Every time I hear a white southerner talk about his "Southern Heritage," I want to take a torch and burn my way from Atlanta to the Atlantic Ocean. Like most folks who were not raised in the South, to my ears "Southern Heritage" isn't anything but genteel code for "Dumbass Bigot Culture." Let us make no mistake, there is a Southern Heritage -- a fine tradition of music and literature and food. However, your typical dumbass bigot waving his Confederate Battle Flag couldn't identify Bill Faulkner in a line up, much less claim to have read, say, Absalom, Absalom! His Southern Heritage seems largely confined to the battle jack and a yearning for a time when you could whip the darkies when they got out of line.
Confederate apologists like to maintain there's nothing about the Confederate battle flag that's inherently racist, but this is of course nothing but unmitigated crap run up a flagpole. Everything about the Confederacy is racist; strip down the camouflaged arguments about state's rights as they relate to the Antibellum South to their essentials, and what you've got is this: Black slaves. The South had them and wanted to keep them. Everything that is inherently "Southern," from its agrarian ethos to the social mores, has the institution of slavery as its common black thread. Make no mistake: Had slavery not existed in the South, there never would have been a Civil War. There would have been no Confederacy without it.
This is why us Yankees (or anyone whose skin shade is browner than 70s station wagon beige) are boggled that anyone would want to ally themselves, intellectually or culturally, with the cause of the Confederacy. In doing so, you ally yourself with a political entity whose whole reason for existing was to keep other men enslaved -- indeed, the only salient differences between the the Constitution of the United States and Constitution of the Confederacy related directly to slaves (my favorite bit is in Article IV, Section 2, in which the Dred Scott decision is enshrined as an article of Confederate doctrine).
