The group of Americans whose views of the flag have been most shaped by real historical events are African Americans. Since the Civil War, African Americans have looked at the battle flag and rightly seen its role in a long, persistent history of slavery, segregation, and racial oppression. In forging that association, though, the battles of the 1960s may have been more important than those of the 1860s. And the state of race relations today is equally important when the flag, which was a symbol of racism in the past, is associated with justifying racism in the present. In polls, many African Americans support ending the official use of the Confederate flag, no doubt in part to make a statement about the continuing need to address institutional racism and white supremacy in American society.

For its white supporters, the meaning of the Confederate flag has shifted with time so that it is now much more closely tied to the country’s divisions today than to those of its past. While the meaning and salience of the flag is rooted in the Civil War and the Confederacy, the battles of the 1950s and 1960s—as well as those of the 1990s—prove more important in understanding the current debate than the battles of the 1860s. Flag supporters today are expressing resentment against African Americans and “concessions” granted to them as well as opposition to what they see as destabilizing social, cultural, and economic trends that have cost them status in the social hierarchy and put them at a relative disadvantage for the future. Thus, for supporters and detractors of the battle flag alike, it is a potent symbol of the America we want in the future.

Seeing the flag only through its historical association with the Confederacy and the South obscures the reality of its appeal today: Support for the flag today is nearly as strong in the Midwest as in some parts of the South. Its white supporters, who tend to be less educated and have lower incomes, do not act on past loyalties so much as out of a sense of grievance about opportunities for themselves and their children in the future. Likewise, some opponents of the flag have a grievance in the flag’s historic connection to structural racism, which has resulted in widespread denial of civil rights as well as lost income, education, and sense of belonging for blacks. They call for its removal as a symbolic gesture of moving onward toward a future that does not repeat our past. These twin grievances speak to deep and growing divides in American society.

Thus, the facile description of the battle flag as a relic of a previous Civil War prevents us from comprehending its distressing implications for the future of the country. It also prevents us from addressing—and perhaps healing—the growing rifts in American society that the flag has come to mark.

In June 2015, protestors rallied to remove the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s statehouse, a day after Governor Nikki Haley described it as a “deeply offensive symbol of a brutally offensive past” following Dylann Roof’s racially-motivated murder of nine people. Photo by Rainier Ehrhardt/Associated Press.

While today’s Confederate battle flag appears much the same as it did in the 1860s—as it has been copied on everything from state flags to coffee cups—its associations have shifted significantly over time. To understand why we’re still fighting about its symbolic meaning, you have to understand how it has been used since the Civil War, particularly in the last 80 years, as new meanings for the flag have been forged.

In the decades immediately after the Civil War, white Southerners revered the Confederate battle flag, but well into the 20th century, they flew it mostly on Confederate memorial days, during veterans’ reunions, and at monument unveilings. The flag’s use at this time was regional and tied to the memory of the war.

But in the late 1930s, display of the battle flag expanded when Congress nearly passed an anti-lynching bill, leading to increased white Southern fears of federal intervention in Southern race relations. In 1948, the battle flag’s use by the Dixiecrats—the segregationist, independent Southern Democratic Party that ran South Carolina governor J. Strom Thurmond for president—spurred the flag’s popularization.

In the 1950s, it became an ornament of popular culture, with Confederate flags flown in a multitude of contexts and featured on coffee mugs, T-shirts, beach towels, bikinis, and many other items. All served as symbols of a white Southern identity, an affirmation of pride in the region and its customs.

At the same time that it became a ubiquitous consumer culture item, the Confederate battle flag was used as the banner of the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens’ Councils, segregationist mobs, and others opposed to the civil rights movement and racial change, cementing its association with white supremacy. In 1956, Georgia adopted a new state flag that prominently featured the battle flag, and in the early 1960s both Alabama and South Carolina began to fly it over their capitols.

During the 1960s, African Americans, empowered by their victories in the civil rights movement, unsuccessfully challenged its use. In the 1970s and 1980s, black legislators proposed removing the Confederate flag from the Alabama capitol and adopting a new Georgia state flag, but their efforts failed.

