4 ms·

I moved when Obama was president. I sincerely believed that we were in a post racial world. Imagine my surprise in seeing people proudly flying confederate flag

by pm90 8mo ago

I moved when Obama was president. I sincerely believed that we were in a post racial world. Imagine my surprise in seeing people proudly flying confederate flags in Austin! I am still hopeful. While that flag was considered “ok” then, it no longer is anymore, and I rarely see it in the urban areas.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
SlightlyLeftPad 8mo ago
Flying confederate flags while Obama was president was considered “ok?”
- ProllyInfamous 8mo ago
  It still is in Trenton, Georgia (whose city flag is the former Georgia Confederate flag). Weird driving through that part of the world...
- rayiner 8mo ago
  According to polling, yes: https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/02/politics/confederate-flag-poll-racism-southern-pride https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/02/politics/confederate-flag-pol.... For people who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s in the south, it was a generic symbol of rebellion or regional rivalry. Remember, Dukes of Hazzard, which aired in the 1980s, was a liberal show about southern boys fighting corrupt politicians and greedy businessmen. Now you can say “hey, maybe you shouldn’t have picked that particular flag as a symbol to mean ‘fuck the Patriots.’” That was the result of propaganda by Lost Causers in the early 1990s. But that doesn’t change the fact that the symbol was repurposed over a long time period and generations grew up associating it with ideas that were quite different from what it originally represented.
  - ahazred8ta 8mo ago
    The "Young Patriots" in the 60s were a white far-left anticapitalist antiracist group, part of the Black Panthers' Rainbow Coalition. They flew the confederate flag. The Panthers were okay with it, go figure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Patriots_Organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Patriots_Organization
    - znpy 8mo ago
      Maybe the Panthers were smart enough to accept the help without bothering about the flag.
  - SlightlyLeftPad 8mo ago
    I will accept being wrong. The more you know…
  - dctoedt 8mo ago
    > For people who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s in the south, it was a generic symbol of rebellion or regional rivalry. Remember, Dukes of Hazzard, which aired in the 1980s .... For people who grew up in the south in the 1960s (me, mostly), the Confederate battle flag was indisputably and unambiguously a symbol of white supremacy and keeping "the coloreds" in their supposedly-proper place. I really don't think it changed that much in the 1980s and 1990s.
    - rayiner 8mo ago
      I’m talking about a completely different generation that grew up decades later. Dukes of Hazzard was not a white supremacist TV show. It was a top rated prime-time show on CBS. You can’t take people’s use of symbols out of the context in which they use them. I once use the phrase “atomic bomb of patent law” half a dozen times in a brief to describe inequitable conduct doctrine. It’s a quote from a line of federal circuit cases. Co-counsel from Tokyo sent us a polite email asking if we can reduce the number of times we say “atomic bomb” out of consideration for the Japanese company that would be co-signing the brief. The Federal Circuit obviously didn’t mean to suggest that inequitable conduct findings vaporize entire patent families the way the atomic bomb vaporized hundreds of thousands of Japanese families—even though that’s the only thing atomic bombs have ever been used for.
      - dctoedt 8mo ago
        > You can’t take people’s use of symbols out of the context in which they use them. So: What a symbol means to the writer (or speaker) is supposedly more important than what the symbol means to readers — who (according to the writer) must accommodate themselves to the writer's mindset instead of vice versa. This sender-oriented approach is in contrast to the writer's seeking to serve his readers — and the writer's intended message — by using the readers' language, if you will. (I'm curious whether you've found the sender-oriented approach to work when writing a legal brief for a court or agency — in our joint line of work, the received wisdom is that it's decidedly suboptimal.)
rayiner 8mo ago
> I sincerely believed that we were in a post racial world. I grew up in a post-racial world as a "brown" immigrant in a deep red Virginia county in the 1990s. My daughter, meanwhile, developed a strong "brown" identity from her teachers in our deep blue state. I don't blame Obama for it. But there was a definite shift in thinking during his administration where the distinct politics of black democrats--which is highly focused on racial identity for obvious reasons--became generalized to the hispanics and Asians that democrats sought to court. It was a couple of years into the Obama administration that someone called me a “person of color” for the first time, as if you can properly group people together based on skin color.
- benterix 8mo ago
  > highly focused on racial identity for obvious reasons This is something I get but it always buffles me. Shouldn't it be the opposite? Shouldn't they, in their own interests, and the interest of groups they aspire to represent, attempt to unite people above skin-color differences and emphasize our human aspect?
  - locopati 8mo ago
    In order to bring people together, it's necessary to acknowledge the harms that have been caused. That is part of repair and trust building. Germany had war crimes trials. South Africa had truth & reconciliation. The US can't paper over the ways in which marginalized populations have been harmed, especially since large parts of the country either don't believe harm has been caused or activity endeavor to perpetuate that harm.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - rayiner 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - locopati 8mo ago
lern_too_spel 8mo ago
Texas celebrates Confederate Heroes Day as a state holiday on January 19 each year. This occasionally coincides with the third Monday of January on which MLK Jr. Day is celebrated as a national holiday. Democrats in the Texas legislature have repeatedly tried to remove or rename the holiday, but these attempts have so far failed to get out of committee. Some people take umbrage at being lumped into a large heterogenous group called People of Color. I can assure you that the people who celebrate Confederate "Heroes" have no issue with lumping all of those people into a group of Colored People. That is where the grouping originated.
zappb 8mo ago
I thought we might have finally reached enlightenment after WWII, but the world only stopped hating Jews for a few years before reverting to the norm. This long arc of justice is on the order of centuries, not years.

by pm90 8mo ago

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

SlightlyLeftPad 8mo ago

Flying confederate flags while Obama was president was considered “ok?”

