Who gets to define whom?

I hope I'm not pandering to the crowd when I say that this blog really has some smart readers and commentators. I was just thinking about what B.D. Rucker had to say on the Confederate flag thread below:

I guess I'm in the minority on this one because the flag doesn't bother me. I realize though that because I'm black I'm supposed to be all up in arms about it. . .

Growing up in NYC I was taught that it was a symbol of racism, and I know for some folks it is, but honestly, I've also met enough white southerners for whom the flag is really just an expression of southern pride. I mean, I've sat down and had long, soul-baring conversations with a coupla friends about this issue, southern white people I respect. As someone who used to sport a wooden "black power" fist around my neck in the second grade -- ahh the 70s -- I can't get too mad about it.

Just because you're pro-something doesn't necessarily mean you're anti-someone else. I feel the same way about Obama's church affiliation.

I thought about this in connection to Rebecca T.'s post about how to blacks, the racialist language Jeremiah Wright uses doesn't strike them as anti-white, but as reflections of the reality they live with every day. Others on this blog, I believe, have suggested that it's possible to be pro-black without being anti-white. Well, isn't that what B.D. Rucker is saying with regard to white people displaying the Stars & Bars? That it's not right to assume that just because someone affiliates with a symbol associated strongly with white racism, that they share that racism?

All of which raises a tricky question: When considering powerful symbols -- the Confederate flag embraced by some Southern whites, racialist language and concepts embraced by some blacks -- how much leeway should we give regarding self-definition?

I think this question really deals with the extent to which anyone's identity is social. I remember when I was a teenager, and I'd go back to my small town on holiday from my residential high school, I would go into the local grocery store wearing my New Wave clothes (hey, it was the Eighties) and have a big chip on my shoulder about the rejection I expected to receive from the country music-loving locals. But if people didn't notice me -- that is, if they just treated me as normal, not noticing anything special about the way I was dressed or the way my hair was cut -- I left the store frustrated. Now, obviously I was an immature kid, but I think there's something about human nature (and not just the nature of teenage humans) in my juvenile experience.

We all want to be able to present ourselves to the world as we really are, and to be accepted by the world. Yet that is not entirely possible, because the signs and symbols we use as part of our self-definition are not always interpreted by society as we ourselves interpret them, and would like them to be interpreted. We want to be accepted by the wider society on our own terms, while at the same time wanting to set ourselves apart in certain ways by rejecting social convention. I'm broadly generalizing, I know, but what I'm getting at is that it's unrealistic to expect everyone to react positively or benignly when you present symbols that they rightly interpret as hostile, or rejectionist. When I walked into the Piggly Wiggly with my goofy Eighties get-up, I wanted to make sure the people there knew that I wasn't like them, that in some sense I rejected their standards of what I should look like, and what kind of music I should listen to. I took pride in my difference, because that difference was intentionally a form of rebellion. Their scorn would have validated me in my Specialness ... and yet, had they actually scorned me, I would have been really angry, because Who Are They To Tell Me How I Should Define Myself?!

You see? Society couldn't win. I had created a therapeutic drama based on signs, symbols and identity. My teenage identity was constructed around a positive affirmation of New Wave culture (such as it was), but it also depended on a conscious rejection of the received rural Southern white culture around me. Positively affirming the culture I'd chosen as my own was not enough; I needed a culture to define myself against, to feel the weight of my own identity. I wanted to belong and not belong. I needed them to condemn me but affirm me too, and I wasn't going to be happy unless I got both. Which was impossible, and idiotic. But that's what it means to be 16. I laugh at the absurd Sturm und Drang of it all now, but I don't think the fundamental social and psychological anxiety over identity, self and society ever goes away, and certainly not in a society as diverse as our own.

Going back to the original question, it strikes me as simply unrealistic, given history, to be surprised when black people and unsympathetic whites interpret displaying the Confederate flag as identifying with white supremacy. I would hope they would be as open-minded as B.D., but I think it's naive to expect that. But I also think that in a culture in which we are constantly told that racism is unacceptable, and to resist thinking of people in racial categories, it is disingenuous to expect those outside the African-American community to naturally interpret racialist language like the Rev. Wright's as benign, just because he and his followers say so. What gives the Rev. Wright and his followers the exclusive right to define how his words are interpreted?

So, I put this questions to the room -- and by no means should the discussion be limited to racial categories: Under what conditions can pride in one's own particular culture or group be recognized as such by outsiders, without being taken as a put-down of those who aren't part of that culture or group? And if so, who decides?