Support for the Confederate battle flag in the Southern United States: Racism or Southern pride?

Abstract

Supporters of the Confederate battle flag often argue that their support is driven by pride in the South, not negative racial attitudes. Opponents of the Confederate battle flag often argue that the flag represents racism, and that support for the flag is an expression of racism and an attempt to maintain oppression of Blacks in the Southern United States. We evaluate these two competing views in explaining attitudes toward the Confederate battle flag in the Southern United States through a survey of 526 Southerners. In the aggregate, our latent variable model suggests that White support for the flag is driven by Southern pride, political conservatism, and blatant negative racial attitudes toward Blacks. Using cluster-analysis we were able to distinguish four distinct sub-groups of White Southerners: Cosmopolitans, New Southerners, Traditionalists, and Supremacists. The greatest support for the Confederate battle flag is seen among Traditionalists and Supremacists; however, Traditionalists do not display blatant negative racial attitudes toward Blacks, while Supremacists do. Traditionalists make up the majority of Confederate battle flag supporters in our sample, weakening the claim that supporters of the flag are generally being driven by negative racial attitudes toward Blacks.

Is Support for Confederate Symbols Motivated by Southern Pride or Racism? Further Distinctions Between “Traditionalists” and “Supremacists”

“…discipline) were both strongly associated with support for the Mississippi state flag (Orey, 2004). 2 The link between negative racial attitudes and support for the Confederate battle flag has been corroborated in recent studies (Cooper & Knotts, 2006;Strother, Piston, & Ogorzalek, 2017;Wright & Esses, 2017).…”

“…Even recent research (Strother et al, 2017) has used poor proxy measures of Southern pride (e.g., whether the respondent considers him/herself to be a native Southerner, a converted Southerner, or a non-Southerner, or how many civil war battles participants can name). The only study to use a measure of Southern pride with good face validity and good internal consistency found Southern pride to be more strongly associated with support for the Confederate battle flag than both overt racial attitudes and political ideology and even found a small association (r = .19) between Southern pride and support for the Confederate battle flag among Black respondents (Wright & Esses, 2017)-a finding consistent with the notion that the Confederate flag encapsulates a "Southern pride", not even solely a "White Southern pride." Wright and Esses (2017) (Wright & Esses, 2017).…”

“…Some research suggests that being older is correlated with less support for the Confederate battle flag (Reingold & Wike, 1998;Wright & Esses, 2017) whereas other research suggests that being older is correlated with more support for the flag (Clark, 1997;Strother et al, 2017). Conservative ideology is associated with more support for the flag (Cooper & Knotts, 2006;Orey, 2004;Strother et al, 2017;Wright & Esses, 2017). The desire to respond in socially acceptable ways has also been associated with reduced support for the Confederate battle flag (Wright & Esses, 2017).…”

“…Conservative ideology is associated with more support for the flag (Cooper & Knotts, 2006;Orey, 2004;Strother et al, 2017;Wright & Esses, 2017). The desire to respond in socially acceptable ways has also been associated with reduced support for the Confederate battle flag (Wright & Esses, 2017). These various predictors are important control variables in any analysis of support for Confederate symbols.…”

“…We incorporate right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) as additional control variables because these are common correlates of politically relevant dependent variables and because they are often conceptualized as factors of conservative ideology (Duckitt & Sibley, 2010;Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003). Wright and Esses (2017) cast doubt on the assumptions that negative racial attitudes are the strongest motivator of support for Confederate symbols, and that most supporters of Confederate symbols harbor anti-Black attitudes. These researchers did so with a high-powered study, constructs with good measurement, and used latent variable modeling to control for measurement error.…”