Dukes of Hazzard the South Will Rise Again
J ohn Schneider, AKA Bo Knuckles from the TV prove The Dukes of Hazzard, recently asked his fans a question via YouTube: "Was The Dukes of Hazzard a racially charged bear witness? Was the intention of the paint scheme on the General Lee a white supremacist statement in any way? And if you think it was, I wanna know."
For the uninitiated, the General Lee was the Duke brothers' 1969 Dodge Charger, which outperformed the cop cars of rural Georgia week after week from 1979 to 1985. Bo and Luke's automobile was named subsequently a Confederate ceremonious war hero; its horn played the opening bars of Dixie; and, as for its pigment scheme, it sported a giant Confederate flag on its roof. Information technology was basically the South on wheels.
We all know why Schneider felt the demand to ask, 35 years later the testify ended. In response to the police killing of George Floyd and the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests, Confederate monuments and symbols are being removed and reassessed, non least the flag. In June, Nascar banned Amalgamated flags from its race meetings and Mississippi became the final US state to remove the Amalgamated battle emblem from its state flag. And before this calendar month, the Usa Defense Department banned the Confederate flag and "other divisive symbols" from all military bases. Culture is also undergoing a reappraisal: Amazon's streaming service is considering removing The Dukes of Hazzard from its catalogue.
And information technology'south not over yet. Dispute rages over what the Amalgamated flag really signifies. With his limitless want to open another front in the culture wars, President Trump recently asserted it represents "freedom of speech", and criticised Nascar. Spike Lee, on the other hand, said the flag made him feel "the same way my Jewish brothers and sisters experience about the swastika". Having one time stood for one, unambiguous thing – the Confederate army during the American ceremonious state of war – the flag has now accumulated a multitude of meanings, many far removed from the original Amalgamated crusade. Popular culture has been primal to that process.
The responses to Schneider's question were an overwhelming "No", even from commenters claiming to exist black and Latino fans. On the face of it, The Dukes of Hazzard was simple, adept-natured fun. It barely ever broached matters of race, slavery or the ceremonious state of war, although the erasure of not-white characters from the landscape made that easier. Sure, their motorcar had a Amalgamated flag, but the Dukes were just "practiced ol' boys, never meanin' no harm", every bit the theme tune had it.
The Amalgamated flag equally we know information technology – 13 white stars on a blue cross with a carmine groundwork – was designed in 1861 by William Porcher Miles, an avowed pro-slavery secessionist politician. After the civil war, it became the prevailing way to stand for the Confederacy, initially in the context of military history and memorials. Information technology began to seep into popular civilization in the 1940s, says John Coski, historian at the American Ceremonious War Museum and writer of The Confederate Battle Flag. It was adopted by southern fraternities and soldiers from the s used it during the second earth war. Information technology entered postwar politics via the pro-segregation Dixiecrats. In the early on 1950s, the US adult a "flag fad" and suddenly it was everywhere: on T-shirts, licence plates and mugs. "It became an icon for an attitude," says Coski.
And that attitude was "rebel". But, rather than military and political rebellion confronting the north in defence force of a racist ideology, the flag came to represent more than nebulous forms of rebellion. Lynyrd Skynyrd's 1974 pro-southern anthem Sugariness Home Alabama famously featured the flag on its comprehend, and the ring used it liberally in their graphics, merch and stage act, equally did such other southern rock acts equally Tom Fiddling and the Allman Brothers Band. Piffling would unfurl the flag on phase during the song Rebels, whose chorus begins: "I was born a insubordinate down in Dixie." They all later renounced its utilize, though not Johnny Greenbacks, who sang in front of information technology on The Muppet Prove in 1980.
It wasn't just southern bands. Fundamental Scream put the flag on the cover of their 1994 album Requite Out Merely Don't Surrender, but this was intended to point their new southern-tinged audio, the album having been recorded in Memphis. The cover was actually a photograph by William Eggleston, celebrated chronicler of the southern American landscape whose work often incorporates Amalgamated flags, overtly or covertly. Eggleston's best known paradigm may be 1973's Greenwood, Mississippi , itself used as a cover for Big Star's 1974 album Radio City. It depicts a bare lightbulb on a garish red ceiling, with white cables forming an X across it, similar a subliminal Amalgamated flag.
On screen, the flag came to correspond another class of rebellion, that of the outlaw. It had often figured in movies in a historical context, as in Gone With the Wind, but a new trail was blazed by car-chase caper Smokey and the Bandit, the US's highest-grossing movie of 1977 after Star Wars. It features many elements The Dukes of Hazzard would later conform: a charming southern maverick (Burt Reynolds) evading inept cops in a fast car, with a Confederate flag on its licence plate.
In both cases, the flag is associated with balmy rebellion against the local police, more on the level of moonshine-running, in a virtually post-racial southward. Consciously or not, popular culture was now in pace with the "lost cause" narrative, which had striven to dissociate the Confederacy from slavery and racism, aligning it instead with dignity and heroism.
