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Retiring the rebel flag would be the Southern thing to do

 
Published July 1, 2015

I proudly consider myself a child of the South. I've lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line nearly my entire life with a few exceptions, including a couple of months in Pennsylvania, where I was born. My parents were both born and reared in the South during the civil rights era. My father is from Jacksonville, and my mother was raised, quite literally, among the cotton fields of Cordele, Ga. To be blunt, my parents were reared by racists.

I remember a conversation I once had with my paternal grandmother, Meme. She insisted to me that she wasn't racist because she "had one to my house once," as if sharing a roof with a black person somehow implied equality. She also told me, among other musings that day, that if I ever were to date a black man, she would cut me out of her will because "it's just not right." I adored my grandmother, and she me, but that conversation made me realize that there were some feelings that ran deeper than even her love for me.

My maternal grandfather, Grandaddy, had a third-grade education and reared nine kids on his south Georgia farm. He worked hard and demanded the same of his seven sons and two daughters. They were poor, and life was hard, yet they managed to make ends meet. My grandfather worked at a logging company in Cordele. He eventually came to own the business, employing anyone willing to work hard in the stifling Georgia heat.

My grandfather was well respected in Cordele and known to be an honorable man, yet it was expected that everyone "knew their place."

I remember one particular visit to Grandaddy's small, two-bedroom farmhouse. A knock on the porch screen door drew my attention to a black gentleman standing nervously outside. My grandfather went to the door. I took notice as the man removed his cap and stared down at his feet while mustering the courage to speak. When Grandaddy returned, I asked who it was. "Just some n----- wanting money," he replied. It was one of his employees looking for an advance on his pay. He gave the man the money, but the tension of the transaction made clear that the man was encroaching on a hierarchy that dare not be breached.

The anecdotes of racism I witnessed as a child are too numerous to tell all and yet pale in comparison to the stories my parents tell. Like the time my Eagle Scout father was slapped in the face by my grandfather for referring to a black man as "sir" — only to be reprimanded a second time by my great-grandfather when word got back home; or the time my mother was caught in a race riot in downtown Jacksonville alone in her car with bottles being hurled at her windshield by angry, young black men.

To their credit, both of my parents, despite their upbringing, chose to raise me and my brother differently. They deplored racism. Never once was the n-word uttered in our home. Equality for all was advocated. When my mother tells the story of her experience in Jacksonville, she's quick to recall the black man at the nearby gas station who ushered her inside and kept her safe.

See, that's the thing about my "Little Mama," as I call her. She is Southern to her core, yet racism is not part of her identity. She makes a mean chicken pot pie and stirs up the perfect blend of sweet tea; she smiles and greets any who pass by; she says "fixin' to" and "y'all"; she is humble and fiercely loyal, and when her family needs her, she is there, no questions asked. She is durable and feisty because the South made her that way.

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Those are the characteristics I think of when I see the rebel flag. It is a gritty symbol that represents a journey that only those raised like me understand.

But I am white.

For others, the symbol is not so much gritty as it is dirty, and it represents a journey that only those raised like them understand.

The fact is, as difficult as it is to hear the stories my parents tell, they pale in comparison to the stories the man on my grandfather's porch must tell his grandkids. When he sees the flag, he sees something entirely different. He sees fear, intimidation and a time he was considered "less than."

It is time to retire the symbol that divides "us" from "them."

It's the Southern thing to do.

Cherie Miller is a freelance writer from Brooksville.