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From Dukes of Hazzard to Kanye West: the curse of the Confederate flag

Lynyrd Skynyrd flew it, Ludacris stamped on it and Spike Lee compared it to a swastika. In the era of Black Lives Matter, what do these battles reveal about the American South’s Confederate flag?

John Schneider, AKA Bo Duke from the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, recently asked his fans a question via YouTube: “Was The Dukes of Hazzard a racially charged show? Was the intention of the paint scheme on the General Lee a white supremacist statement in any way? And if you think it was, I wanna know.”

For the uninitiated, the General Lee was the Duke brothers’ 1969 Dodge Charger, which outperformed the cop cars of rural Georgia week after week from 1979 to 1985. Bo and Luke’s car was named after a Confederate civil war hero; its horn played the opening bars of Dixie; and, as for its paint scheme, it sported a giant Confederate flag on its roof. It was basically the South on wheels.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/300he6A
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