It doesn’t matter when our families moved to America, because all of us here own the past. 

Slave owners weren’t complete monsters–though they certainly were monstrous selectively–and those of us who got here much later might have acted just as abominably if we had been born to landed parents in the antebellum South–in fact, we probably would have. As the Confederate flag is hopefully lowered for good, the best thing we can do is realize that it’s possible for any people, any nation, to live within a delusion that’s unspeakably cruel to some. And we should ask ourselves if the American flag looks different to native peoples than the Stars and Bars appears to most of the rest of us.

From Campbell Robertson in the New York Times:

COLUMBIA, S.C. — It has been quite a few years since the lost cause has appeared quite as lost as it did Tuesday. As the afternoon drew on and their retreat turned into a rout, the lingering upholders of the Confederacy watched as license plates, statues and prominently placed Confederate battle flags slipped from their reach.

“This is the beginning of communism,” said Robert Lampley, who was standing in the blazing sun in front of the South Carolina State House shortly after the legislature voted overwhelmingly to debate the current placement of the Confederate battle flag. “The South is the last bastion of liberty and independence. I know we’re going to lose eventually.”

“Our people are dying off,” he went on, before encouraging a white reporter to “keep reproducing.” …

“You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters,” said Greg Stewart, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the executive director of Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis.

Mr. Stewart was livid at the “reckless and unnecessary” statement by Philip Gunn, the Republican speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, that the Confederate battle saltire needed to be removed from the Mississippi state flag. Mr. Stewart pointed out that the state had voted by huge margins to keep the flag as it was in 2001, and that should have been that.•