Is the Gadsden flag racist?
Conn Carroll
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The term “Gadsden flag” was trending on X earlier on Tuesday as a video spread of a school administrator explaining to a mother and her son that her son could not return to class unless he left his backpack, which had a Gadsden flag patch on it, behind.
“The reason we do not want the flag displayed is due to its origins with slavery and the slave trade,” the administrator tells the mother.
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When the mother, correctly, responds that the Gadsden flag was a symbol of the Revolutionary War against Britain and not the Confederacy, the administrator responds, “I am here to enforce the policy that was provided, by the district, and definitely, you have every right to not agree to it.”
The “district” in question here is Harrison School District 2 of Colorado Springs, Colorado. The school itself, the Vanguard School, is a public charter school in that district.
One does wonder just how necessary this administrator’s enforcement of this alleged ban on the Gadsden flag really is. Did anyone complain about the Gadsden flag being racist before this incident?
Because that has actually happened in the past.
In 2014, in nearby Denver, a U.S. Postal Service maintenance mechanic filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against a fellow employee who wore a hat with the Gadsden flag on it. According to the aggrieved employee, the Gadsden flag is a “historical indicator of white resentment against blacks stemming largely from the Tea Party.”
No other racial harassment of any kind was alleged in the complaint. Just that the Gadsden flag was a symbol of the Tea Party and that the aggrieved mechanic associated the Tea Party with “white resentment.”
The EEOC did admit that, “after a thorough review of the record, it is clear that the Gadsden Flag originated in the Revolutionary War in a non-racial context,” but the EEOC allowed the suit to go forward because “whatever the historic origins and meaning of the symbol, it also has since been sometimes interpreted to convey racially-tinged messages in some contexts.”
In other words, who cares about the truth of the origin of the Gadsden flag? As long as some people associate it with racism, even if that association is completely in their own heads, then the Gadsden flag is racist.
That seems to be the conclusion of the EEOC and the Harrison School District 2.
How far does this go? What if someone wore a Republican elephant patch to work? Or, god forbid, a MAGA hat?
Are those symbols all racist now, too, if just one person complains?
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And, of course, this does not go the other way. No school administrator or EEOC employee would ever rule that a Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden T-shirt was racist.
The result is asymmetric symbolic warfare. Democrats can use the power of civil rights laws to censor any symbol that conservatives like, and conservatives are powerless to respond in kind.