Confederate Flag Should Not Be Banned Essay

The confederate flag should not be banned because it’s not about people being racist, it’s about the slavery and our hairitage. The confederate flag has been around since the civil war. The confederate flag has been around for about 150 years. They are taking the confederate flag down from the battle ground and tv shows and now trying to ban it from school. They should not ban it because it goes way back. Just because the guy shot 9 black people, it should be banned. The confederate flag is a part of our hairitage, the civil war, and slavery.

If you a confederate flag some people says it the hate that black and white have for each other and that’s not true at all. Let’s say that the black people started tothe kill white people and the black’s person take a picture, what a black panther that would be called hate and racism to it’s just not the rebel flag their is other flags out the that can be use as hate and racism to it just not the rebel flag. 70% of black people say that they are treated less fairly by white police. They are even takeing the rebel flag off of the top of the state house too. A hundred fifty years after the end of the Civil War, the Confederacy is on the run.

Statues of Jefferson Davis are under fire in Kentucky, so is the flag at Veterans Memorial Park in Wichita. Parents want to replace the Vestavia Hills Rebel Mascot near Birmingham. Tennessee may take down the bust of confederate general and KKK leader Nathan Bedford Forrest. It’s as if the end of the Civil War was front-and-center all over again. The Confederate battle flag is most at risk. The flag was designed after the outbreak of the war by William Porcher Miles, the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, who aggressively supported slavery. The significance was clear: this means war.

That war began in Miles own state hen South Carolina seceded over the president’s opposition to slavery. Then 620,000 Americans died in the four bloodiest years of U. S. history. The Confederacy lost, but its battle flag endured as a symbol for the KKK, white supremacists, Dixiecrat opponents of civil rights like the late South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, and people buying into the effort to rebrand it as a symbol of southern pride and Confederate ancestry. The latest battle under the battle flag also began in South Carolina when Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, allegedly killed nine people during Bible study at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Even as politicians in the state opened the door to removing the flag from the Capitol in response, it survived long enough to fly nearby as the body of the church’s pastor and a state senator, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, lay in public view in the South Carolina State House. The significance of flying this flag or displaying other Confederate symbolism is not about the Civil War. It’s about how blacks and whites feel about each other today, whether respect has triumphed over racism, whether modern evils like racial profiling, inequality or segregation should remain in our lives.

This flag would wave wherever it wants, if the feeling in the air was about unity. It wouldn’t matter, we wouldn’t care. But there is much to care about because our country is raw with racial tensions and inequities. The Pentagon just can’t let go. In the wake of the Charleston Massacre, Amazon and Walmart have announced that they will no longer sell Confederate flag merchandise. Ebay says it will stop offering Confederate items for electronic auction. The Republican governor of Mississippi calls his state flag, which includes the Stars and Bars in the top left corner, “a point of offense that needs to be removed.

Even Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the majority leader of the U. S. Senate, agrees that a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in his state’s capitol building belongs in a museum. Yet the Department of Defense says it isn’t even “reviewing” the possibility of a ban on the flag, deciding instead to leave any such move to the various service branches, while military bases named after Confederate officers will remain so. One factor in this decision: the South provides more than 40% of all military recruits, many of them white; only 15% are from the Northeast.

Filling the ranks isn’t, however, the only reason for the military’s refusal to act. Over the last few weeks, there has been near unanimous agreement among liberal and mainstream commentators that the Confederate flag represents “hate, not her eritage. ” The flag’s current presence in American culture is ubiquitous. It adorns license plates, bumper stickers, mugs, bodies (via tattoos) and even baby diapers. The flag’s popularity is normally traced back to the post-World War II reaction of the Dixiecrat South to the Civil Rights Movement.

South Carolina, for instance, raised the Stars and Bars over its state house in 1961 as part, columnist Eugene Robinson said on “Meet the Press,” of its “massive resistance to racial desegregation. ” All true. But like many discussions of American conservativism, this account misses the role endless war played in sustaining domestic racism. Starting around 1898, well before it became an icon of redneck backlash, the Confederate Battle Flag served for half a century as an important pennant in the expanding American empire and a symbol of national unification, not polarization.

It was a reconciled Army that moved out into the world after the Civil War, an unstoppable combination of Northern law (bureaucratic command and control, industrial might, and technology) and Southern spirit (an “exaltation of military ideals and virtues,” including valor, duty, and honor). Both law and spirit had their dark sides leading to horrors committed due either to the very nature of the American empire—the genocide of Native Americans, for example, or the war in Southeast Asia -or to the particular passions of some of its soldiers. And both law and spirit had their own flags.