When I was growing up I had no idea there was any significant racial component to it at all. I mean, I knew the Civil War was largely waged over slavery and I knew that was the Confederate flag, but slavery was so obviously way back in history and so obviously wrong that it seemed irrelevant. I saw the Confederate flag in the Dukes of Hazzard and I knew Lynyrd Skynyrd (sp?) waved it around and I thought of it purely as a symbol of southern pride. In roughly the same way that Scotsmen proudly fly the St. Andrews cross even though they're part of the UK. Most of them don't want to secede, but they're still proud of being Scots.
But eventually I learned about lynching and the KKK and I figured out that that flag carries a whole different meaning for black people. And for me, that's the point where it started being an issue of courtesy -- why would anybody want to display a flag that made his neighbors think about hatred and death? It's hard for me to imagine anyone being so married to his southern-first identity that he'd be willing to say FU to 10-20 percent of the people he sees around him. As I said on the mothership, we're supposed to have better manners than that down here.
