Flags as social objects

Pic: Getty Images/BBC

Flags are social objects, no doubt about it. Not strips of material.

Flags stand between people: they give us something to gather round (hence the origins in military culture and group identity). Rally round the flag. Rally round the leader. Rally round our team. They are designed to be highly visible – unlike secret handshakes and discrete markers, flags are meant to be seen from afar.

They also operate between groups of people as markers of social identity and in doing so test in- and out-group membership (like wearing football “colours” or a sub-group’s uniform “look“)

Over time the marker function of a flag gets overwritten with specific meanings – not just by individuals but by individuals copying each others’ associations.

So the “battle flag of the army of North Virginia” (thought to have originated in 1861) has come – over many years  to be adopted as a social marker of a Southern Identity. It has provided a very simple signal of membership of a particular (white, segregationist) group. Both to in-group members (such as the Charleston gunman Dylann Roof) and those on the outside. Yes, you guessed it, by copying. Other markers have long been available but this one has proved the most popular and resilient, appearing (until this week in Walmart) on clothing, as badges/pins and of course as replica flags. So much so that we all know what it signifies.

Indeed, this is why, at the stirrings of the civil rights movement, the politicians of South Carolina’s state legislature adopted it as a marker of their resistance to federal policies around integration and desegregation of public institutions and public spaces and flew it from the State Capitol building (ensuring also that it could not be tampered with as other flags could, for example by lowering and raising as a mark of respect).

And why so many white supremacist groups and individuals who feel they identify with or want to associate themselves with the Old South choose the flag as their own (both inside and outside the US – certain German groups, forbidden by law from flying the Nazi swastika have adopted it themselves).

Here’s part of the mangled manifesto from Roof:

“I think it is is fitting to start off with the group I have the most real life experience with, and the group that is the biggest problem for Americans.
N****** are stupid and violent. At the same time they have the capacity to be very slick. Black people view everything through a racial lense. Thats what racial awareness is, its viewing everything that happens through a racial lense. They are always thinking about the fact that they are black. This is part of the reason they get offended so easily, and think that some thing are intended to be racist towards them, even when a White person wouldnt be thinking about race. The other reason is the Jewish agitation of the black race.”

But equally its widespread adoption as a social object is why many in modern SC and beyond who identify themselves outside this group see its continued presence (albeit on a public memorial now rather than above the state legislature itself) as an affront. Particularly those who experience the racist attitudes of the group that it connotes, be they black or white.

Its presence in these places – and the reticence of elected representatives to reconsider the legislation from 53 years ago – serves to many as a continuing reminder that at heart the State of SC still endorses the 1961 resistance to social and racial equality. That they are not equal. That Selma and Montgomery and so on are still possible (which the nature of Charleston’s murders seems to support). And in doing so, the flag binds these people together ever more tightly: they learn of such things from each other and share and diffuse emotions to each other.

At the same time, any attempt (or even suggestion of the possibility of discussion) to remove it serve as an equally powerful provocation to the “in-group”: it brings them together to fuel each others’ anger and strength of association with the group. And its resentments which go back a century and half.

Like it says at the top of this post, flags are social objects not strips of material.

The flag of the Confederacy as much as any. And the decision to fly it on the State Capitol.

And that’s where the problem and the solution lies: in the social. In the space between people.