Citing ‘Heritage,’ Georgia To Begin Offering Confederacy License Plates

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On the heels of a recent ruling forcing North Carolina to offer equal opportunity license plates, a new push out of Georgia shows that certain motorists aren’t satisfied with relegating their culture wars to ballot boxes and Tea Party marches.

As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, Georgia has begun issuing license plates sponsored by the Sons of the Confederacy. As if their sponsorship didn’t signify drivers’s political leanings, the design will splay the Confederate Flag as both background and issuing sticker.

Per the AJC:

The new Confederate flag plate replaces one that was already in circulation. The new design places the St. Andrew’s flag in the background across the entire tag. Like the old plate, it also features the flag in the square logo of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. It adds the organization’s name across the bottom of the tag, where the name of the issuing county typically appears. …

[Ray] McBerry, [spokesman] of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, was unfazed by the renewed controversy over the battle flag. “We believe that everyone has the right to preserve their heritage,” he said. “Southerners have as much right to be proud of their heritage as anybody else.”

Georgia, for what it’s worth, isn’t the first state to issue plates with the Stars and Bars prominently displayed – North Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi already offer such options. Georgia’s plates will cost $80, a chunk of which will go toward the local chapter of Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Beyond the obvious and immediate division engendered by the plates – the AJC details the myriad complaints from civil rights leaders – the entire reasoning behind placing one’s heritage on a state-issued license plate smacks of logical fallacy.

Not only are these, again, state-issued material, but is this to mean that, say, the local chapter of Jamaican ex-pats could fund their own Jamaican plates? Or that the Japanese-American community can pay to have the Rising Sun plastered in the middle of their plates? Or that the local Saudi enclave can place their Arabic script next to their identifying numbers? These lineages still count as heritage, yes?

Of course, none of the Jamaican and Japanese and Saudi members have ever attempted to secede from the United States, or craft a separate nation based solely on white supremacy and the destruction of black families. None of these stand proudly behind the slave-laden division of this country. None can boast the “heritage” of the Sons of the Confederacy. Which is a shame, because if they did, well – then they could brag about it on the state-sanctioned rump of their big-rigs.

Casey Michel is a graduate student at Columbia University, and former Peace Corps Kazakhstan volunteer. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, and Talking Points Memo, and he has contributed multiple long-form investigations to Minneapolis’s City Pages and the Houston Press. You can follow him on Twitter.