Johnny Reb was my school’s mascot. A big goofy fiberglass Confederate soldier. The school nickname was “The Rebels” and my hazy memory is the Confederate battle flag was occasionally used as decorative color. This seemed perfectly normal in Houston, Texas in the 1980s. Part of our Southern Heritage.

Young kids are blameless in this kind of thing, victims of indoctrination. By the time we got old enough for high school a lot of us found the racist association embarassing. A year after I graduated the upper class voted to change the mascot and banish any symbols of the Confederacy. (Which may or may not have had anything to do with the school also hiring its first African American teacher.) It took another 14 years before they changed the name from “Rebels” entirely.

I went to a great prep school and am thankful for the excellent education I got there. But only recently have I understood how white privilege helped gain me access to that education. SJS was not overtly racist or discriminatory. It just perpetuated (and still perpetuates) the advantages of whites. It is part of the legacy of one of the two Original Sins of America, the societal damage still extant six generations after the end of slavery.

South Carolina’s use of the Confederate battle flag is controversial again this week. The defense that the flag symbolizes Southern Heritage is sincere, which is what makes endemic racism so dangerous. The Confederate flag represents the South’s pride in slavery, treason, and victimhood. That flag is a hateful thing, deliberately hateful.