During a 1966 civil rights march in Chicago, white men waved Confederate flags and displayed a crude sign with the words “White Power” and a swastika. Courtesy of the Associated Press.

The fate of the Confederate flag became a major national issue in 1993, when the United States Senate denied a patent renewal to the United Daughters of the Confederacy because its seal included a Confederate flag—in this case not the provocative battle flag, but the Stars and Bars, the first official flag of the Confederacy. Illinois Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, the nation’s first black, female senator, gave a moving speech in which she stated that the Civil War was fought “over the issue of whether or not my ancestors could be held as property, as chattel, as objects of trade and commerce.” A flag that stood for that cause, she argued, should not be “underwritten, underscored, adopted, and approved by this United States Senate.” Her view prevailed as the Senate voted.

At about the same time, disputes about the battle flag began in earnest over its place atop the state capitols in Alabama and South Carolina, on the capitol grounds in Florida, and as part of the state flag in Georgia and Mississippi. In each state, African Americans called for an end to such public uses of the flag, and for several years debates raged over the issue. Many whites had not changed their minds about the flag. Proponents claimed that they sought only to defend their heritage and honor their ancestors. Some, including prominent citizens, spoke of their ancestors who fought for the Confederacy—a cause they still considered noble.

But a closer look at opinion polls shows that history was not the major source of this white affinity for the flag. Southerners were neither informed nor enthusiastic about their history. A 1994 Southern Focus Poll found that nearly two-thirds of Southerners did not claim Confederate ancestors, and about half said that, “the Civil War doesn’t mean much to me personally.” Over 40 percent could not name a Civil War battle and only 32.8 percent could name one other than Gettysburg, which had been the title of a motion picture the year before.

By the 1990s, African Americans and some whites opposed the public use of the battle flag because of its historical association with slavery, the Confederacy, and racism. White support for removing the flag often came from the states’ elite, who worried that continued display of the flag threatened economic development. In Georgia, for example, the Atlanta business community’s fear that the flag would make attracting industry more difficult and present Georgia as a less welcoming place for the international community during the 1996 Olympics played a role in Governor Zell Miller’s decision to call to change his state’s flag, although he later withdrew the proposal in the face of opposition from the legislature.

Across the South, a new economically focused elite joined with activists to call for an end to the official use of the flag. The campaign to eliminate the battle flag from the existing state flag of Mississippi drew support from what sociologist John Shelton Reed described as “a truly remarkable coalition of historic adversaries: civil rights activists and country-club Republicans; student newspapers and university presidents; casino managers and fundamentalist ministers; trial lawyers and industrialists; college professors and football coaches.” In South Carolina in 2000, another “diverse confederation of business, civic, education, government and religious interests,” as one study put it, kicked off a fight to take the flag off the capitol.

To historians of the South, the Southern elites’ renunciation of the flag was remarkable. At the turn of the last century, the Southern elite promoted the Lost Cause, the white South’s celebration of the Confederacy as heroic and honorable; but by the turn of the 21st century, as historian Thomas Brown has observed, much of the South’s elite led the campaign to remove the very flag that symbolized it.

The battle over the flag began to take a new shape as these “remarkable coalitions” fought to remove it and public opinion began to shift. While a Mississippi referendum held in 2001 voted to reject a new design for its state flag, in other states public controversies ended in compromise. Georgia changed its flag—not once but twice between 2001 and 2003. In Florida, Governor Jeb Bush, as part of a construction project, took the flag off the capitol grounds and put it in a museum. In South Carolina and Alabama, the flag came down from the capitol dome and moved instead to the statehouse grounds. That most of the states achieved some form of compromise reflected increased African American political power and a change in attitudes among some white Southerners.

Polls confirmed this shift. In the 1980s, as John Shelton Reed noted, only 23 percent of Southern whites polled opposed the use of Confederate flags in public schools, while among blacks, 45 percent objected. By 2000, two polls, by CBS and CNN, showed Southern opposition to the official use of the flag had risen into the low-forties, with opposition outside the South slightly higher, although in neither poll did it reach 50 percent.

