Trace Adkins and the Confederate flag

Trace Adkins

Now this insulting and apart from that, it reflects the biased US mass media. Trace Adkins who I assume is related to Chet Atkins, a country singer, wore an earring decorated with the confederate flag when he performed for the Christmas tree lighting in the Rockefeller Center on Wednesday night.

"Some regard the flag as a racist symbol" the Associated Press says as it reported the incident. Oh, and "who might that be?" "He meant no offense by it", the AP reports Adkins as saying. To prove how un-racist he is, Adkins says that he is a "Proud American who objects to any oppression" and that the flag represents his "Southern heritage."

Well what aspect of "Southern Heritage" does Adkins represent? The slaveowners? If not, he'd better separate himself from them then.  He claims he is a descendant of "Confederate soldiers" and didn't intend "offense" by wearing it. But I can't accept this. If his relatives were poor white sharecroppers or something I would have more sympathy as the ruling classes, industrialist or slaveocracy, always divides us, always tries to set one group of against the other.  But if he is the descendants of landowners and slaveowners then he should publicly admit that they were on the wrong side.

The reality is that this flag is a racist symbol.  The black folks know that.  Doesn't Trace ever talk to them? Has he never read history or is Trace an idiot?  I don't know him so I wouldn't know.  But he is either an idiot or a racist, what other conclusions can a person draw? .  The Southern Slaveocracy was a racist state in the extreme. Capitalism, the system of production favored by the Northern industrialists is also a racist system but for workers, black or white, a step forward historically.  White workers would not have had the right to vote, the right to organize either under this regime and the fight for such things would have been much harder with racism much stronger had the Southern slaveowners won the civil war. The white workers of the south were barely a step or two above the ladder from the black folks.

So if you can forward this to Trace I would like to hear what he has to say about it. If his descendants were poor white workers then why would he support the southern slaveowners?  And why does he not accept that the symbol of a racist state that considered persons of a different color less than human something to be proud of?  If Germans said they were proud of the Nazi state would he think that was OK?

It is easy for me as a white person to be measured about this. If I were black I'd want to kick his ass.