As a southerner and former San Francisco resident of 10 years, I often bring up Dukes of Hazard to try to explain to people the complicated history of the Confederate Flag. I also bring up Billy Idol of 1980s fame, a British pop star who wore the flag as part of his 'rebel' look and Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies who would carry it around in some episodes. All of white America laughed, never thinking of Granny as an old southern racist, pining for the days of slavery and lynchings, burning a cross in the Drysdale's front yard.

This is not excusing the flag, it's not saying that it was ever OK, it's an attempt to explain to people that this flag has not always been viewed as a racist symbol by everyone, not even close. Not every Northerner who bought a Confederate t-shirt on their way to Florida was wanting to express their white pride. All they saw was a souvenir. If we see a photo of someone from let's say, 1974, wearing the flag. There's absolutely no reason to think they understood that this would be a toxic symbol of slavery and oppression in 2018, no different than a Nazi swastika. But that's where we today. It feels good to be on the moral high ground and scream 'racist!', without making any effort to understand and accept the context. A person's reputation can be ruined today if an old photo shows up online from the 70s or 80s and they're next to this flag. All of the trauma of 400 years of slavery and Jim Crow is associated with them. It's a bit nuts.

This lack of awareness around the flag was ignorance, it was an insensitivity to all that this flag represented and developing a deeper consciousness around the flag has been very gradual for white America, all of white America, even in San Francisco. Like the protest in 1984, people made this association until more and more people understood. Today, even in the south, it's seen as the symbol for the KKK and neo-Nazi groups. Almost all southerners want nothing to do with it today, we understand what it says. Civil War monuments are coming down steadily by majority consensus. It's never in the news unless a white supremacy group shows up to throw a fit. In Charlottesville, they came from as far away as California.

Good article but I disagree with painting atheists and the non-religious as completely innocent. I believe that millennia of antisemitism rooted in Christianity led to the Holocaust but that doesn't mean that atheists and the non-religious were not influenced by this prejudice, were not prejudiced themselves. The treatment of people of African descent as subhuman has its roots in religion but that doesn't mean that an atheist can't be a racist or in the past, even a slave trader.