Here are my thoughts on the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia, more commonly called the "Confederate Flag" (though it wasn't).
What does this have to do with the Corn Palace? What the heck is the Corn Palace? Read on...
There is a curious place in South Dakota called the Corn Palace. Every year, they create murals on the sides of the building using different colors of corn kernels. Hey, if Pasadena can have a parade of floats covered with flowers, why not corn murals?
Inside the building are pictures of the murals of prior years. One of them rather leaps to the eye: in it, the building is decorated with swastikas. A note beside the picture states that this is a traditional Indian symbol that was used on the Corn Palace prior to WW2.
In that context, there is nothing objectionable about that symbol. In most other contexts it is not acceptable in any way. Certainly it is not used in Germany to honor their war dead. In fact, that's explicitly illegal, as are most other usages of that symbol in Germany.
But the analogy breaks down: the Battle Flag isn't a symbol of other things that was co-opted to represent belief in racial superiority. It was created to symbolize fighting for the cause of preserving the right of whites to enslave blacks.
There were other grievances between North and South, but the articles of session of many states made it explicit that a threat to the system of slavery was the reason to claim a right to secede. In some cases, that is the only grievance even mentioned.
So I don't agree that the Battle Flag is a symbol of bravery or heritage that has been tarnished by an additional legacy. It was always about fighting to preserve the system of white domination of blacks. It's more a matter that other ways of seeing it have been stripped away.
That's why the Battle Flag was hardly seen from shortly after the Civil War until it was used, starting with Strom Thurmond in 1948, as an explicit symbol in favor of segregation. George Wallace, the Ku Klux Klan and many others used it explicitly that way in the 1960's.
There are still proper uses for that flag in museums and historical recreations. And I'm sure some people who fly it aren't thinking about how the "Southern heritage" it represents is really a heritage of white supremacy. But that is what it means.
Calling something "racist" is not a judgement of intent: we can't know what is in people's hearts. It is actions that are racist, just as the action of shooting someone injures them, whether you intended to shoot or even realize that you did.
What we need is something more difficult than simply removing the Battle Flag. We need people to understand the racist legacy of oppression that is symbolized by that flag, however much some white people don't understand or accept that legacy.
More than that, we need people to see the pattern in these events. Another mass murder at a black church -- by someone who explicitly said he wanted a race war -- is part of a culture of racism that people must acknowledge before we can root it out.