confederate flag debate

Xurtio · 07-30-2015, 02:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DwnWthVwls

What is the long term solution in your scenario? In mine I feel that educating people will slowly create future generations of more open-minded people. Banning the flag will just cause all the people who are open about their racism and bigotry to be a little less open about it, but it's not going to change the way they raise their kids. They are hate breeders, and I don't see that changing just because you take away their flag.

These approaches aren't mutually exclusive and, used together, could be synergistic. In fact, the banning of the flag would be pretty futile without a educated children that can acknowledge the events or the meaning behind them and consider them in a broader context of society. People may raise their kids that way, yes, but people don't raise their kids alone. Are you familiar with the 50-0-50 rule of developmental psychology? It appears that society raises children (parents, teachers, authors, actors, advocates, but mostly peers). Most people do stray from their parent's principles in favor of their own generation's. Rebellion is a healthy part of coming of age. Functionally, it allows organism behavior to adapt to a changing environment (in this case, the environment is society).

Of course, there are also consequences of banning the flag that you outlined. So the problem now is that we have a bunch of small competing factors - some positive, some negative - how it plays out in the large picture can only be speculated. Evidence-based speculation would be best, but we'd have to ban the flag and see how it goes and then create another universe in which we didn't ban the flag to subtract irrelevant factors that just happened to occur in the same time frame. That's basically the problem with sociology - controlled experiments of the relevant scale are impossible. So people look to their own ideologies instead of evidence.