Recently the community where I live has been embroiled in a controversy surrounding a high school student displaying a Confederate flag decal in the window of his truck. On a story about this conflict, a Minneapolis Star Tribune reported stated, “The Confederate flag, seen by many as a racist symbol, is defended by others as an icon of Southern culture and history.” As a native Virginian with family still there, including my 91 year old mother, I take offense at such a misguided statement. The only Southerners who believe the Confederate flag is anything other than a symbol of racism are those who still believe the south was right in fighting a war to maintain ownership of slaves. What is more, that this is an issue here in Minnesota is an example of how bereft we Americans are in knowing our own history. The Confederate flag is no more a Southern flag than it is an American flag. The most that can and ought to be said about it is that reminds all of us of a shameful period in our national history when we came close to undoing this great experiment in democracy.

To the student and those who want to defend his right to do as he pleases, I say this. Unless you grew up in the south, unless you are old enough to have experienced racial segregation, discrimination, and intimidation, and unless you participated in the years of struggle to right these wrongs, anything you say about the Confederate flag is at best uninformed conjecture and at worse a display of racial insensitivity. Slavery and the hundred years of Southern racism that followed it form a necessary historical context for understanding what the Confederate flag truly symbolizes. You needed to have seen “Whites Only” signs hanging in store windows to know what it means. You had to watch city workers drain the public swimming pools and fill them with concrete when there was an attempt to integrate them to know what it means. You had to hear your friends, family members, church members, and politicians use racial epithets with ease and frequency to know what it means. You had to see the humiliation in the face of adult black men when white kids called them “boy” to know what it means.

If you are one who believes this issue is about first amendment rights, you simply do not grasp the weight of history attached to it. If you think it is an innocent matter of wanting to play the “Dukes of Hazard, redneck-type thing,” you are associating fantasy with reality. The history you are ignoring is my history. My Virginia ancestors were among those who fought to defend the morally indefensible practice of slave trade. Displaying that awful Confederate flag in any form is to do the same thing. Let’s be clear. That flag doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the South and no one else. And millions of us who are proud of our heritage nonetheless see it for what it is - a flag of shame.