Opinion: Look away, Dixie Land
Most of what needs to be said about “Accidental Racist,” the new song by the unexpected and inexplicable duo, Brad Paisley and LL Cool J, has already been said. The now-infamous song is a cute attempt to soothe the relationship between African Americans and whites, particularly white southerners. Naturally, the song only serves to dig itself further into the hole and make itself adorably, horribly racist.The main premise of the song is that Brad Paisley wishes he could live in a world in which wearing a Confederate flag t-shirt offends no one and only shows his Southern pride. It seems prudent to mention Brad Paisley is from West Virginia, a state that was created for the express purpose of not being part of the Confederacy or flying the flag that Paisley apparently wants to wear on his body. I myself am from Virginia, which technically makes me a southerner. I say technically because I’m from Northern Virginia; basically the Northern most edge of the Confederacy.But as a technical Southerner, I will say this about the Confederate flag: It’s time to let it go.I have no problem expressing southern pride, but there’s a way to do it right and a way to do it wrong, and the Confederate flag is the wrong way. For one thing, the flag we all call the Confederate flag is not the Confederate flag. It was the battle flag used by the Army of Northern Virginia. Ever seen this? Probably not, but that’s the national flag of the Confederate States of America.So if southern pride means celebrating a group of people who abandoned their country after being told they could no longer own human beings, that’s the flag to use.To do so, however, would be to ignore another important fact about the Confederacy. The whole point of seceding was so that states would have more individual freedom and identity and not be subject to the control of a central government. So why is the symbol of the Confederacy now a symbol of a central government? If we are going to show true southern pride, as the Confederates knew it, we’d all wear t-shirts with our state flags, like this. See? Nothing offensive about that, just a semi-naked woman killing an emperor with her foot.Clearly the evidence is stacked against the Confederate flag. It’s racist, either intentionally or accidentally, it’s not representative of the original ideals of the Confederacy and it’s also not the real Confederate flag. But besides these, there are deeper reasons to do away with it.The Civil War is perhaps the worst thing that has ever happened to America. It swallowed thousands of people, consumed entire cities, all in a battle for the nation’s soul. That is not something to be celebrated but rather respected and remembered somberly and a memorial of how thankful we should be that the stars and stripes continue to fly over the American South. There is much for southerners to be proud of. It’s the land that survived Reconstruction and the Depression, it’s the land of Mark Twain and sweet tea, country music and fried chicken and a resilience and intangible identity with which no other part of the country can compare.If you can put all that on a flag, I’d fly it every day.
