COMMENTARY - Enemies in our midst

Isn't it pretty to think that students at Duke University are not bigots or fools? Unfortunately, some are both, and invariably other students suffer the misfortune of living beside them. Last week, as a friend and I were leaving a nearly vacant residence hall, we saw a cooler sitting in a fraternity commons in plain view from the public hallway featuring a painted Confederate battle flag on its top above some lettering advertising an "Old South Party" that certainly brought joy and gonorrhea to the fraternal order of rednecks and their misuses sometime during early April. Tempers shakily in check, we started looking at the pictures on the wall, discovering an unsurprising paucity of pigment and an equally unsurprising abundance of men with Roman numerals after their names. But as time passed, I had second thoughts about my reaction. Could it be possible, as one of my white friends suggested, that the Confederate flag is simply a symbol of Southern heritage?

Patrick Buchanan, the ultraconservative darling of elderly Jewish voters in Florida, argued for this interpretation in a December 2003 article called "Vilifying Southern Heritage," in which he claims that displaying the battle flag says: "We love our Southern heritage and shall never forget our ancestors who fought and died under this flag."

But this is disingenuous. Germans and Italians whose beloved parents perished fighting for Fascism do not honor their legacy in significant numbers by parading about with swastikas and armbands. Flags do not honor individuals. Flags honor regimes. And the Confederate flag honors the racist Confederate States of America.

Moreover, Buchanan's argument states that the Christian cross has been used as a means for effecting racial intimidation but has obviously not lost its principal symbolic value is an example of analogizing on crack: the cross and the Confederate flag are conceptually incommensurable. The cross is much older and only recently has been used to intimidate blacks, though it has an extensive history of intimidating Arabs and Jews. In any event, its symbolic legacy is too long and rich to be usurped by subnormal bumpkins. Yet the Confederate flag was devised comparatively recently to represent a political entity with explicitly discriminatory social policies. Buchanan has resorted to the illogic of scoundrels. As the famous aphorism goes: when ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Somehow it seems the flag of a regime that endorsed slavery and racial inequality cannot avoid racist taint. If Southern heritage is really the issue, why not valorize Jamestown, or William Faulkner, or any of the musical brilliance that originated in the South? To this Coloradoan, displaying the Confederate battle flag smacks of racial triumphalism and deliberate harassment, an unambiguous way of reminding blacks about the way things used to be and the displayer's nostalgia for that dead era. Why rally heritage around a symbol Strom Thurmond carried while agitating for segregation? Why rally history around a symbol that has flown over innumerable Ku Klux Klan rallies and lynchings? Proponents of this argument do not even believe themselves.

But what really shocks me is that this party could happen without inspiring any student notice or protest. In other circles, people pay attention to the Confederate battle flag and recognize its menacing connotations, and this includes federal judges. In fact, on May 30, 2003, The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld a lower court decision which affirmed the legality of firing a man for displaying the Confederate battle flag on his toolbox at work in violation of his company's anti-harassment policy.

Duke, too, has an anti-harassment policy. According to the Office of Institutional Equity, "Harassment is the creation of a hostile or intimidating environment, in which verbal or physical conduct, because of its severity and/or persistence, is likely to interfere significantly with an individual's work or education." I can't imagine why this policy explicitly excludes written harassment (Is it okay to scrawl racial slurs on someone's door?) and in this form seems utterly ridiculous; I am led to conclude that the University regards some forms of written or drawn material as unacceptable. Leaving a cooler painted with a racist symbol in a public space in a dormitory, where it is not optional to live, seems to be a violation of this policy and--legally speaking--is similar to the case recently decided by the Fourth Circuit, since black members of the custodial staff are responsible for cleaning our dormitory and in the process will surely encounter that symbol.

Nor is this a matter of free speech. In a living space like a residence hall, the University has a compelling interest in keeping the peace between residents that supercedes the right students have to display racially offensive material. A Confederate battle flag in a dormitory is indefensible; it is an invitation to violence--fighting words. It is divisive, and it is wrong. Gentlemen: Y'all can go to hell. For your sake, I wish it existed.

Matt Gilllum is a Trinity senior.