What to Do When Your Heritage is Hateful

If one pays attention to the old Confederate battle flag (and since the horrific shooting rampage in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015, it’s been hard not to notice), one will eventually see it paired on bumper stickers and T-shirts with the words “Heritage, Not Hate.” This combination is a way for some white folks—often Southern, but not always—to explain their affinity for the Stars-and-Bars, not necessarily as a vestige of antebellum or Jim-Crow-era racism but as a way of celebrating redneck culture, “Southern-ness,” and/or nonconformity. While there’s nothing wrong with people celebrating what they interpret as their tradition, inheritance, or homeland, what does one do when that heritage is less than fully inclusive, even antagonistic toward another group? In a National Public Radio piece aired on July 14, 2015, Gene Demby describe the “awkward mental gymnastics” involved in certain cultural preferences. A person’s musical tastes might run toward gangsta rap or outlaw country, for example, both of which can be misogynistic and reactionary, but the listener might paradoxically consider himself to be a supporter of women’s rights. Such inherent contradiction might seem hypocritical to some, but there is a certain elasticity of symbols, as cyphers meaning different things to different people. For some, the Confederate flag is a sign of racial Neanderthalism, the trademark of unreconstructed segregationists and rednecks. For others, the flag is a happy reminder of Tom Petty’s 1985 “Southern Accents” tour. Who is correct? Whose interpretation wins? Such questions are not particular to Southern history or Confederate heritage. If the past is what happened, and history consists of selective attempts to describe what happened, then heritage, as J. E. Tunbridge and Gregory John Ashworth have argued, is a contemporary product shaped from history. Because it draws boundaries (between ours and theirs, mine and yours), all heritage is “dissonant,” open to discord and disagreements; as such it is never fully inclusive or representative of all people. In light of the dissonance of heritage, it is possible that the Confederate flag is both a symbol of white supremacy and a relatively benign badge of regional and cultural pride. Perhaps we can acknowledge that not everyone who slaps a Confederate flag sticker on his truck or listens to Lynyrd Skynyrd is a racist, no more than we would argue that everyone who wears a hoodie or listens to 50 Cent is a thug. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll released in July 2015 found Americans evenly divided: 42 percent of respondents