The reality was quite different. For one thing, General Lee wasn't some proficient soldier who happened to exist on the losing side. "When Robert Eastward Lee's army marched into Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863," says historian Kevin Levin, "it was with the intent of kidnapping upwards of 200 costless blacks. That army was carrying the Confederate battle flag. That army was a slave-catching ground forces. Information technology was functioning as the military arm of a government that had one purpose: to protect the establishment of slavery."
To African Americans specially, the Confederate flag represents a darker class of rebellion, i that targets their civil rights. The flag was adopted past the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and was frequently brandished by counter-protesters at civil rights marches. Even in 1982, when The Dukes of Hazzard was at its meridian, John Hawkins, the first black cheerleader at the University of Mississippi, ignited a controversy by refusing to conduct the flag at college football games, where information technology was a ubiquitous fixture. His fraternity was picketed past over 1,000 white students waving Confederate flags. The local Ku Klux Klan held a protest.
"What is the idea that this symbol is intended to convey?" says Kyle Bowser, consultant to the Hollywood bureau of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). "The mutual denominators seem to be elements that are malicious, unproductive and certainly injurious to certain members of our club." In 2000, the NAACP and other groups began an economic boycott of Southward Carolina over its refusal to remove the Amalgamated flag from the state capitol, where information technology had flown since 1962.
Ironically, effectually the same time, the flag began to be appropriated by blackness musicians, who sought to redefine its significant. Such rappers equally Outkast's André 3000, Lil Jon and Ludacris all wore the symbol. Ludacris caused a stir at the 2005 Vibe awards past performing draped caput to toe in a Confederate flag outfit. After the bear witness, he said: "This flag represents the oppression that we as African Americans have endured for years. This is a symbol of segregation and racism. At the stop of the performance, I removed and stomped on the flag to reveal my version of the flag – a flag comprised of black, red and green. Those are the colours of Africa."
In a less thought-out manner, in 2013 Kanye W wore a jacket emblazoned with the flag and incorporated information technology into merchandise for his Yeezus tour. "I took the Confederate flag and made it my flag," he said. "Now what you gonna practise?"
All these attempts to untether the flag from its original associations were largely undone in 2015, when a mass shooting in a church in Charleston, Due south Carolina, left nine African Americans dead. The 21-yr-old shooter, Dylann Roof, was avowedly motivated by white supremacist beliefs, and his website featured images of himself waving the Amalgamated flag. Within weeks, major retailers – including Wal-Mart, Amazon, Sears and eBay – pledged to finish selling Confederate flag merchandise. The manufacture of toy replicas of the General Lee also ceased. And, in a victory for the NAACP, the flag was removed from the South Carolina state capitol. Mississippi was the last hold-out.
The recent moving ridge of Blackness Lives Matter protests ought to have ended the thought of the Confederate flag as an innocuous symbol, only the boxing continues. According to a Quinnipiac poll this month, 56% of Americans encounter the Amalgamated flag as a symbol of racism. In another poll, nevertheless, 70% of Republicans saw the flag as "a symbol of southern pride". Even as the war machine and Nascar abandon the flag, other southern groups are resisting the erasure, encouraged by Donald Trump. On 15 July, some four,500 "patriots" drove in an eight-mile convoy through Ocala, Florida, in support of the flag which, of class, appeared in affluence. Leading the convoy was a replica of The Dukes of Hazzard's Full general Lee.
To its defenders, equally the bumper sticker puts it, the flag represents "heritage not hate". The NAACP's Kyle Bowser responds: "I would press those who feel that connection to clearly articulate that heritage. Is it the nutrient they ate? Is it a manner of dress or art? I don't encounter what the connective tissue is betwixt states that hoisted the Confederate flag, other than their delivery to the exploitation of black people."
John Coski points out that the people who were almost opposed to the proliferation of the Confederate flag into the wider culture were Confederate groups themselves. The United Daughters of the Confederacy were responsible for airbrushing Confederate history and erecting monuments to the civil war in the 20th century. In the 1940s and 50s, they campaigned to laissez passer laws restricting the use of the flag solely to historical and commemorative purposes.
"Why brand a signal of trying to go on it out at that place," says Coski, "where everyone has a right to interpret it however they wish? Isn't it in your interest to limit it to museums, where it has an unambiguous historical context, or to cemeteries where it has an unambiguous memorial context?"
Should nosotros also put The Dukes of Hazzard in a museum? Should we remove it from our screens, like Disney did with Song of the S (having accustomed that the film's cheery nostalgia for slavery and plantation life was grossly offensive); or provide historical context, as HBO Max recently did with Gone With the Wind? These are catchy questions. But, while the "civilization war" grinds on, no creator of film, boob tube, music or art is probable to employ the Amalgamated flag unthinkingly e'er again – and most volition choose not to use it at all.
As with the Confederacy itself, the fight to retain the flag in The states public life is facing defeat. The only thing it now seems to symbolise is America's inability to heal its divisions and reconcile with its past.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/jul/27/from-dukes-of-hazzard-to-kanye-west-the-curse-of-the-confederate-flag
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