‘What other flag is there?’

I have never been a slave owner and I would not care to be one; in fact, I am disgusted at the thought.

Still, my heritage is inalienably linked to a Southern confederacy of people who saw nothing wrong with enslaving people on the grounds of something as arbitrary as the color of their skin—I imagine more than a few bodies rolled over in their graves when I came out brown.

My maternal grandfather—a World War II-era navigator for the U.S. Air Force—was a Virginia man who greeted everyone he met with friendly words. Ignorant rednecks notwithstanding, a proper Southerner (at least the ones I’ve known personally) could teach us all something about treating people with dignity and respect. True Southern hospitality is second to none.

Upon a weekend visit with my Grandfather during my college years, I told him about a controversy at my school over whether or not students should be allowed to hang confederate flags outside their dorm room windows (this is not a new debate). To which he quipped, “What other flag is there?”—jokingly, of course.

The point being that for him and many more southerners like him, the Confederacy (and subsequently the Confederate flag) stood for far more than some racist struggle to preserve slavery and certainly more than some modern-day rednecks’ battle-cry for white supremacy. He never owned any slaves either, but he was a proud southerner through and through. Among other things, he kept a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee prominently displayed in his house with a loaded gun rack of various rifles and an old musket that looked as if it might have been used in America’s Civil War.

The primary issue and of grave concern to the Confederate States of America were their states’ rights to govern themselves—and no, that certainly does not excuse the matter of slavery. But the fear of tyrannical rules was a lesson not easily forgotten from a mere 100 years prior. And so the most legitimate source of Southern pride in the Confederacy rests in honoring the dead who stood steadfast against an imminent threat (perceived or otherwise) to their independence, hence (for example) Virginia’s enduring motto of “Sic Semper Tyrannis” (Thus Always to Tyrants). And no, the irony (or better yet, the hypocrisy) of enslaving one group of people in the name of freedom for another does not escape me.

No doubt the Civil War ended as it should—the United States of America persevered, each state continues to enjoy some level of sovereign immunity, and slavery was abolished.

(Coincidentally, the issue of our CNMI’s “sovereign immunity” is currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to be adjudication in a case brought by NMPASI on behalf of an individual with mental illness.)

Discrimination is ugly in all its forms. The reality is that battle fronts are formed, lost, and won daily on the basis of race, religion, color, sex and disability—the latter being NMPASI’s area of expertise.

My Grandfather, despite being a white male product of a segregated South, took great pride in his colored grandchildren. Yet, he was about 70 years old (in the early 1990’s) the first time he ever invited a black man into his house for a sit down dinner.

“I had Mr. Witcher and his family over for dinner the other night,” he told me. “And I’ll tell you, they were downright pleasant.”

To that point, Mr. Witcher (a black man also from Virginia) had been the one who took care of my Grandfather’s lawn. One of my fondest memories from my brief time of living with my Grandfather was helping Mr. Witcher rake and bag leaves in the crisp Virginia fall weather. And truth be told, Mr. Witcher was the first black American I had ever spoken with directly—I would have been about 11 years old at the time. Subsequently, the first black person I can honestly say that I made friends with thereafter wouldn’t be until high school. Even he might be surprised to know that and even more surprised to think that I might actually be a confederate sympathizer though I suspect he is clear about where I stand on the issue of racism.

The stars-and-bars of our Southern ancestors is the cross that I and all other great, great, great, great grandsons and daughters of the confederate South have to bear. But I will not apologize for it any more than I’d apologize for the crucifix in light of the countless atrocities committed at the hands of past Catholic zealots or, for that matter, the U.S. flag for any misdeeds committed in the shadows of our red, white and blue. I am what I am.

We are an imperfect, flawed breed of people grown out of a regrettable history that we cannot erase and “woe to those who try lest they be doomed to repeat it.”

For more on discrimination against people with disabilities, please feel to contact the NMPASI office at (670) 235-7273/4 [tel] / 235-7275 [fax/tty] or via the Internet at www.nmpasi.org.