When the fight over the flag was revived in 2015, after Dylann Roof’s murders, there were again calls to remove the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds in South Carolina. After initially opposing the idea, Governor Nikki Haley and much of the state’s Republican establishment, worried in part about how its continued presence might discourage outside investment, endorsed taking down the flag. Later that summer, the legislature voted to remove the flag, although only after a contentious debate in the House. By then, opposition to the flag had spread to other states and the governor of Alabama, too, ordered the battle flag removed from its capitol grounds.

In the aftermath, national opinion polls showed opposition to the flag had continued to grow. Three polls found support for removal of the flag had risen, in one to 57 percent and in another to 55 percent. Over roughly two decades, support for ending official use of the flag has risen significantly. The shift in public attitudes no doubt in part reflects generational change, although surely some people changed their minds because of the flag’s association with racism. Far from being fixed in the historical past, both support and opposition to the flag has been malleable over the years—as its meanings have shifted for different groups of people.

But even though opposition to the flag’s display grew, support for the flag was still consistently strong, as more than 40 percent of Americans still favored its public display. Once the flag came down in Alabama and South Carolina, pro-flag protests increased. Groups formed to put up flags along highways and in other public places, and the debate over flying the Mississippi state flag intensified. In Charlottesville in 2017, a protest by white nationalists, some of whom carried Confederate flags, led to the death of a young woman there to challenge them. That same year, a candidate who made the Confederate flag and monuments central to his campaign almost won the Republican nomination for governor of Virginia and a year later became his party’s nominee for the U.S. Senate.

Opinion had shifted but no consensus had emerged.

In 2017, a high school student in North Bend, Oregon wore a Confederate flag hoodie while waving an American flag and checking his phone. The school district banned all representations of the Confederate flag from school property following a fight between two students. Photo by Bethany Baker/The Coos Bay World. Courtesy of the Associated Press.

If this were about a Southern identity rooted in the Civil War, you would also expect the division over the flag to be regional, but in polls from 2000 through 2015, support for the Confederate flag in the Midwest almost equaled, and, in one poll, even exceeded that in the South. People driving through rural areas of states such as Maine and Michigan report seeing privately displayed Confederate flags. The symbolism of the flag has moved outward from the South to find new likeminded supporters.

The flag now seems to appeal to people who share demographic characteristics and partisan affinities, rather than history. In a 2015 poll, people who made under $50,000 supported the flag by 16 percentage points more than those who made over $50,000. Similarly, those who had not attended college were 18 percentage points more supportive than the college-educated. A still larger difference existed between rural and urban support; 60 percent of rural residents favored keeping the flag up, while only 36 percent of city dwellers did. Partisan divisions were equally significant; 70 percent of Democrats agree that the flag should come down from government buildings, whereas only 39 percent of Republicans do.

These divides reflect a fundamental division over values, a determination to preserve a certain vision of what America has been and a sense of grievance about what some people believe it is becoming. To understand how this connects to the Confederate battle flag, we need to reexamine the ideology of the Lost Cause, which persists today less in any specific memory of the Confederacy and more through the social values it promoted.

The Lost Cause emerged in the decades after the Confederacy’s defeat in part out of a sense of regional grievance and a sense that the North did not respect the honor of the Confederates. At its height in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Lost Cause not only celebrated the service and sacrifice of Confederate soldiers, but also offered a model of the good society as one built both on white supremacy and also on deference to aristocratic leaders and loyalty to the social order. That social vision of the Lost Cause—along with the emphasis on conformity and order necessary to maintain a rigid, repressive racial system—helped make white Southerners particularly given to tribalism, accepting of hierarchy, and invested in symbols that supported both. The battle flag now represents that vision of a traditional, conservative social order where strict social hierarchies still apply.

