You’ve no doubt read about the latest nonsense in claimed “offensive” symbols: that Nike was going to have released, in time for Independence Day, a shoe with the Betsy Ross flag, that is, with thirteen stars in a circle, but was instructed by Colin Kaepernick not to do so because that flag was both oppressive in its own right because slavery existed at the time of its creation and because it had been “appropriated” by White Supremacist groups. Writing at Forbes, Shiv Singh repeats this latter claim uncritically, but at The Federalist, David Harsanyi refutes this, reporting that
BuzzFeed was only able to dig up two instances to bolster this risible theory. In one, a member “of white nationalist group Identity Evropa” reportedly displayed the flag and, in another, a bunch of high school students in Grand Rapids, Michigan, “displayed the Betsy Ross flag along with a Trump campaign flag” because, I guess, we’re just going to keep conflating Trump supporters with Klansmen.
And however much Nike is mocked and criticized, there appear to be just as many supporters of Nike’s decision, either on the grounds of “slavery existed in colonial times” or “white supremacists have appropriated the flag,” or both.
When exactly will this end? Will it be deemed intolerable to celebrate any event in American history prior to the Civil War? (Already, as I wrote a couple weeks ago at The Federalist, the Lake County Board President has deemed a Civil War Days festival offensive and cancelled it, never mind that the Union actually ended slavery, at the cost of nearly 400,000 Union soldier deaths.) Just on Monday, the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, cancelled its municipal holiday celebrating Thomas Jefferson in favor of a holiday celebrating the liberation of slaves at the end of the war. How long before George Washington himself is deemed tainted, for having owned slaves, or simply having lived at a time when slavery existed? How long before other antebellum figures are similarly tainted, or even those who lived before the Civil Rights Movement began?
At the same time, recall the panic around the “OK sign,” and reports that high school yearbooks were destroyed and reprinted because of students making the sign as a reference to the “circle game,” at two middle schools and a high school in Oak Park, Illinois, at the University of Chicago Lab School, and at Walter Payton College Prep High School. This sign has been claimed to have been used by White Power groups (the three fingers “up” standing for W and the circle with the wrist forming a P) and administrators justified their actions because the gesture was an objective “symbol of hate.”
“We believe, with confidence, that the students’ gestures were part of this innocent game, but as the gesture has become a symbol of hate we will not distribute the yearbook in its current form,” Sandy Bixby, Middle School principal, stated in an email to the school community. “I want to stress that we do not think our students did anything wrong, but we do respect that a gesture can quickly take on new meanings.”
So here’s my request: I need some 4channers (real or not) to start some more rumors and appropriate more symbols. How about appropriating the rainbow flag, because it represents the separation of the races (especially in the version with a brown and black strip at the bottom)? Maybe the peace sign? For expert-level trolling, Nike shoes can be suggested to be signs of White Supremacy because, after all, Nike was a Greek god, and the Greeks are held up as the forebears of Western Civilization. I’m sure there are others that are suitable, but the more the better, until the sheer whiplash of giving (self-identified) White Supremacists the power to destroy not only our national symbols but even trivial parts of our community life is finally recognized by those arbiters for the rank foolishness that it is.
Can we do this, please? And the sooner, the better?
Because this cannot continue to go on. It is destructive to our national culture, to our society, in a way that extends far beyond any single individual decommissioned symbol or element of our heritage. We cannot replace the Betsy Ross flag with the Rainbow flag and continue to be a functioning society. And given that the decline in social trust and in community has been connected up with the dramatic increase in “deaths of despair,” that is, suicide and chemical dependency, this is not a harmless endeavor that can be done simply “in an abundance of caution” or to avoid any risk of offense.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RossBetsy.jpg; Edward Percy Moran [Public domain]
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