No Flag This Fourth

You won't find me with Old Glory. Instead, I'll be celebrating my return to the Old South and my own personal secession from the Empire.

I will fly no flag this Fourth of July but celebrate the South.

Taking such pride is rooted not in some imagined antebellum past with fancy clothes and Spanish moss but in something I love that lives in my bones.

I have spent many years elsewhere—Germany, England, the French Riviera. When I traveled, I took not so much Americanness but Southernness. I took my manners. Where a drunk from Syracuse might be all mouth in a bright sweatshirt and white shoes, I’d smile politely and give a nod—even in close quarters like the London Underground. I would greet people at a pub as if walking up to an old drugstore counter. I’d cook meals and make BBQ sauce for friends. I was consciously seceding from a stereotype (Americans abroad) while being myself.

This was not an affectation. It was my flag.

Speaking of flags, I don’t think sentiments for the Confederate Flag always and in every case represent racism or ignorance. Civil War buffs and southern diehards still carry their great granddaddy’s letters inked in blood and shame. Just as the descendants of slaves can be quick to blame people alive today for that terrible legacy, today’s white Southerners want desperately to believe that there is something more meaningful to their heritage than being the descendant of somebody with a whip.

So it’s complicated.

Yet people who cling to a flag aren’t trying hard enough. 

Flags are just so much shorthand. People from the South have plenty of stories, symbols, and helpings of their culture to share. There is no need to resort to using that stained old standard. War and human suffering are not the only ways to define history and cultural significance.

For starters, what distinguishes Southerners is sweet tea and porch swings, bourbon, and better BBQ.

Lightning bugs make faery fire around old Piedmont oaks. You can hear pickers among ancient mountains, green with moss and rhododendrons till the vistas turn blue at the horizon.

Out on the coast, the smell of shrimp boils and grills fills the night after days of pulling in crab pots or fishing for flounder.

All of this is yours, Southerner. It’s better than any meaning ascribed to dyed cloth.

Your literature includes Faulkner, Hurston, Wolff, McCarthy, Welty, and O’Connor. 

You are friendlier than everybody else in the country, and the people who move nearby learn to be friendly, too. You have a dark side, of course, and a tendency to sweep things under the rug that ought not to be so swept. But at least you don’t go in for all this “vulnerability” that has been so fashionable in recent years.

If you are from the New South — those urban magnets where all the northerners are moving — you can be proud of this, too. I think of my hometown, Charlotte, North Carolina, rising in glinting light shafts and wealth spires. When I return, I am struck by how cosmopolitan it has become — yet still so beautiful.

The South has risen again.

If you’re white and southern, you need not carry that bitter history in which your great, great grandfather lost his brother or his dignity in the war. It is not your cross. He was probably either conscripted or conned by a bunch of rich slave owners into their war. That flag was a distraction designed to cast the spell of tribe over a cause that probably kept your ancestors in poverty. Remember, Southerner: that slave owner was probably denying your great, great granddaddy an honest job due to that peculiar institution—which is true, Dear Reader, whether you’re black or white. 

Now we have new tribes painted up in stadiums or arenas with slogans like “Roll Tide” or “Go Tar Heels.” These mini-melting pots defy race, as one is more likely to hate Duke Blue than more or less melanated skin.

Of course, we should never forget the past. My great-grandmother slaughtered hogs at first frost among black neighbors who’d help in exchange for chitlins and some of her livermush. She was a poor sharecropper. Her husband, my great-grandfather, helped a black friend euthanize his rabid son between two corn-shuck tick mattresses because that’s all you could do in those days. They didn’t even notice the Depression because they were poor before and after—together.

Things are not always so black and white.

I remember living in Chicago in 2000, chatting with some people in a bar. They heard my accent, which is quite pronounced in Wrigleyville. I told them I was from Charlotte. They asked: “Isn’t it racist there?” I said, “To be honest, Chicago is the most racist place I’ve ever been.” Just two days before, I’d heard an Irish guy from the south side use the N-word like it was a pronoun. And in terms of segregation, it’s more Thomas Schelling than Jim Crow, but it’s segregated nevertheless.

There are still a lot of people freaking out over everything Confederate. A New York Post writer once called for a ban on Gone With the Wind, a movie made by a Jew from Pittsburgh. Apple has ditched an app about the Civil War. People are calling for statues and war memorials to be pulled down as if the path to post-racial Utopia will be paved with burned books and broken busts.

But this is not us—not Americans.

I’m loath to get all weepy and collectivist on you, Dear Reader. But if there is one thing that defines Americans as a people, it’s sure as hell not censorship. Toleration—that fine virtue we took from our British cousins—sometimes means letting people say stupid things. And, of course, we reserve the right to say stupid things right back.

At the risk of writing something dumb, I want to close by explaining why I'm going flagless on this Fourth of July.

I used to think that flags were attached to principles. I grew up putting my hand over my heart and thinking that liberty and justice for all was what I was pledging my allegiance to. But I no longer think it’s healthy to swear allegiances to flags, especially one that has flown over so many bad ideas. If the confederate flag flew over slavery, Old Glory flew over Japanese internment camps, occupying U.S. forces and the White House. It’s flown over a lot of shameful aspects of American history. As American ideals continue to be adulterated and forgotten, I worry people have forgotten what they are meant to symbolize.

So, I think I’ll give up on flags for a while.

I will go through the motions this Fourth of July and eat a hotdog with slaw (Carolina-style). I might take my toddler daughter to watch some fireworks. But under those bright bursts, I hope to meet someone from another country — a human being with blood, bones, and aspirations for fulfillment and freedom — someone just like me, yet carrying something of their culture.

They are my countryman.

I will think of all my friends from all those other countries I’ve lived in when I was an unofficial Ambassador from the South. I will celebrate secession — not the one with the stigmata of slaves, but the algorithm of leaving a system that isn’t working to start something newer and better, just like the Founders did. I will celebrate high-tech cultural cosmopolitanism and 21st-century collaboration the Founders could have only dreamed of.

Of course, I will always take my Southern-ness with me: My story, culture, and sense of the good life. What choice do I have? 

I wrote this article back when I was living in Austin. It seems just as relevant now that I live in South Carolina (forgive the irony). So, I’ve smoothed it and added a little from its original version (FEE.org). So much of what I still love about the South is what I once loved about America. But I will not celebrate Independence Day until my country embodies her ideals again. Instead, I will mourn.