Driving back from Branson, Missouri one summer day, I noticed a small confederate flag flying proudly in the wind. As an obviously non-white citizen of America, I was someshat concerned for my well-being.

I knew the probability of something actually happening was small, but as I realized we were stopping at the McDonald’s right by this piece of cloth, I was worried someone would stop us and yell. Fortunately, no one did. In fact, that may be the best service I’ve had in a McDonald’s. But of course, because of that flag, I rarely remember that. I just remember being repulsed.

Now, it’s important to realize I support freedom of expression and freedom of speech. I am protected, by Supreme Court ruling, to legally burn the American flag as a form of protest.

It is legal to fly other colors. Even if those colors are technically the same, just rearranged.

I would not burn the American flag because I know what that implies and the meaning behind it, but I wouldn’t fly the Confederate flag either because I know its history and am disgusted by what it represents. 

It is first and foremost a symbol of white supremacy. There is no getting around that fact. The creator of the flag, William Thompson explained the original design, with the white border, as needing a white flag “to maintain the heavenly ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race.” Though the flag most often seen today, the rebel flag, is without the white, it was adopted by the people who agreed with Thompson’s original statement; they just didn’t like the fact that white flags also meant surrender.

The rebel flag actually died down in popularity after the Civil War, as the losing side’s memorabilia usually does after wars, but it only regained its popularity when the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and white supremacist politicians, usually connected Dixiecrats, who used it as parts of their campaigns.

Its present popularity is not based in the “rich history of the South” but in the way it was used to grab power for white supremacists and how it was used by the KKK to terrorize African Americans, Jews, LGBTQA+, immigrants and Catholics.

Even if people did wave the rebel Confederate flag to brag on their history, why would anyone want to proudly regale a war lost that they waged against their own nation, or place themselves alongside an ideology that stands on the wrong side of history?