This meaning of the flag, tied to the ideology of the Lost Cause, has stayed fairly consistent over the last 70 years. In 1951, contemporary news accounts quoted a store owner in Knoxville, Tennessee saying, “The Southerner loves his country, his women, his church, and his whiskey. The flag is a symbol of all these things so dear to his life.” 45 years later, a letter to the editor of a Birmingham, Alabama, newspaper explained, “As a Southern-American, I am tired of being told by others what the Confederate flag means to me….Speaking for myself, Southern heritage represents a way of life….It represents a time when you could walk the streets without fear. A time when the little man had a chance to make a life for his family. A time when God’s law was above all else.”

Most of the flag’s proponents tie those values to the United States, not to the Confederacy, which helps explain the seemingly paradoxical fact that the region with the strongest ties to the Confederate flag is also the region with the largest percentage of people who think it is important for the pledge of allegiance to be repeated in schools and who see America as a great country. Rallying around the Confederate flag may be, in the minds of many of its proponents, much more about preserving a traditional, hierarchical America than about perpetuating the memory of the Confederacy, much less reviving it.

Before a 2015 Confederate flag rally in Vicksburg, Mississippi, a woman shows off a flag that has been altered to signal defiance. Photo by Justin Sellers/The Vicksburg Evening Post. Courtesy of the Associated Press.

Fighting to keep the flag flying offers a way for some to express their sense of grievance with an America where non-whites have more power than they did previously. After South Carolina’s 2015 fight over the flag, a Winthrop University poll asked: “Do you feel that generations of slavery and discrimination do or do not make it difficult for Blacks to get ahead?” Of those who believed that history did not make upward mobility difficult for blacks, 58 percent said that they approved of flying the flag on the capitol grounds; only 30 percent disapproved.

Although in no way a typical flag supporter, Dylann Roof provides both an example of the blatant form racism takes as well as evidence of how loyalty to the Confederate flag is often the result of contemporary resentments rather than historical loyalties. Although much remains unknown about Roof’s motives and beliefs, what is known so far suggests he was more interested in the history of black and white relations than the history of the Confederacy. Stirred by the shooting of Trayvon Martin, Roof embraced a radical white supremacy, railing about black crime and claiming blacks had taken over. His cause became race war and the restoration of white supremacy.

On a pre-massacre journey around South Carolina, Roof had his picture taken not only with Confederate flags but at Confederate historical sites. In an insightful analysis of that tour, Washington Post reporters noted that in Charleston Roof did not appear to have visited Fort Sumter. They found it “odd for someone who drives a car with a Confederate license plate to ignore the place where the Confederacy began.” They continued: “But when the totality of pictures on his Web site, and the manifesto he posted there, are considered, it becomes apparent that the only part of the Confederacy that interested him was slavery. There are no pictures of Civil War battlefields, no screeds about the heroic Robert E. Lee, George Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, no Lost Cause ideology.”

On his Facebook profile picture, he wore a jacket on which he had sewn the flags of South Africa and Rhodesia. Any flag associated with white supremacy, it seemed, would do. Roof found inspiration not in the Confederacy but, as historian Edward Ball, who covered his trial observed, in Nazi Germany.

If Roof was not a typical flag supporter, his route to embracing the battle flag was by no means his alone. White nationalists, many from outside the South, embrace the flag simply as a symbol of white supremacy. Also like Roof, white nationalists and neo-Nazis display the battle flag along with a host of other racist and neo-Nazi symbols. Their ideological racism owes more to a nativist strain of American thought, epitomized by the Klan of the 1920s and Nazism, than to the Lost Cause itself.

Other supporters of the flag may not rally with white supremacists, but race plays a central role in their defense of the battle flag. At a 1994 protest over the flag at the South Carolina capitol, a white woman shouted at a black counter-protester: “We’ve given you everything you’ve asked for! We’re tired of it.” And in the midst of the South Carolina debate in 2000, after the NAACP called for an economic boycott of the state, state Senator Arthur Ravenel claimed, “the flag is a lot stronger now with the boycott a-goin’ on than it was before. You don’t really think the General Assembly of South Carolina is gonna knuckle under to the N-A-A-C-P, headquartered in…wherever the hell they are—where is it, New York?”