ProllyInfamous 8mo ago
It still is in Trenton, Georgia (whose city flag is the former Georgia Confederate flag). Weird driving through that part of the world...
rayiner 8mo ago
According to polling, yes: https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/02/politics/confederate-flag-poll-racism-southern-pride https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/02/politics/confederate-flag-pol.... For people who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s in the south, it was a generic symbol of rebellion or regional rivalry. Remember, Dukes of Hazzard, which aired in the 1980s, was a liberal show about southern boys fighting corrupt politicians and greedy businessmen. Now you can say “hey, maybe you shouldn’t have picked that particular flag as a symbol to mean ‘fuck the Patriots.’” That was the result of propaganda by Lost Causers in the early 1990s. But that doesn’t change the fact that the symbol was repurposed over a long time period and generations grew up associating it with ideas that were quite different from what it originally represented.
- ahazred8ta 8mo ago
  The "Young Patriots" in the 60s were a white far-left anticapitalist antiracist group, part of the Black Panthers' Rainbow Coalition. They flew the confederate flag. The Panthers were okay with it, go figure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Patriots_Organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Patriots_Organization
  - znpy 8mo ago
    Maybe the Panthers were smart enough to accept the help without bothering about the flag.
- SlightlyLeftPad 8mo ago
  I will accept being wrong. The more you know…
- dctoedt 8mo ago
  > For people who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s in the south, it was a generic symbol of rebellion or regional rivalry. Remember, Dukes of Hazzard, which aired in the 1980s .... For people who grew up in the south in the 1960s (me, mostly), the Confederate battle flag was indisputably and unambiguously a symbol of white supremacy and keeping "the coloreds" in their supposedly-proper place. I really don't think it changed that much in the 1980s and 1990s.
  - rayiner 8mo ago
    I’m talking about a completely different generation that grew up decades later. Dukes of Hazzard was not a white supremacist TV show. It was a top rated prime-time show on CBS. You can’t take people’s use of symbols out of the context in which they use them. I once use the phrase “atomic bomb of patent law” half a dozen times in a brief to describe inequitable conduct doctrine. It’s a quote from a line of federal circuit cases. Co-counsel from Tokyo sent us a polite email asking if we can reduce the number of times we say “atomic bomb” out of consideration for the Japanese company that would be co-signing the brief. The Federal Circuit obviously didn’t mean to suggest that inequitable conduct findings vaporize entire patent families the way the atomic bomb vaporized hundreds of thousands of Japanese families—even though that’s the only thing atomic bombs have ever been used for.
    - dctoedt 8mo ago
      > You can’t take people’s use of symbols out of the context in which they use them. So: What a symbol means to the writer (or speaker) is supposedly more important than what the symbol means to readers — who (according to the writer) must accommodate themselves to the writer's mindset instead of vice versa. This sender-oriented approach is in contrast to the writer's seeking to serve his readers — and the writer's intended message — by using the readers' language, if you will. (I'm curious whether you've found the sender-oriented approach to work when writing a legal brief for a court or agency — in our joint line of work, the received wisdom is that it's decidedly suboptimal.)

rayiner 8mo ago

> I sincerely believed that we were in a post racial world. I grew up in a post-racial world as a "brown" immigrant in a deep red Virginia county in the 1990s. My daughter, meanwhile, developed a strong "brown" identity from her teachers in our deep blue state. I don't blame Obama for it. But there was a definite shift in thinking during his administration where the distinct politics of black democrats--which is highly focused on racial identity for obvious reasons--became generalized to the hispanics and Asians that democrats sought to court. It was a couple of years into the Obama administration that someone called me a “person of color” for the first time, as if you can properly group people together based on skin color.

benterix 8mo ago
> highly focused on racial identity for obvious reasons This is something I get but it always buffles me. Shouldn't it be the opposite? Shouldn't they, in their own interests, and the interest of groups they aspire to represent, attempt to unite people above skin-color differences and emphasize our human aspect?
- locopati 8mo ago
  In order to bring people together, it's necessary to acknowledge the harms that have been caused. That is part of repair and trust building. Germany had war crimes trials. South Africa had truth & reconciliation. The US can't paper over the ways in which marginalized populations have been harmed, especially since large parts of the country either don't believe harm has been caused or activity endeavor to perpetuate that harm.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - locopati 8mo ago

lern_too_spel 8mo ago

Texas celebrates Confederate Heroes Day as a state holiday on January 19 each year. This occasionally coincides with the third Monday of January on which MLK Jr. Day is celebrated as a national holiday. Democrats in the Texas legislature have repeatedly tried to remove or rename the holiday, but these attempts have so far failed to get out of committee. Some people take umbrage at being lumped into a large heterogenous group called People of Color. I can assure you that the people who celebrate Confederate "Heroes" have no issue with lumping all of those people into a group of Colored People. That is where the grouping originated.

zappb 8mo ago

I thought we might have finally reached enlightenment after WWII, but the world only stopped hating Jews for a few years before reverting to the norm. This long arc of justice is on the order of centuries, not years.