To expand more on the Confederate flag, since it seems particularly apropos:

Back in the day when the US was transitioning away from being totally cool with black slavery, the Federal Government wanted to make it illegal to own slaves. The North supported it for the most part, but the South was very against releasing slaves because their businesses (and governments) were owned by a very few number of people who could only enjoy the massive profits from their plantations because of slave labor. This is why you’ll hear people say “the civil war was more about economics and state’s rights” to make it seem not racist. Of course, they’re talking about a state’s right to own and profit from slavery lol.

So the North wouldn’t let the South keep owning slaves (because they had an unfair business advantage) and the South wouldn’t stop owning slaves (because it made them rich and probably it felt good to subjugate other humans to your will). So the United States said “that’s it, we’ll force you to do it” and some Southern states said “no you won’t, we’re leaving the United States, we’re called the Confederate States now” and thus the Confederacy was born. We fought a war over it, killed a bunch of people, and eventually the tide turned and the North was really killing a lot of people in the South. Both sides were like, “I’m sort of tired of killing” and one side was like “please stop killing us” and they struck a truce.

What you might notice is that a group separated from the US, the US killed them until they decided to join up again, but they didn’t quite kill all of them. Instead, they helped them repair, and actually kept them alive.

Fast forward to now. The descendants of the Confederates have been taught that the Confederate flag represents them as people SOLELY because they’re from the South - the whole “we’re against America” has been turned into “we ARE America”. This is why people fight over taking down statues of generals who fought against the United States, or waving the flag of traitors over government buildings lol. The Confederate flag is explicitly ANTI-United States. And this is also why you’ll see it flown by white supremacists, the whole blacks-should-be-slaves thing.

But the thing is, the people who wanted to leave were virtually held hostage in a country they didn’t want to be a part of, because freedom was getting in the way of profits. So they had babies, and now a good number of those babies are holding the reigns of the government that once showed them mercy for being traitors. And now, unsurprisingly, the United States is doing everything it can to protect profits from freedom.

So that’s why people are so against the Confederate flag, but not much has actually been done to curb its influence.

I do have an ancestor who fought for the south (or at least was in the Confederate army) but my identity is not tied to the flag of traitors lol.