It’s time for another bracket, and this one is familiar.
Last year, we ran the State Flags That Don’t Glorify Slavery Bracket. It was a good bracket. California won. State flags are fun.
Except for five of them.
Last year, it was six of them that weren’t fun. There were six flags that made us say, “Should we really run a state flag bracket?” So we removed those flags. This year, we only have to remove five. Mississippi changed its state flag. Bravo, Mississippi.
There’s a lot to unpack when talking about the five flags in question, and I think we should address it before we begin voting, because part of the reason we do want to run this bracket is to familiarize people with how normal it is in this county to honor the Confederacy, and to remind people how unacceptable that should be.
The Confederate States of America were the political coalition responsible for the deadliest conflict in American history, one fought because said political coalition wanted to continue the enslavement of other people. There’s a popular myth that “the Civil War wasn’t about slavery,” but these states’ own declarations of secession, adopted at the beginning of the war, rip through this falsehood rather thoroughly. Here are five of those declarations: Georgia’s, which makes mention of slavery 35 times, beginning in the declaration’s second sentence; Mississippi’s, which mentions slavery seven times, beginning in its second sentence; South Carolina’s, which mentions it 18 times, beginning in the first sentence; Texas’s, which mentions it 22 times despite only first mentioning it in the third paragraph; and Virginia’s, which only mentions it once but offers no other reasons for its attempt to leave the United States. I don’t dispute that slavery was one of plural issues at play in the divide that erupted into the Civil War—that seems like something upon which reasonable people can disagree. But the assertion that slavery wasn’t the core reason for the Civil War is false and immoral and enables a lot of perverted nostalgia for a terrible institution, one that tried to destroy the country those who espouse such nostalgia often claim to love.
An argument is also made that “history should be remembered.” And history should be remembered. But history doesn’t need to be honored to be remembered, and flags, like statues, are honorifics. We wrote last summer, before beginning this bracket, about the flags of the Confederate states, parsing each and offering our own assessment of whether each honors the Confederacy. There are a few upon which reasonable people can disagree—some in good faith can call North Carolina’s state flag racist (because slavery was the core reason for the Confederacy’s existence, honoring the Confederacy honors slavery, and honoring the enslavement of Black Americans is inherently racist), some in good faith might make a case for Tennessee’s not being racist (I’ve yet to hear said case, but fire away if you’d like to make such a case). But when states themselves, like Georgia and like Arkansas and like Alabama (three of the five we exclude from this bracket, in addition to Tennessee and Florida), state that the flag’s purpose or the purpose of an element of the flag is to honor the Confederacy, the flag’s racist.
Our hope is that after a few more years of running this bracket, we’ll be able to have every state flag in America involved. Not because of our effort here, of course, but because good people who love their neighbor and love their country will, we hope, do away with these symbols that honor those who, out of hate and fear, committed the ultimate act of hatred against their country, going to war with it for the purpose of continuing one of the most brutal institutions in humanity’s long, brutal history.
We look forward to voting with you beginning tomorrow morning. If you want to look at all the state flags, here are my rankings of them from last fall (with Mississippi inserted just now in preparation for this bracket). Here are the image credits for every state flag (and associated flag) shown on the site. Finally, here’s the bracket, seeded using last year’s results and our own judgment on Mississippi:
