The whole controversy over Sen. George Felix "Macaca" Allen's subtle-but-not-so-subtle racism has caused me to reflect on my pre-secondary and secondary education. Allen, as you know, has an odd fascination with the memorobilia of the Confederacy--the only widescale act of treason the United States has ever had to face. You have certainly seen here his cameo in a really bad 2003 Civil War movie as a Southern soldier being led in a rousing rendition of "Band of Brothers," an 1861 patriotic song of the Confederacy that complained about how mean Abe Lincoln was being to them.
Growing up in Tennessee, my education regarding the American Civil War was very much regionally softened. A whole lot of classmates too readily bought into the whole "The Civil War was about States' Rights" canard. This attitude pervades into many adults' lives, including those who fight to return the Cofederate Battle Emblem to the Georgia state flag (and to keep it on Mississippi's).
Allow me to cut through the bullshit. The only state's right at issue in the Civil War was the right of a state to allow its white residents to enslave its black residents for the economic benefit of the former. The framing of the issue as an effort to uphold the beautiful traditions of the American South is simply an effort by modern day racists to justify their feelings, however subtly stressed.
I am a Southerner. I have ancestors who owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy. While I value and celebrate my family, I celebrate them not because they fought for the South. I celebrate them because they stayed alive long enough to continue the family line while being handed the asskicking they so richly deserved for perpetuating an offensive racist institution. Did the Civil War make my family poor? Yeah. Good.
The modern-day Republicans' fetish for the Southern side of the Civil War should be called out for what it really is--a longing for long gone days when white people like them felt unquestioned in their superiority. George Felix "Macaca" Allen has been exhibiting this "Southern Rights" fetish for years, and its true nature is just now catching up with him. Every politician who shows a smidgeon of respect for the confederacy should be asked why he sympathizes with an act of treason against the United States committed by a society with an inherently racist agenda. They won't have a good answer, because there is none.