On George Allen' s Confederate flag

A discussion of Macaca-gate by Kathleen Parker of the Orlando Sentinel includes the following:

Allen owns a Confederate flag, as nearly everyone has mentioned during this tempest. He also reportedly plastered his high school car with a Confederate bumper sticker and wore a Confederate flag lapel pin in his high school senior picture.

I don't know if Allen is a racist. I do know that owning a Confederate flag is not a damning offense if you're a collector of Southern memorabilia, as Allen is. And high school is, well, high school.

I grew up in the South and I once made up the following rule: One Confederate flag on a car indicates regional pride--eight Confederate flags on a car indicates Klan-membership. It wasn't really a reliable rule, but it was good joke, or it was in the Bible-belt town where I used to live. I don't think people appreciate the joke the same way here on the West Coast. So place makes a difference, and that, I think, is the key to the Macaca remark. It may be that somebody somewhere is slurred by that word, but the person Senator Allen referred to was not a member of that group. And in this case, Allen is also not a member of the group that usually does the slurring. So the whole event seems essentially meaningless: not one of those things where you had to be there, but one of those things where you had to be somewhere else.

Tags: George Allen, Macaca, racial slurs, Confederacy