Flag advocates have often argued that if the state took the flag down or removed it from a state flag, blacks would only ask for more. One respondent to a Mississippi newspaper poll cited by John Shelton Reed said that if Mississippi adopts a new state flag, “They’ll want us to change the state flower because they don’t like the smell.” Another respondent to the same poll, though, suggested more was at stake, complaining “that too many concessions” have been made to blacks already.

This use of the word “concessions” emerges from a profound form of racial politics that intertwines a rhetoric of resentment with conceptions of history. Supporters seem to fear that admitting the flag’s ties to racial oppression in the past will justify and lead to “concessions” to African Americans in the present. Honoring the flag, then, represents a denial of America’s racial past, which makes it easier to oppose programs—such as affirmative action or even welfare—that are perceived as disproportionately helping blacks.

The depth of this reasoning can be seen in a national poll from 2000 that asked whether “the government in Washington is paying too much, not enough, or about the right amount of attention to the needs and problems of blacks and other minorities.” Of those who thought the government paid too much attention to the needs of blacks, 74 percent wanted the Confederate flag to continue to fly over state capitols. Among those who thought it did not pay enough attention, only 22 percent favored flying the flag—a difference of 52 percentage points. Thus, support for the flag has become associated with the denial of a long history that could justify future policies supporting blacks.

Dylann Roof again provides a surprising example of this thinking. In a little-noticed section of the racist screed that he prepared before the murders, he wrote, “I wish with a passion that n—–s were treated terribly throughout history by Whites, that every White person had an ancestor who owned slaves, that segregation was an evil an oppressive institution, and so on. Because if it was all true, it would make it so much easier for me to accept our current situation,” by which he meant the loss of white supremacy. “But it isnt [sic] true. None of it is. We are told to accept what is happening to us because of ancestors wrong doing, but it is all based on historical lies, exaggerations and myths.” Roof’s formulation wrongly assumes a current world of black domination, but his reasoning nonetheless implies a realization that if history did show that whites had oppressed blacks for centuries, actions to help African Americans would be justified.

In his 1982 book Southerners, John Shelton Reed wrote that white Southerners’ sense of identity owed much to a culture of grievance, in part a response to a long history of Northern criticism and condescension. But he also questioned the depth of Southerners’ interest in the Confederacy and astutely suggested that the “link between attachment to the Confederacy and Southern identification may run at least as much from the identification to the attachment as vice versa.” Today, this complex sense of grievance, not loyalty to the Confederacy, contributes to identification with the flag.

Three decades later, we can see that supporters have embraced the battle flag as a symbol of multiple grievances, including resentment over the increased—if not fully equal—status of African Americans, the power and influence of economic and cultural elites, and a perceived loss of traditional values. Country music and Southern rock, which have used the flag as a symbol of alienation and defiance, have also done their part to build this meaning for the flag—and to spread its use outside the South and even in Germany, Ireland, and Italy among other countries. To modify and extend Reed’s formulation: A shared sense of white grievance explains the modern embrace of Confederate symbols rather than the other way around.

A member of the “Take ‘em Down Coalition” holds a sign in support of removing Confederate monuments at a 2015 rally in front of City Hall in New Orleans, while protesters wave Confederate flags in the background. Photo by Gerald Herbert/Associated Press.

Symbolic statements are significant, as are the changes in the official use of the Confederate flag: The removal of a symbol so closely associated with white supremacy is a good thing in and of itself, particularly if the battle flag actually stimulates racism, as one experimental study by psychologists has suggested. If the flag debate can be made to serve as a prelude to a more fundamental discussion of the heritage of slavery, segregation, and racial oppression, and spur Americans to address structural inequalities in our society, it will become even more important.

It may be difficult to grasp that what appears to be the ultimate American regional symbol—it is, after all, a Confederate battle flag—is now no longer tied exclusively to the South or to its particular history, but that is the nature of symbols. One danger of continuing to treat the flag as a regional issue is that it allows people who live outside the South to dismiss the flag and its historical associations as yet another sign of uniquely southern failings, when racism plagues communities across America today.

