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

[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.