COMADRE USA

Growing up with the Rebel Flag

 

By Juana Bimba

People say that if Germans don't display swastikas over their public buildings, US Southerners shouldn't fly Confederate Flags over theirs. They're both reminders of shameful pasts, right?

But Hitler never got to cloak his infamy in rosy myths; an avalanche of appalling media images and firsthand horror stories have prevented it, as has the historical proximity of the event.

Also, Nazis never benefited from the ministrations of  beloved pop culture apologists, like fiction writers and movie stars.

Views on antebellum culture had begun to transform with this nation's

first efforts to heal by honoring war veterans from both sides at early 20th century parades. Then along came "Gone with the Wind", and historical revisionism dug in for good.

Subsequent media depictions of the Confederacy were mostly sympathetic.  The Antebellum South became a happy memory-land of singing darkies and the kindly whites who "took care" of them. The Confederate struggle morphed in memory, from a dogged defense of the indefensible to a noble fight against invading Yankee barbarians. 

For at least a century, white Southerners were left to cherish these fantasies   while the rest of the country looked away, or joined in. The white South's celebration of its antebellum history was considered a harmless quirk. Racism? Slavery? Those pages conveniently flapped loose from the main script to become as  anomalies, unrelated to the True Glories of Dixie's Past.

As the child of Cuban exiles, I landed in 1960's Miami amid all these historical delusions.  Florida, though it dissembles, is still very much The South, in a bone-deep way that you'd miss if you didn't know any better. 

Florida schools were segregated back then, so they housed no black sensibilities and were free to celebrate their antebellum heritage. One local learning institution named itself after Robert E. Lee, while another, the South Dade

Rebels, draped its marching band in Confederate uniforms. In my public high school, boys carried Confederate flags to football games and waved them whenever our side scored. 

For us, that flag was just a symbol of battle, too bad it's been hijacked by the lunatic fringe. Redneck atrocities only perpetuate the resentment that most American blacks feel towards just about everyone else today.

 However, back in the 60's, we Cubans were oblivious to any considerations of prejudice or bigotry. We even ignored the subtle fumes of de apartheid that enveloped us in high school, because we believed they were coming from us, and not from the ones who were excluding us.

Tacitly kept from Anglo American fraternities and sororities, we created our own, or joined honor societies and academic clubs. We flocked together in hallways, classrooms, games, sock hops and the cafeteria. We only dated each other. We had no "American" friends, because acceptance by the larger group 

would mean suppressing our ethnic ways.

 And we thought Anglos (or "whites" ) were boring. 

The more sinister racial implications of Southern history also eluded us, since we considered ourselves white. So I grew up with the idea of  Former Confederate Glory as a normal ingredient of the Zeitgeist, part and parcel of my adopted background as an American.

And when I moved up North as an adult, I was startled to discover how deeply the Southern perspective had been etched into my soul, and that I was now on the "other" side of an existing cultural and historical divide. Who knew that a cemetery in rural Vermont could hold nothing but Union Soldiers? That a historic hotel in upstate New York would proudly display Union relics and daguerreotypes? That anyone could celebrate the same people who had victimized poor antebellum Southerners? 

It took some getting used to.

I've since gotten over those qualms; I know that white Southerners probably don't like Cubans any better than they do Blacks. But I had to wince at the recent outpour of media vitriol against the South, at the hate one segment of the country was directing towards another. To me, that's like stomping on a corpse, or disparaging American war dead.  It's compounding past wrongs.

And wrong as it was, they sincerely believed in their wretched cause and supported it against overwhelming odds, hence, their insane pride in defeat. I think it’s sad.

Yes, slavery was a major disaster and surely this entire country would have been much, much better off without it and all of its unfortunate ramifications. Just think: we could be Canada! (Kidding.) But no, we're rabid Americans, bent on redressing historical wrongs with violence. On both sides. 

It occurs to me that while we're at it, we could also start trashing the hayseeds who died at  the Alamo, trying to defend Texans' right to lynch Mexicans and steal their land. Instead, we celebrate them, which I’ve always found appalling as a Hispanic. And I’m sure that must be offensive to other Latinos (now the largest US minority, BTW) as well.

So why isn't anyone mentioning THAT?