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A flag is a piece of communication. If it's not communicating the message that you want it to, the problem isn't the fact that audience misunderstood, it's that you have chosen the wrong symbol to communicate.
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That's right. If I speak some foreign language where the phrase "White Supremacy" means "Love and rainbows," and I put a "White Supremacy" sign in front of my house in an English-speaking country, I have nothing to complain about when people think I'm advocating racial hatred. But that's not what I meant! To me, it means love and rainbows! Well, so what? My neighbors speak English, they can read the sign, and those words mean something to them. If I don't want people to think I'm a white supremacist, I shouldn't say so in their local language. "White Supremacy" can still have a totally different meaning to me in my own home.
The fact is, a lot of people in this country, for very good reason, see words on that flag along the lines of "White Supremacy" or even "Die N***** Die." That's because it has been used to communicate those messages to tremendous effect for decades. If that's not the message you want to express,
just use a different Confederate flag.
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Do people in the North honestly believe that when people in the South fly the rebel flag, they're doing so because they're racist/pleased with the results of slavery/trying to reverse the outcome of the Civil War? Honest question.
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Honest answer: I believe that those who are not racist are either: 1. ignorant of the Southern history they supposedly honor, or 2. they know that the flag was used to terrorize fellow Americans, but they choose not to think about whether that part of its history has any relevance today.
Here's my honest question: is there any non-racist message that this flag expresses that cannot be expressed using a different Confederate flag? Why don't people use the other ones instead?
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