On January 6, I watched in horror at the image of Kevin Seefried of Delaware marching through the halls of the US Capitol with a confederate flag. Never before in the history of our nation has that flag even come close to the steps of the US Capitol, and just last week, over 150 years after the end of the Civil War, in which over 600,000 Americans perished, the 51-year-old broke into the Capitol along with his son and other rioters after attending Trump’s speech at the White House. That image is deeply disturbing. Defenders of the South claim that the stars and bars are about heritage, about state’s rights, about honoring fallen Confederate soldiers. But let’s not fool ourselves, the Confederate flag is a symbol of white supremacy, a symbol of slavery, and a symbol of oppression.

No matter how you slice it, the Confederacy was founded on the notion that Abe Lincoln would force the southern states to give up their slaves, so in a sense, the Civil War was about states’ rights, but it was about states’ rights to own slaves. When Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, that’s when the Civil War morphed into a war about slavery. It’s interesting to note that the flag paraded through the Capitol last week was never the official flag of the Confederacy, but the battle flag of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. And after the Civil War, it wasn’t prominently displayed in public until almost a hundred years later when the battle flag reappeared in response to the civil rights movement. 

Sadly, white supremacist groups have adopted Lee’s battle flag as their symbol. I always thought that it was southerners who were most likely to display the flag on their lawns, T-shirts, and vanity license plates, but that’s not the case. The Confederate flag and its analogs can be seen everywhere in the US, even in the northern states; Kevin Seefried is from Delaware after all. So the Confederate flag must not actually be about southern pride and culture, but actually about preserving slavery and white supremacy. The Confederate battle flag does not symbolize freedom or a big middle finger to the federal government, it stands as a symbol of persecution, and of viewing African Americans as property to be subjugated, sold, and oppressed by whites.

But it wasn’t just the image of the Confederate flag that is disturbing to me, it was the display of other flags: Trump flags, Don’t Tread on Me flags, the American flags with the blue and red stripes, 1776 flags, and of course American flags. The rioters who stormed the Capitol, donning anti-semitic hoodies, trying to grab a police officer’s gun while chanting, ‘Kill him with his own gun,’ carrying zip-ties for potential legislative captives, who trashed the Capitol offices, and constructed a gallows to “hang Pence,” are not patriots, they are domestic terrorists. Those rioters refuse to believe that Trump lost the election, they believe in conspiracy theories and have been misled by a dangerous president, his enablers and an unhinged media and social media alike. The rioters who first attended Trump’s rally were predominantly white, but what was so different about that rally is that all those flags, even traditional symbols of American patriotism, were all displayed together as symbols of hate. Far-right and white supremacists groups have in the past been a bit fractured and independent of one another, but under Trump, they have found a champion, a leader who has succeeded in bringing all these groups together for one common cause; to spread hate and the message of white supremacy. We saw pro-Trump, far-right, anti-government Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and the Proud Boys act as a united front to storm the halls of the US Capitol on January 6. 

The white supremacist movement in the US has a very long history, but it’s interesting to note that it has had three clear peaks in activity: 1) During reconstruction in the south after the Civil War (giving birth to gerrymandering), 2) during the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, and 3) following the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement last summer. According to Lecia Brooks, chief of staff of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the resurgence of Confederate flags and white supremacist symbols is often a direct response to civil rights efforts. “This is a response, and it’s not a new response,” Brooks said. “Every time there is progress in asserting civil rights, there’s a backlash. Confederate iconography is a means to reassert white supremacy when it is thought to be threatened.” 

So that image of the Confederate flag in the halls of the Capitol is poignant in that it exposes the ugly underbelly of white supremacy and discrimination in our country. As Brooks states above, the white supremacy movement resurges whenever the subject of civil rights comes up, it’s as though they are afraid of something. The frightening thing is that the various groups, from neo-Nazis to QAnon, have found an ally, a voice, and a supporter in Trump, who for the next four days, holds the highest office in the country. It’s time for our nation to face the reality that racism is still very much alive and well in our culture and that some of the ways to combat it are to reject symbols of oppression, such as the Confederate flag, to reject misinformation and conspiracy theories, and to realize, and embrace the fact that yes, black lives do matter.