“I’m proud to be next to the Confederate flag,” said Stewart, a Minnesota native and chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors. “That flag is not about racism, folks. It’s not about hatred. It’s not about slavery. It’s about our heritage. … It’s time that we stop running away from our heritage. It’s time that we embrace it.”
Neo-Confederate icon worship is a textbook example of a failure to acknowledge the entirety of one's heritage in favor of a white washed and romanticized myth that's completely tone deaf to the seedier underbelly of our national history. If Southerners really want to lay claim to their "heritage," they need to embrace every part of it, warts and all. I do the same for the the U.S. as a whole, I love this country and its history, but this country has a dark side to its past that must be recognized. Southerners must do the same if they wish to come to terms with the mistakes of their ancestors, which many have so far failed to do.
It's hard to generalize Southerners as doing this, I feel that only the neo-Confederate, "Gone With the Wind" types don't recognize the darkness of Southern history. Most Southerners, myself included, love and appreciate Southern history in all of its facets .
