Stop with calling the confederate flag racist. Do your research. Its not even the official flag of the confederate states. Its the West Virginia battle flag.
It was incorporated into later Confederate flags, but not alone.

The ONLY reason its considered racist is because the KKK picked it up in the 50's and used it as their flag.
Oh, the confederacy supported slavery therefore they were racist ? Hello, Britain was big into slavery at one point, as was most of Europe.
It was not until 1833 that Britain abolished slavery, and even then they allowed the East India trading company to continue it for another 10 years.

If the KKK picked up the union jack tomorrow and started calling it their official flag, does that mean we are all racists Brits for flying the Jack ?

What about the Swastika ? For thousands of years was a symbol of auspiciousness, yet taken up by the Nazi's and now its an evil symbol ?

I dont believe states should be flying the flag on their property, but i do believe in the rights of citizens to fly it.

Stop with calling the confederate flag racist. Do your research. Its not even the official flag of the confederate states. Its the West Virginia battle flag.
It was incorporated into later Confederate flags, but not alone.

The ONLY reason its considered racist is because the KKK picked it up in the 50's and used it as their flag.
Oh, the confederacy supported slavery therefore they were racist ? Hello, Britain was big into slavery at one point, as was most of Europe.
It was not until 1833 that Britain abolished slavery, and even then they allowed the East India trading company to continue it for another 10 years.

If the KKK picked up the union jack tomorrow and started calling it their official flag, does that mean we are all racists Brits for flying the Jack ?

What about the Swastika ? For thousands of years was a symbol of auspiciousness, yet taken up by the Nazi's and now its an evil symbol ?

I dont believe states should be flying the flag on their property, but i do believe in the rights of citizens to fly it.

US History disagrees. The "peculiar" institution that was African slavery was the root cause of the Civil War. Yes, Northern business interests, particularly New England maritime interests profited greatly from the slave trade until importation was banned. Then inbreeding began. It was the Confederacy that fired the first shots of the war at Fort Sumter and a great deal of documentation has proved that racism was at the foundation of Southern philosophy, such as the "white race is superior to the Negro." Racism is and will always be the original sin of the United States. It was enshrined in the Constitution (slaves were counted as 3/5 a person for census purposes) and it took the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to partially undo that. 100 years later, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were needed to reinforce the Constitutional Amendments passed a century earlier. The Confederate battle flag is seen in this country as fundamentally racist by more and more people. The South Carolina Governor, as Republican as it gets and the South Carolina State Legislature, as staunchly conservative and jealously guarded of their traditions as can be, voted themselves into special session and ordered the battle flag removed in near record time. This wasn't PC run amok. It was the revulsion they felt over the wanton murder of nine more people, including one of their own, due to racist extremism in their own backyard. It was Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1965, when three young civil rights workers were murdered on orders from the KKK to local law enforcement. It was the firebombing of an AME Church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed several black youth worshipping there. Not for one minute do I think consigning that flag to a museum will change much. As far as the Union Flag is concerned, yes there have been some pretty rotten things done in its name. There have been some pretty rotten things done in the name of the Stars and Stripes, most recently the needless invasion of Iraq. There have also been some pretty good things done as well. The only thing the Confederate Battle Flag and the Stars and Bars (the official flag of the Confederacy) represent is a system where some considered themselves superior human beings to others based on their skin color. That is racist to its core and that is what the Confederacy was all about. To anyone who believes themselves to be a superior life form, let me remind them that we all put our trousers on the same way, one leg at a time. Before anyone says I sympathize with the North because I am a New Yorker, I should tell you that no member of my family lived in the United States before 1895 and that my father emigrated from Germany in October 1935, stayed in London for a time and arrived in the US aboard RMS Berengaria in February 1936. That makes me a first generation American on my father's side and third on my mother's. No member of my family had a stake in the United States from the founding of the first colonies until the last five years of the 19th Century. No member of my family was involved in the lead up to the Civil War, the actual war or the events that followed it known as Reconstruction.

The swastika is an ancient religious symbol that appears in a great many cultures, including First Nations/Native American. The symbol used by the Nazis is a mirror image of the swastika and is called in German the hakenkreutz, or hooked cross. It is not the traditional swastika and should not be confused with it. There was a small town in Colorado named Swastika Falls that some groups wanted to have renamed, The residents quite rightly pointed out that the name had nothing to do with Nazis and Nazism b ut dated back to the First Nations people who originally lived there. As far as racism in the United States, I and others have freely acknowledged this, If you take a look back at my posts I refer to racism as the original sin of the United States. The fact that we Americans have as a nation become sensitive to racist symbols such as the Confederate war flag and the Washington NFL team's offensive nickname should be viewed as progress towards as a more sensitive and caring society. I lived through the 1960s and they were definitely not the nostalgic era they are being made out to be. There were many rough times as we struggled with how we as a nation dealt with each other, never mind the world at large.