Designer Marc Jacobs recently released a new take on the rainbow flag: “rebel pride.” This startling development has everyone in the entire world wondering if the multi-hued symbol will come back in style. No one question has captivated so many people since “Who Shot JR?” (It was jilted lover – and sister-in-law – Kristin, by the way.) [The Shophound]
Revival?
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CTnSF
I’m not sure how I fel about this one. I grew up in the South and I view the Confederate Flag the same way Jews view the Nazi Flag–as a symbol of ethnic hatred, violence, and murder.
What is Jacobs trying to say with this combination—that redneck bigots have gay pride? I ain’t buying it!
fredo777
I’m sure how I feel about this one.
It’s crap.
Kid A
It’s ugly as fuck.
al
I can’t be the only one who thinks this is really clever.
fredo777
If by “really clever” you mean “pointless, controversial symbolism used for shock value”, yes. Really clever.
The Banania Blogger
CTnSF, I’m from the South, too.
You know just as well as I do that that flag doesn’t “mean” ethnic hatred and murder. It’s come to be associated with fringe racism and the KKK and reappropriated for hatred movements in the historical “Union.” That doesn’t make it a symbol of that hatred anymore than the Christian and Nordic mythological symbols that have been taken up to the same ends in the US.
That flag is, as Fredo777 points out, used here as shock symbolism because it’s so misunderstood as a symbol of our nation’s biggest headache and most completely distorted historical scenario. That doesn’t mean that it “represents” those ideas – in fact, in the beginning, it was a symbol of defiance and of assertion of rights. Now those rights seem ghastly, but it’s about context, history, and politics.
Boiling that all down to racial hatred and comparing it to Nazism is an uninteresting way to make offensive that which should just be ignored as an equally uninteresting reappropriation of a highly misused symbol representing a time in American history that is still widely misunderstood and incorrectly taught. (By the way, wouldn’t the North have been the Nazis of the Civil War? Trying to promulgate an empire by burning half a continent to the ground under the banner of making a better nation for rich industrialists, and all…)
The Banania Blogger
Well, not half a continent, obviously, but a pretty sizable chunk!
Trenton
I love your posts, Banania.
Have we all forgotten that the pink triangle has its origins from the Nazi concentration camps? The meanings of symbols are not fixed and when reappropriated they become even more powerful. I too grew up in the South, and I’ve experienced first-hand all the hatred and contempt associated with the bigots who continueto use it as their symbol, but Banania makes a good point that it’s original meaning was more complex and to some it still does stand for more self/state-sovereignty (even though many proponents would abuse others with that sovereignty).
I think Marc Jacobs is a vapid schmuck, but this is actually a little clever. It merges the symbols rather nicely, and I just love how mad it will make the most hardened renecks to see “their” wonderful symbol defiled by Gay pride.
Still, you couldn’t pay me to wear it… :\
CTnSF
The Banania Blogger, I never said it “means” one thing or the other. I said I “view” it as a symbol of ethnic hatred, violence, and murder and nothing you said changes my view. You are right for the most part that the flag represented defiance to Northern agression and the assertion of the right to own slaves. The Nazis could make the same argument then that they were defending their perverted way of life against outside aggressors, e.g., the Communists.
The point is both the Nazis and the South lost their respective wars and their symbols should not be used today for anything other than a history class, you know, the part when they teach the most evil and barbaric episodes of world history.
I know the whole cultural heritage argument used by some to defend the flag’s use and I know the mentality that goes along with the arguments. It is the same mentality which caused me to flee and call a different place home.
An Other Greek
Gay Treason?
What does this flag stand for?
Treason, division, racism…
Sad chapter of our history,
CAN WE MOVE ON PLEASE,
and can Jacobs resist a poorly-thought out attempt at $$$$ through controversy.
Yuck!
stupid is as stupid does Forrest
—————————————————-
The Banania Blogger
CTnSF, you write as though the South fought FOR slavery and the North fought AGAINST it. This is a historically inaccurate assumption that comes from the fact that Emancipation happened during the War – even Lincoln had no intention to free slaves until it would cripple rich slave owners in the reconquered territories.
