Our heritage is hate

I have burned one flag in my life. In college, some friends and I set a Confederate flag ablaze in a parking lot one summer afternoon. It was a symbolic way for us to renounce our racist heritage as young southern men.

But renouncing it didn’t erase it. Reducing it to ashes didn’t do anything to end the white supremacy on which the United States was built. Burning it didn’t change the fact that I—and every other white person in this country—was benefitting from the very thing I tried to disavow.

So while I understand why there is such a fervent call to take down the Confederate battle flag flying over the South Carolina capitol in the wake of the Dylann Roof’s terrorist attack at Emanuel AME Church, I am also worried that it will provide white people an easy way to absolve themselves of the white supremacy endemic in U.S. society.