In many ways, when the conversation about banning the Confederate flag came up I was indifferent.

Being black in America and being told “___ is racist” is a dime-a-dozen thing. So many things are honestly racist and yet, throughout my childhood and youth, I have had a hard time actually placing any feeling of particular animosity or distrust to the Confederate flag itself.

It was a non-factor to me, as though living in the South had immunized me against it, but as I gained more knowledge I learned that the Confederate flag can symbolize heritage and that heritage is the South fighting to preserve the right to own black people and white supremacy.

The Confederate flag has many nicknames like “rebel flag,” “Southern cross” or “Dixie Flag.” It’s sometimes incorrectly called the “stars and bars” – which is only on the first Confederate flag.

There are still people who want to say that the Confederate flag isn’t a racial thing, because they believe slavery was not a central point of the Civil War. But in South Carolina, Georgia,  Mississippi and Texas, documents of secession all cite threats to slavery as reasons for leaving the United States. According to the Declaration of Causes of Seceding States (http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~ras2777/amgov/secession.htm), even our lovely state went as far to say that “A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

Now let’s fast forward to the 1940s when the Dixiecrats adopted the Confederate flag as their symbol. The Dixiecrats were a short-lived segregationist political party that wanted to retain Jim Crow laws. This summer I read “A Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem” by John M. Coski. Coski stated that the Confederate flag was rarely used as a symbol before 1948 at the University of Mississippi, but after the students Truman’s civil rights proposal the university began to incorporate the symbol with the school.  

Also it was the desperate need to preserve segregation in 1956 that made Georgia add the Confederate flag to their state flag. But in 2001, they decided to change it because of the racist notion it gave and let’s not forget about the Ku Klux Klan. The biggest white supremacist group in America waves that flag likes there is no tomorrow.

More recently, on June 17, 2015, a white supremacist shot and killed nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. According to reports published on cnn.com, the gunman later confessed to committing the shooting in hopes of igniting a race war.

All of these obvious racist groups have the Confederate flags as their symbol, because the flag represents hate, not heritage. According to an article in The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/23/the-confederacys-pathetic-case-of-flag-envy/), even the flag’s designer,  William T. Thompson, called it “The white man’s flag.”

The Confederate flag can stand for a lot of people’s heritage, but do not try to act as if the heritage behind that flag is not terrible because that’s just playing dumb.