The South and what it got attacked and destroyed by the North for weren’t very valiant in light of our current political and cultural understandings of race, because the issue at hand was black slavery. And it is undeniable that that symbol gets charged by those current understandings. But the South didn’t fight *for* racism. They fought for their right to opt out of a constitutional system that favored fat cats in the North getting fat off of textile and tobacco industries dependent on slavery while making villains of people who had no economically feasible way to get out of using slavery in the market system endorsed and created by the North.
The North wanted its raw materials cheaper than wage-labor or surplussing subsistence farms could produce them. It offered no alternatives for the economic system of slavery, one supported mainly by its industrial complex, for the main producers of those raw goods.
Ending slavery was most certainly a worthwhile moral cause, but that certain is *not* what the North originally fought for. Remember that the North had the most to gain from free labor: slavery also kept the poorest white people (those who didn’t own slaves and made up about 75% of the white population) in the South in devastating poverty and subsistence farming. The effects of this are still felt to this day. The South fought for the chance to make its own way and its own choices to better its own lot vis-a-vis the industrial and more populated North who were solidifying a monopoly on federal power.
Those are historical facts that should *never* be forgotten when talking about the Confederacy and what it stood for and what that symbol sincerely means to some really good and honest people who have no racist agenda.
What they fought for is certainly not the same as Nazism (or even comparable to it, really) or other “evil and barbaric episodes of world history.” Nazism created a false political panic in a shaky economy that led to the greatest genocide ever known. That is evil and barbaric. Burning down all of another country’s farms and major cities with the goal of keeping your crop imports duty-free and the people there dependent on the goods you manufacture might be a little evil and barbaric, too.
Your problems with the South that caused you to “flee” it aside, learn the history.
And Trenton, you made a pretty righteous point about how people who do use that as a symbol to rally hatred around will be pissed.
fredo777
Regardless of the flag’s debatable roots, you’ll have a hard time convincing me that there aren’t some who have, in fact, since used the confederate flag with racist intentions.
CTnSF
I know my history and the true motivations of the Civil War. The question is, do you know your history? You claim that Nazism “led to the greatest genocide ever known.” Really?
What was slavery in your view? As a student of history, certainly you know that millions of more people died during the African slave trade in the Americas than died in the Jewish Holocaust. In American Holocaust (1992), David Stannard estimates that some 30 to 60 million Africans died being enslaved. Or is it your view that the African Holocaust does not measure on par with the other evil episode of history?
I am not trying to start a pissing match about which period was more evil and barbaric…they all were. The issue here is the rebel flag and I along with other Southern descendants find it repugnant and Jacobs’ use of it is distasteful to say the least. So you can continue to fantasize about the ol’ south and I will continue to dump on it every time I think about it.
allstarecho
Nothing new here.. Equality Mississippi designed a gay “state” flag for Mississippi already and has used it for 3 years now. Maybe they should sue Jacobs. You can view it at http://www.equality.ms/images/MSrainbowRebelPride.gif
Scooter Bangs
Slavery lacked good visuals. Had we a good logo to work with there might be ONE memorial to those that died in the Middle passage in addition to the dozen in America dedicated to those who died in the European holocaust.
As a person of color, this ‘rebel’ gay flag is unacceptable even as a joke. I would sooner wear a calico swastika then this latest abomination from Jacobs. (This is worse than when he tried to revive pony skin coats)
What ever happened to Todd Oldham? And When is it going to happen to Marc?
Lena Dahlstrom
@ Trenton – The thing is, the pink triangle was appropriated by the very folks who were forced to wear it, i.e. the victims of its original symbolism.
That’s a bit different that appropriating symbols that were used by the _victimizers._
(Yes, we can argue about the original meaning of the Confederate flag, and its symbolism to the general population of white Southerners, but the fact remains that in recent history it’s been a symbol flaunted by racists, anti-segregationists, white separatists, Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.)
The Banania Blogger
I don’t think anyone is denying that slavery was bad, that tens of millions of people unjustly lost their lives, or that somehow that shouldn’t be taken into account when thinking about the Civil War. And I have been openly admitting that that flag has been charged with a lot of meaning and has become a symbol for intolerant and hateful people since the beginning of Reconstruction.
