The Confederate flag is a symbol of racism. If you disagree, you must have failed U.S. history in high school.

The Confederate States of America split away from the Union following the election of Abraham Lincoln because they feared that the federal government would forcibly free all African-American slaves in the South. They did not even wait for Lincoln to take office before they seceded, so the argument that they were somehow responding to active oppression of their rights as states is purely wrong.

The Confederate States, in their constitution, made minimal changes to the actual structure of their government. One change was that the Confederate president would serve for six years, without the possibility of reelection, but would be more powerful than the Union president. The other change was that the institution of slavery was codified into law. Where the American constitution never made reference to slavery, the Confederate constitution repeatedly referenced it.

The myth that the southern states seceded as some protest in support of states’ rights is ridiculous. On Dec. 24, 1860, the South Carolina secession convention adopted the “Declaration of Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” in which the main complaint was that there was an “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery.” It also protested the fact that the northern states had largely failed to return slaves to their owners if they escaped. So, the only “states’ rights” the South cared about was the right to decide whether a state would support the institution of slavery, and they were actively interested in curtailing this right for the northern states.

The idea that you can somehow divorce the concept of slavery from the memory of the Confederacy is absurdly short-sighted. The Confederacy arose because slavery was something they wanted to protect. They failed in that goal and the long, arduous process of Reconstruction, which ultimately failed because Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, was a weak man with little will to punish those responsible for the Civil War. Thus, the South was plunged into a nearly century-long period where it would enshrine in law the subjugation of African Americans. There were black southerners who did not know that slavery had ended or continued to work in situations essentially the same as slavery. The Confederacy fought to protect slavery, and when it failed to protect it by force, the re-integrated states sought to protect it by legal trickery.

Any northerner, indeed any American, who today flies the Confederate flag, is flying the symbol of slavery, subjugation and hatred. They are flying the flag of the KKK, the flag of modern American neo-Nazism and the flag of social devolution. That flag should be relegated to the trash bin and the museums, with context that accurately and completely describes the hate that is stands for. It does not belong on your belt buckle, your truck, your laptop case or your flag pole.

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