What’s more, focusing on the Civil War origins of the flag ignores the divide within American society today, one that transcends geography and in which so many—blacks and whites—have a sense of grievance. More than region, race and racism shape attitudes toward the flag. The sense of grievance among flag supporters, rooted in part in the fear that whites are losing their influence and their opportunities in a changing America, has made it a potent symbol waved in defiance of a perceived economic and cultural elite that supports its removal.

In this sense, fights over the official display of the battle flag are not so much about the flag itself—which has a symbolic meaning that has shifted over the years—but about the America we want to have in the future. Confining our analysis to the flag’s historical association with the South obstructs our understanding of how race and inequality are dividing us now, and it has kept us from engaging in a fundamental rethinking of America’s racial past and present. What we need to see more clearly is that the ongoing struggle over the meaning of the Confederate flag could be an opportunity for reconciliation of these pressing cultural divisions in American society: White nationalism must be condemned, the injustices of the American racial order must be corrected, and all Americans’ fears for the future need to be addressed.

The post Today’s Battle Over the Confederate Flag Has Nothing to Do With the Civil War appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In December 2017, he sat down with Zócalo Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Gregory Rodriguez in Los Angeles to talk about what “the South” is, how the South came to embrace Thanksgiving, and why old country songs often reinforce a cult of the noble loser.

This transcript of the discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

The post Why Has America Been So Reluctant to ‘Own’ the South? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Most people in the U.S. understand that slavery was the condition black people were forced into before the end of the Civil War. That’s entirely understandable: The United States became the largest slave society in the Atlantic World in the mid-19th century, and those bonded men, women, and children were of African descent. Indeed, I first heard of slavery from my mother’s stories of the brutality her ancestors suffered on the land she grew up on—and we visited often when I was a child—in rural South Carolina. Colonial and antebellum slavery was a shameful episode in this nation’s history, one that most Americans rather not focus on, preferring instead to celebrate this year the 150th anniversary of the end of that institution via the ratification of the 13th Amendment.

The horror of nine black men and women recently killed while holding prayer service at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston by a man who steeped himself in a racist ideology driven by a pro-slavery philosophy from the 18th and 19th centuries, however, has brought to a screeching halt our celebrations of the “end to slavery.” Instead, the nation is deeply entrenched in a debate regarding the public display and commemoration of one of slavery’s most potent symbols, and one of the accused Charleston murder’s chosen personal icons: the Confederate flag.

What most of us should realize, however, is that beyond these kinds of symbols, the racial mistrust and misunderstandings that linger, and the inequalities—institutionalized and customary—that never completely disappeared after black emancipation, the phenomenon of slavery itself literally is still with us. Slavery—the physical and fiscal ownership of one human being by another—is one of the most common behaviors in our global history. Almost every civilization around the world has practiced some form of slavery, from antiquity through the modern era. American slavery is not simply a relic of one particular time and place, but part of a global continuum that extends from the ancient world—where societies from Egypt and Rome to Greece and Asia had slaves—to modern times.

The early slaves could be spoils of war, but some also inherited their status. Many were kidnapped or purchased from traders. Still others were debtors or the orphaned, abandoned, or sold children of impoverished families. They didn’t just work in the domestic sphere, but were court administrators, soldiers, merchants, miners, craftsmen, agricultural workers and supervisors, musicians, and human carriers. Female slaves also served as water carriers, midwives, and healers, as well as concubines and sex slaves. Some form of slavery also existed in what would become the United States among American Indian nations, many of whom acquired slaves through slave raids or took them as prisoners of war.

Approaching slavery from such a global angle makes it easier to see the institution’s persistence around the world today, as a $32-billion-per-year industry that enslaves an estimated 20 to 30 million people. They are movable pieces of chattel (property), debt peons, sexual slaves, and forced laborers. They come from, and are enslaved in, both poor and wealthy nations (including the United States), although the poor and politically dispossessed make up the majority of the enslaved. So, too, do women and children. While most human trafficking is illegal, the social, economic, and political marginality of its victims, and the wealth and power of its benefactors, keep local, national and international authorities suspiciously inept in eradicating the problem. But these are not the only obstacles.

