US people - is the confederate flag a symbol of racism?

[Duty]

I've been watching, again, Eastbound and Down, and the lead/hero has a confederate flag on his surfboard. I'm A brit so know jack in a way on this but...I'm struggling to enjoy the show now 'cos of this. Is there a way that the confederate flag can be interpreted as being something other than racist, in the mainstream, or, perchance, East Bound and Down is totally unacceptable racist shite?

[Anomalocaris]

I've been watching, again, Eastbound and Down, and the lead/hero has a confederate flag on his surfboard. I'm A brit so know jack in a way on this but...I'm struggling to enjoy the show now 'cos of this. Is there a way that the confederate flag can be inferred as something other than ruthless, in the mainstream, or, perchance, East Bound and Down is totally unacceptable?

The nazi flag can also be inferred as something other than ruthless, in the mainstream, or, perchance, East Bound and Down is totally unacceptable.    The question is do those other somethings outweigh what they primarily symbolize.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I've been watching, again, Eastbound and Down, and the lead/hero has a confederate flag on his surfboard. I'm A brit so know jack in a way on this but...I'm struggling to enjoy the show now 'cos of this. Is there a way that the confederate flag can be interpreted as being something other than racist, in the mainstream, or, perchance, East Bound and Down is totally unacceptable racist shite?

Symbols mean what you put into them, but - as Anom said - you have to weigh the baggage of their primary association against different interpretations. 

Sort of like claiming the swastika is an ancient Scandinavian good luck symbol doesn’t do a helluva a lot to justify wearing it.

Boru

[onlinebiker]

It's amazing how tight of a wad some people can wind up their panties.

.....

I rode British motorcycles for many years. Consequently I had a Union Jack hanging in my garage. (Still do).

I had one particularly clueless SJW liberal twat show up at one of our summer parties - and she seen the flag in the garage - who began berating me for my "display of hatred, white supremacy and Southern stupidity"....


It took me a bit to figure out what the fuck was wrong with her.

[Rev. Rye]

It's certainly possible for people to give the Confederate flag a meaning other than "we believe black people should be slaves so bad that we're willing to commit armed insurrection for it." Case in point, I recently re-watched Cry-Baby, and while it was still a good movie, there was one strange thing that kind of bugged me about it this time around. See if you can spot it:



To the eyes of 2020, to see the stage of the heroes' hangout emblazoned with a confederate flag is all very "what the Hell, John Waters?" Though given that this is the same guy who brought the world Pink Flamingos, it's nowhere near the most fucked up thing in his filmography. And, indeed, some (but not all) reviewers picked up on the strangeness of it when it came out 30 years ago. And it's even more strange considering that, if anything, the Drapes are easily the more racially tolerant of the two factions in this film, what with them embracing black music (the rockabilly that pretty explicitly came about because white people saw what black R&B artists were doing and wanted to do it themselves), and their being friendly to the one black character in the film (to be fair, Baltimore was still legally segregated in 1953, when the film was set). It started to make sense when I realised that it's likely that, at that time, the fact that it was so racially charged probably didn't even register to the Ricketteses. History was frequently whitewashed, and the Confederates became Rebels, and the reason was... umm... states' rights...? And by the time it got to them, it stopped being simple evasions and became just established fact (at least as far as they knew it, and I doubt they'd spend much time looking deep into history on their own.)

And in the decades since, it became a Hell of a lot harder to give these alternate meanings their old currency, especially as the history became clearer, the injustices that black people suffered then and now became more obvious, and, eventually, it became a hot potato nobody wanted to hold but bigots and idiots who don't know better and probably wouldn't want to.

And the fact remains: symbols mean what a culture says they mean. That's why they're symbols. And if you want to change the meaning of something, well, good luck, because unless you have the backing of increasingly larger cultural forces, it ain't gonna work.

Also, about Eastbound and Down, the main character is supposed to be unlivable.

[brewer]

This one?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I go by whose flyin' what. Pretty easy to sort it out around here.

[Rev. Rye]

It's amazing how tight of a wad some people can wind up their panties.

.....

I rode British motorcycles for many years. Consequently I had a Union Jack hanging in my garage. (Still do).

I had one particularly clueless SJW liberal twat show up at one of our summer parties - and she seen the flag in the garage - who began berating me for my "display of hatred, white supremacy and Southern stupidity"....


It took me a bit to figure out what the fuck was wrong with her.

So, this idiot thought the Union Jack was the same as the Stars and Bars? Besides the colors, and the saltire design, they have nothing in common!

[onlinebiker]

It's amazing how tight of a wad some people can wind up their panties.

.....

I rode British motorcycles for many years. Consequently I had a Union Jack hanging in my garage. (Still do).

I had one particularly clueless SJW liberal twat show up at one of our summer parties - and she seen the flag in the garage - who began berating me for my "display of hatred, white supremacy and Southern stupidity"....


It took me a bit to figure out what the fuck was wrong with her.

So, this idiot thought the Union Jack was the same as the Stars and Bars? Besides the colors, and the saltire design, they have nothing in common!

There ya go...

Stupid people are a source of amazement...

[Ranjr]

When I was a kid, in the 60s and 70s, I viewed the battle flag as a symbol of the south.  I didn't think about slavery or racist connotations because slavery was in the past and civil rights were on the upward trend.  It was a symbol of good southern values, not the ugly ones.  When southern rock bands used the flag or Dukes of Hazzard painted it on a car, I didn't see hate.  When Skynyrd played Knebworth in 1976, Brits waved the rebel flag.  (Paul and Lynda were in the crowd.)  Of course, using the flag was MCA's idea, not the band's.  

That changed over the following decade, and now there's no viewing the flag as anything but a symbol of racism and hate, especially if it has Hank Jr.'s face on it.  Because I grew up in newly integrated Hope, Arkansas schools, making friends with whomever was nice and patient enough to put up with me, I thought race relations were advancing for the better and would continue to improve.  Boy, was I wrong, being a stupid kid notwithstanding.  I didn't know yankees were just as racist, sometimes more so, than southerners.  After all, yankees were the good guys in the war, right?