It only took 150 years since the Civil War ended and nine innocent people losing their lives in a church shooting for South Carolina to consider taking the Confederate flag down.
As of Wednesday, the House of Representatives in South Carolina agreed to meet to take a vote, but as of now, no vote has been taken. Because the flag is so controversial, the House may have an issue reaching the two-thirds majority it needs to take it down.
While the decision to remove the flag comes at a good time, I can only question why the flag is still flying in the first place. I understand the argument about the history behind the flag, and the stars and bars were not always supposed to be the symbol for racism. The meanings behind symbols change, though.
The Civil War started over the North taking away the South’s ability to own slaves, among other issues. The support for slavery was so strong in the South that states seceded from the Union in the North to become the Confederacy in order to continue the slave trade. For all we know, had the South won, we still might be a slave-holding country.
The Confederacy wanted slavery so much, to save it they literally started a war with half the country made up of the same people they fought side by side with less than 100 years prior to gain independence. And they used the current Confederate flag we know today as their representative symbol.
It was then that the flag ceased to represent the South but became the symbol for the pro-slavery movement.
Even after the war was over, white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, started using the flag to instill violence and fear, a practice still in place today as we saw with Dylann Roof, the young man who killed nine churchgoers in Charleston. And while states claimed they flew the flag in order to commemorate the lives lost in the war, the flag still flies today, even with the stigma of hate that it now represents attached to it.
The way I see the flag has nothing to do with politics. The flag in my eyes comes down to meaning. It became the representation of racism, and 150 years after the Civil War, the stigma is still very real.
While it does represent pride in the South, the overwhelming meaning that it came to be known for is not worth the history of the flag. That is what the American flag is for — to represent a unified nation, not the Union and the Confederacy. Why the flag flies next to state Capitol building in any active American state boggles my mind. South Carolina is living in the past, and the government’s support for the flag over the past century proves that.
South Carolina is like your racist grandpa in a way — it ceases to get with the times, no matter how many people it offends by flying that Confederate flag over its house.
Riley Katz is 20-year-old mass communication junior from New Orleans. You can reach him on Twitter @rkatz94.