War—some of it fueled by cultural difference, particularly religion—and slavery often go hand in hand, making it difficult for police and government agencies to allocate the resources necessary to consistently and comprehensively tackle the issue. In the last decade, for example, conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Nigeria, and other places have resulted in thousands of women and children being kidnapped and forced into sexual and domestic slavery. We see some of this in headlines, such as the kidnappings and subsequent enslavement of female students in Nigeria by Boko Haram. Military conflict also has thrown tens of thousands of male and female children and adolescents into the position of bonded soldiers in war-torn parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Just the other week, headlines indicated that while some of the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram over the years have been rescued, others have been forced to become soldiers.

Like war, poverty and social marginalization create populations quite vulnerable to enslavement. Each year millions of impoverished men, women, and children in South and East Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean are forced into slave labor in their home countries and in Western countries where they are brought to serve.

But what do these forms of slavery look and feel like? We have some accounts, thanks to a few brave survivors. The female author and antislavery activist Mende Nazer and an adolescent boy only known as Majok, for example, have both testified to their capture, rape, and forced labor in Sudan, where it is estimated that as many as 200,000 have been enslaved. In war-ravaged Afghanistan, an illegal tradition of kidnapping adolescent boys, such as Fahrad, who was 13 at the time his neighbor tricked him away from his home and held him captive for five months, exploits these youth as sex slaves (“bachi baza”) for powerful men.

If you live in a large U.S. city, you probably have come across these desperate people, who appear to us as low-ranking, foreign-born workers in restaurant kitchens or nail salons, as domestic workers, and as prostitutes. But they are trapped—sometimes even sold by people they know and love—and are under the near-complete control of those for whom they work. On the floor of the United Nations, Kikka Cerpa, for example, told the story of how her boyfriend tricked her into leaving her home in Venezuela to work in New York City in the early 1990s. Kikka believed she was going to be a nanny, but ended up being beaten, raped, and forced into prostitution in order to pay off her boyfriend’s bills. A “customer” promised to help her to escape, but instead held her as his own sex and domestic slave for 10 years.

No one will go on record supporting slavery, yet no one has been able to stop it either. Human trafficking legislation and activism around the world, including in the U.S., have had little success. The anniversary of the end of the U.S. Civil War, and with it, the end of some forms of slavery in our nation, certainly is worthy of celebration. But we also need to recognize that eradicating every form of slavery, here and abroad, should be essential to our moral, economic, and political agendas as a nation and as part of a global community. Eradicating generations’ old symbols is just one piece of the task, a very tiny piece of an enormous and complicated task.

The post The Confederate Flag’s Gone, But Slavery’s Still Here appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What may well prove to be the most striking of all the many ironies in the life and career of Nikki Haley, born Nimrata Nikki Randahawa, came when, at her mother’s request, she was at least allowed to perform her talent number, a very capable rendition of “This Land Is Your Land.” Anyone searching for a compelling visual testimony to the brutal absurdity of the American South’s racial obsessions surely need look no further than the photo of little Nikki on the pageant stage, clutching the wrapped package containing the fittingly deflated beach ball that she and her sister received as what she later called their “disqualification” prize. Surely no one in attendance that night, save, one senses in retrospect, perhaps the little girl herself, could imagine that some three decades later, Bamberg would boast four signs welcoming motorists to the “Home of Nikki Haley, Governor of South Carolina.”

It is tempting to see a story of both personal triumph and regional redemption in the meteoric political ascent of this woman who was born an “other” to blacks and whites in a society where skin color really mattered. Yet contrary to deep-seated liberal presumptions, Nikki Haley has proven to be anything but the empathetic, compassionate champion of minorities and women that her background seemed almost to mandate. Instead, growing up almost astride the color line appears to have quickly shown a savvy young woman like Haley which side of the racial divide offered the better prospects for fulfilling her ambitions. The same was true of the partisan divide as well, for South Carolina was already an established GOP stronghold when she entered the 2004 primary, where she stunned the pundits by knocking off the longest-serving incumbent in the state House of Representatives before sailing unopposed in an overwhelmingly Republican district through the general election to take her seat as the first Indian-American member of the South Carolina legislature.

