NASCAR and the Confederate Flags: A Turning Point

I remember it now. Funny how some things bring other things back.

It was in the latter part of the '90s, probably 1997, though I'd have to look it up to determine exactly when. Don't think it matters now.

I was in Atlanta for the Representative Assembly of the National Education Association. The NEA-RA takes four days, but there are several days of meetings of splinter groups before it, and anyone who's 'with it' sees the need to be there for at least some of that time.

I was just getting into the culture. It was my third RA. It would eventually lead me to just about the top rung, taking me with it culturally and politically. I went there with great enthusiasm.

A bunch of us hung out together then, and someone drove there from Wisconsin. We thus decided to go to Stone Mountain Park, not far east of the city. I don't think any of us were ready for the celebration presented nightly.

I was stunned at what I saw: A glorification of the old Confederacy. It seemed so out of place to me, from Wisconsin. Carved on the side of a mountain were portraits of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis, all riding on horses. And of course, Confederate flags everywhere.

When the 'lasershow' commenced, it got worse. Not only were the troika given to riding off into the next challenge, scenes from NASCAR were superimposed on the mountainside as well. The two were co-mixed: Enthusiasm about one led one to be enthusiastic about the other, I guess.

I thought NASCAR was just about stock car racing. I guess I was wrong. It was about preserving the Old South, the one where everyone knew their place, the one where good old boys could come, wave their Confederate flags, and pretend things were the way they used to be.

WEAC, the Wisconsin NEA affiliate, had its own newsletter during the time of the RA. I volunteered an analysis of what I'd just saw to be printed within it. I don't recall the precise verbiage I lent to the event, but my criticism of it was scathing. I was offended not just for myself, but for the black people who had to put up with it. It felt so outdated, so much of an anachronism. I wondered why Georgia was clinging to something like that.

Like anything, though, once it gets started, it achieves a momentum of its own. Once it starts making money--a whole bunch of money--it becomes its own cash cow and ending it becomes unthinkable. Thus are old, bad ideas perpetuated.

Underneath it all, I knew that it was drawing literally millions of onlookers, though. Of course, that had included myself, who would have rejected it had I known. But they had my money. I felt stupid.

The display is still there, carved into that mountain. Until the virus hit, it had still been holding nightly 'lasertoon' shows, as I called it derisively in the newsletter. It's still there, just like Confederate statues strewn throughout the South, like the names of Confederate generals for U.S. Army training sites.

Word is that that had happened because the country was in a hurry to establish those sites to get ready for World War I, for which it was woefully unprepared. So, they gave the naming rights to the states, which, of course, attached those of old Confederates, so that Jim Crow would never be lost and the glory of the 'lost cause' would always be preserved.

But that was a hundred years ago. The Civil War was already over a half-century. The country appeared to be moving on. Just like some of the Southern states put a Confederate flag back onto their state flags upon the announcement of Brown v. Board in 1954, to keep a dying concept alive.

That desperation dies hard. It produced 45. It's trying hard to keep white supremacy. But NASCAR has jumped the shark: It has banned the display of Confederate flags at its events. We'll see about the pushback, because you know there will be some.

You know people will try to sneak in flags, and try to get around the ruling somehow. That's what they did almost immediately after Brown v. Board was handed down; city councils and school boards shaved off edges of the ruling and dared the federal government to come after them.

Eisenhower did in Little Rock in 1957. No president, fortunately, was needed for NASCAR to do the right thing. There is no 'heritage to be preserved' here, no 'tradition' to be maintained. A columnist for the very Republican Arkansas Democrat-Gazette tried for years to sustain the memory of the 'Southern gentleman' embodied somehow in the persona of Robert E. Lee by writing a torturously long and gooey editorial on his birthday (celebrated, still, in three states officially, including Arkansas, every year, the same week as Martin Luther King Day, a coincidence not lost on anyone). He kept saying that Lee had that "certain something" that distinguished him in a sense from others of his kind.

Why yes, he did. He betrayed his country and his army, somehow believing that the maintenance of his state's slave status was more important, believing that a category of humanity deserved to be captured into forced labor for their whole lives, just because they could be. That columnist's pandering sounded more detached from reality each year I lived in Arkansas.

It's all old and tired and stupid now, just like the monuments to notable Confederates--notable because they have a monument, not because they did anything for the country except to try to ruin it. Down deep inside, those striving to keep those monuments know it, too. They can resist the ravages of time only so long.

NASCAR has joined the NFL in separating white supremacy from sports participation and fandom. It has stripped some of 45's most important attachments. He can complain, and you know he will, but time has passed him by, too.

That's why several notable Republicans are crossing over now. They see the waste of energy he represents. He, like Stone Mountain, is just not worth the trouble anymore. NASCAR figured that out. So did they.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark