that annoyed the heck out of me when I lived there).

It is different there, and Northerners will never crack the code, which I think simply pisses them of because they have to know everything.

Southerners like to be left alone. It makes the “movers and shakers” crazy that a whole region of the USA just doesn’t give a rats ass about them, are not impressed. It drive them crazy.

Absolutely. The “not impressed” thing is definitely a thorn in the side. My brother married a girl from New York who is so obnoxious about being a know-it-all that most of the family avoids her. She talks over people, she’s smug and arrogant...she’s just flat-out rude. (My father calls her “The Expert.”) She thinks she has impressed all of the Southern “hicks” with her liberal politics and doesn’t quite seem to tune into the fact that Southerners are too polite to tell her to go to hell. (My aunt: “Oh really? Well ain’t that somethin’?” translation: “Oh stick it up your tailpipe, lady.”) She knows something is “off,” but can’t seem to pinpoint it because everyone is so nice to her.