Six years later, in a campaign marked by persistent rumors of her marital infidelity and a fellow Republican’s reference to her as an “[expletive] raghead,” Haley not only dispatched three better-known primary rivals on the way to become the first female and non-white occupant of the governor’s mansion, but she also won praise from national Republican leaders like Sarah Palin, who called her “the proud daughter of immigrants who worked day and night to achieve the American dream.”

Truth be told, Nikki Haley, an early Tea Party favorite, has hardly proven herself a friend of immigrants, or people of color in general. She has opposed a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and, as governor, she championed a new law requiring state-issued photo I.D.s for all voters. Despite her state’s large indigent (disproportionately minority) population, she refused the Affordable Care Act’s offer of increased Medicaid funding, flatly declaring, “We will not expand Medicaid ever.” On the other hand, Haley is just fine with forking over lavish public subsidies to new employers who also have the governor’s personal assurance that “we’d rather die than have unions here.”

Indeed, Haley stands shoulder to shoulder with other Deep South governors in their longstanding and unwavering faith in bringing in new industry at any cost. Forced increasingly to weigh their obligations to preserve segregation against the development imperative as civil rights pressures mounted, the balance began to tip in favor of the latter in the 1960s, when concerns about the potentially harmful effects of racial tensions on business development helped to pave the way for the initial desegregation of public schools and other public facilities and accommodations. A similar consideration has factored heavily in more recent disputes over removing the Confederate battle flag from state property or excising it from the flags of several southern states.

In South Carolina, that flag might still be flying atop the state capitol had a torrent of threatened economic and tourist boycotts and pressure from the state’s business community not forced the legislature 15 years ago to at least move it to the capitol grounds. Though this placement was still far from satisfactory to most black South Carolinians, Governor Haley had shown no public inclination to move against it until the cold-blooded slaughter of nine African- Americans inside their Charleston church by a Rebel-flag-worshipping gunman became both catalyst and premise for a step that southern political leaders had been at once eager but too timid to take. The flag issue has long been the proverbial elephant not simply in the room but squarely astride the shoulders of southern GOP governors and congressmen, not to mention business leaders.

April 6, 2015. The American flag and South Carolina state flag fly above the confederate flag at the statehouse in Columbia, South Carolina.

Not only did the flag pose a threat to party unity, but clinging to such a divisive and seemingly hostile and provincial symbol is hardly indicative of a cosmopolitan state or community ready to welcome global companies and their employees. Make no mistake about it, the moves by Nikki Haley and her counterparts in other southern states amounted in no small sense to what a proponent of ditching the Confederate insignia on the Mississippi state flag once called a “strategic business decision.” Without questioning the sincerity of their expressions of horror and grief over the Charleston tragedy in the least, distancing their state and their party from what so many see as an emblem of hatred and persecution seems to have a huge upside for southern Republicans, especially those with national political ambitions like South Carolina’s Senator Lindsey Graham or perhaps even, its governor as well.

Newsweek’s decision in July 2010 to herald Nikki Haley on its cover as “The Face of the New South” may have startled some at the time, but this has become a common trope in recent days. Its aptness, however, rests not in Haley’s skin color or gender but in her politics, which epitomize the GOP’s gradual shift over the last generation or so away from its old blatantly racialized “southern strategy” to a new, ostensibly “colorblind” but hardly race-neutral conservatism anchored in a coldly pragmatic, pro-corporate worldview.

All of that said, albeit 150 years too late, the move by Haley and other southern leaders to finally furl the Confederate flag is a welcome one nonetheless. History, after all, offers too few examples of right things done for precisely the right reasons to afford us the luxury of being picky.

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