The plausible deniability this time around is based on an argument that this flag is benign, like a Police Athletic League or Fraternal Order of Police sticker on a drunk driver’s car. Like high school potheads giggling about “420,” the rest of us either aren’t supposed to know what this means-or, perhaps, we are supposed to know exactly what it means and be upset or frightened by it. You’ll notice them attached to the same flag poles mounted on the backs of the same pickup trucks driven by the same trolls. Either fully come out of the closet as white supremacists and continue to fly the Confederate battle flag despite its now near-universal recognition as a racist symbol, or find some other more vague symbol that your in-group peeps would recognize but which would still offer plausible deniability when called out for its racism.įor many of these folks, the Confederate flags went down, and the American flag remix, stripped of its color save for a blue stripe, went up.

With the final outing of the Stars and Bars as a racist symbol, bona fide racists were left with a tough decision. They generally want to put their region’s racist history into the rearview mirror. And it didn’t fly for Southerners as well, most of whom are either people of color, or whose ancestors immigrated to the South well after the war to preserve slavery had met its end. The “This ain’t racist” argument always rang pretty hollow among Yankee racists who pretty much only embraced one shameful aspect of Southern heritage, having never enjoyed a boiled peanut or a fried green tomato. Their argument always went “It’s about Southern heritage,” not racism. For years, racists preferred this more ambiguous Confederate symbol to more clearly racist signs such as Nazi swastikas, because it offered arguable deniability for those moments when racists felt more cowardly than racist. The Confederate battle flag is now pretty universally recognized as a racist symbol.

Symbol for anti racism