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I try to learn something about US history without any expectation to be or become an expert of it and I notice that, after the independence in 1776, this new Country, former English colony with all the future in front of it, found a great difficulty in keeping its political and economic unity because its industrial revolution, begun in the first decades of the XIX century, took place only in the northern States, while the southern ones remained bound to agriculture, mainly based on cotton and tobacco.

These two forms of economy created two different societies; the North was more modern and progressive, while the South much more conservative, based on the economic and political power of land owners and cotton dealers. The real shame of the South economy was that it was founded on slaves' work, all Black people deported from Africa since the beginning of the previous century and until the first half of the XIX, despite the attempts of the federal government to make respect the ban on slavery by the South.

This conflict become even a bloody civil war in the period 1862-1867 among the slave States of the South (that called themselves "Confederate", with their own flag) and those of the North (with capital in Washington). The Confederate White men wanted to keep their economic and racial privileges on the Black, treated like beasts because considered sub-humans, only good to work for the White men.

For all these reasons, the Confederate flag, carried by the soldiers of the South in battle, should be banned because, in my mind, it's the symbol of slavery, racism, privilege and conservative mentality. Still today, something of these characters is present in the southern States, the most conservative and also the poorest ones of the U.S., in the average.
Then, this is the flag of the Secession War and it is a division and weakness symbol for America.

We cannot forget that the racial segregation between White (always in dominant position) and Black people in the South had continued after the Secession War, until the dramatic years of the 1960's and 1970's, when the Country was tormented by the bloody protests and campaigns for the civil rights started by the Black community of America, led by Martin Luther King and Malcom X, against racial segregation. Surely, the Black people of the South couldn't adopt this flag as their own, like all the other White people involved in this fight for equal rights between races.

I would like to see the ban of this flag, but I don't know how to cancel it from the mind of many White citizens of the South, who vote and provide the Republican Party and its Presidents with funds. They belong, in the largest part, to the middle and upper class of the South, still holding the best places in the economy and politics of their States; they still hate Black people fearing to lose or share their privileges with them. So, the Confederate flag is their symbol against the rest of the U.S., considered as dominated by "Negroes, Jews and Communists".

In their hypocrisy, many of them defend this flag talking more generically about "Our land traditions and culture". They avoid to mention the racial discrimination problem that, today, regards also the many Latin-American immigrates that the White men of the South (and not only, in the U.S.) exploit as clandestine workers.

So, if the US government were really determined to reduce the racial and economic discrimination, the Confederate flag should surely be banned as the symbol of all these problems that must be resolved. I think the progress toward social and economic justice in the South needs to be achieved also on the cultural field, by removing certain dangerous "worms" from people's mind.

Learn more about this author, Aldo Bonincontro.
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