However, the completely amoral violation of human dignity that was slavery was not a genocide, period. It was not the systematic destruction of one people by another by means of massacre. It was exploitative labor supported by mercantilism and the rise of regional industrialism. Does that mean the Middle Passage and the institutional slavery used in European colonies and successor nations were more evil than the Holocaust? Less? No. They’re both terrible blemishes on the histories of many nations – in Africa, in the Americas, and in Europe.
But in fact, you’re not just talking about the Middle Passage or just slavery when you’re talking about the American Civil War. By that point, in fact, America had banned all imports of human chattel. The Middle Passage was at its most vibrant, in fact, when the North had slaves and when Britain was running the show. It’s not an indictment of only the South.
What is an indictment of the South was the continued use of slave labor, then going to extremes to preserve it. However, that does not extinguish the economic realities of the time – in either the North or the South. Identifying the Confederacy with racism and blaming it and it alone for the slavery that DID kill that many millions is tragically naïve and historically vacant.
That isn’t romantic. That isn’t some lore of an old South that will rise again. That’s balanced, fair history that deserves consideration.
Until you’re this offended over the use of British, American, German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese flags as motifs or on their own, you are falling victim to biased histories and into an acute form of hypocrisy.
CTnSF
Although you make very passionate and eloquent arguments for the preservation of the symbolism of the Confederate Flag, I am surprised you do not apply the same skill and recognize the African slave trade as a form of genocide. But of course, it all depends on the perspective or definition which you attribute to the word.
According to the UN Genocide Treaty, Article 2, it is defined as:
“Genocide means any of the following Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
I am sure, if you are honest, you see slavery falling within the UN definition.
But again, I’m not here to squabble over the meaning of words. We are talking about symbolism here, and of course the discussion would be entirely different had the South won the war. But it didn’t. The war is over and the South (thankfully) lost. It would be nice if the South joined the rest of us in the 21st century and stopped hanging on to symbols of a time that is gone and will never come again.
The Banania Blogger
No, now this is really important because the word “genocide” gets thrown around a lot without it being taken seriously enough.
“Genocide means any of the following Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” is the important part of the definition. The other parts are examples of how groups can be systematically destroyed, but they are themselves neither necessary nor sufficient to define a genocide. I really don’t think it was the intention of even the vilest of slave traders to “destroy, in whole or in part” the peoples whom they trafficked to the Americas. While they did, in fact, commit some of those acts, they most definitely did not do so to get rid of those people. Nazis did that to Jews and Roma and the mentally/physically handicapped and queers.
But you’re right – it’s not a pissing contest of evils.
And joined the rest of us? I would take a long look at the classical “Union” to see where that flag gets used as a symbol of racism the most often. I mean, living in New York, I see that used by completely native New York skinheads. They certainly don’t care about regionalist disparities or states’ rights.
But that’s not an indictment of the South. It’s an indictment of racism and racists. The place and that outlook are not equivalent.
fredo777
Funny that you should mention the British flag, because I’m not so sure how crazy I am about their Union Jack, either.
RPCV
Love it. Now, that’s one rainbow design I’d wear – proudly!!
Matthew
The redesign of the flag isn’t that interesting. And FYI, it was CATHERINE, not Kristin, who shot JR…
Mr C
That Flag is scary. But it does represent a many of Gays who feel “Confederate”
CTnSF
I am sure you would agree that a people can be “destroyed” in more ways than just physical disappearance (or to use your term, get “rid of”). The Native Americans are still physically present, but as part of the extermination campaign, their way of life, culture, freedom, and spirit have been destroyed. There can be no dispute that they were victims of genocide.
Decendants of Africans are still around but the forefathers/mothers were chained, beat, murdered, raped, separated from family, stripped of their culture, language, heritage, deprived of their freedom, and broken until their spirit was gone. All of this was done to deprive them of their humanity and reduce them to nothing more than animals. The institution of slavery effectively did “get rid of” who they were as a people. Thus, there should be no dispute that Africans were victims of genocide and slavery should be referred to as the American Holocaust.
RPCV
CTnSF: Holy smokes, will you and your ilk get over slavery? I’m as tired of hearing about slavery as I am DADT and gay pride freak events…….