Ok now this guy friended me on FaceBook and i notice that his profile pic was a confederate flag image, not trippin off the image but trippin off the color of the image...now im tryna peep if this guy is WHITE or BLACK....Im srcatching my head now as i over look his info, granted i acccept damn near anyones request to be my friend, but i refuse to be friends or affiliated with a weirdo<---(im using that term loosely) Anywayz, we have alot of mutual friends, but who doesnt in the online social world? Instead of writing this guy off as a loser or denying his request i thought i should at least google this matter and LEARN about it b4 i TURN MY CHEEK.
I went through at least 5 different pages before i stumble onto a very good article on it so.....this was in a GQ magazine some time ago not sure the actual date but still good input....
That's a curious place for common ground, but as sales have shown, the NuSouth flag is uniting odd demographic niches. Since the store opened, most of its sales have been to white customers."See, white people have been oppressed by the history of the South, too," said Evans. "It's white people who are more supportive of putting forth a new symbol that creates a better identity for the South. Black kids are into Nusouth strictly for the fashion, although older African-Americans understand the symbolism. They too want to paint a better picture of the future.""White and black alike have been tainted by this so-called heritage. So there had to be a way to celebrate the future and get beyond this. When we sat down at the computer, we tried to change the battle flag to rainbow colors, but that doesn't really say it. This is still not a multicultural place. It's still black and white. We wanted to capture that."
It took Evans and Quintero a little while to hit upon the right look for the flag. "We kept saying, 'Keep it simple, keep it simple,'" said Quintero. "The essence of the flag was the stars and bars, so we had to keep those. Then we changed the blue to black and the white stars to green."
"And we both were like, 'That's it, that's it,'" said Evans. "See, we all know the Confederate flag is a negative image. So we figured we would take the opposition's worst image and wear it with pride. It's the strategy of going right into the fear and claiming it. By wearing it, you look at it, you pronounce it, taste it, chew it, digest it. You embrace it and make it mean something else."Not long afterward, a simple line of T-shirts appeared. This earliest incarnation was a classic in-your-face rap device. On the front was a big red-black-and-green flag and the words THE FUTURE IS DA PHLAYVA. And on the back, THE PAST IS THE PAST.
"We were claiming our territory," Evans said. "The South - that's our Ellis Island; that's how we came into this country. But that's why we had that name, Da Phlayva. it's a hip-hop expression; 'phlayva' is your talent, your skill. You say, 'You got phlayva,' it means you have something."The shirt, once you understand it, is a simple message of work, self-improvement, independence and, by using the Confederate flag, a complete rejection of the lingering rhetoric of victimization."What we were saying," Evans continued, "was that all that talk about the past is just that. It's past. This is where it's happening; it's da phlayva. It's what you can do."Listening to Evans and Quintero discuss the ideas from which their novel image was born, I was stunned to hear what is essentially the American ideal surfacing in the thicket of rap ideology in the South. The Jeffersonian idea of happiness is based on the Greek notion that the good life is spent uncovering one's natural talents. Thomas Jefferson and his generation firmly believed that each person had to be free of the history of government oppression to properly carry out that search, that pursuit. A fairly slangy translation of Jefferson's most famous sentence - "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" - might well be "The past is the past, and the future is Da Phlayva."And yet the T-shirt and Evans' marketing theories might have easily slipped into Kress's two-for-a-dollar bin had it not been for a local high school student named Shellmira Green. In 1994 she wore one of the shirts to class at Stratford High School in nearby Berkeley County. At the time, the white students there had certainly caught the attention of their black peers with some novel T-shirts. One read, 100 PERCENT COTTON. AND YOU PICKED IT. Another shirt popular among the white students said, THE ORIGINAL BOYZ IN THE HOOD, next to an image of a Klansman. Green's donning of her T-shirt amounted to vintage Madisonian First Amendment theory in action: bad speech countered by more speech. The clash of the T-shirts could not have been more constitutionally American.So what did the white principal, George McCrackin, do? Like any oppressive tyrant, he shut down the conversation at once and in the most ham-fisted way. He suspended Green on the grounds that her shirt was "disruptive," because some un-named white students had taken offense. Many people suspect it was McCrackin himself who was upset at seeing the battle flag of the Confederacy Mandelized. When Green wore the shirt again, McCrackin expelled her. A media storm forced him to reconsider that decision and to form a board to review the dress code.Meanwhile, Green and others mounted a First Amendment class-action suit
against the school board. Last July a federal judge dismissed the case. The issue is now on its way to the Supreme Court."I can't wait for the Supreme Court opinion," Evans said. "So we can run an ad that says, 'NuSouth apparel: approved by the Supreme Court.' And if they don't approve it, we have these." He pulled out a NuSouth poster whose flag had a stamp on it that read, PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT LOGO.
The controversial nature of the image extends even to those most politically attuned to its message. "What's interesting," Evans said, "is that some of the liberals come in here and tell me they are uncomfortable with this. And I say, 'Why, because you realize how uncomfortable we've been, because you recognize the future will be a little different?' We are all uncomfortable with crossing borders. When you see a world that's no longer black and white but the melting pot in motion, you get nervous about whether you should represent that."I've bought one of the shirts, and I admit I feel awkward wearing it. Many people - black and white - look at the image and still see a Confederate flag; others are merely baffled by the slightly altered image and clearly don't get the anti-racist message. Until people do, it is audacious to wear these shirts.But that edginess is precisely what Evans and Quintero are selling and why people buy their clothes. For instance, the tag inside the collar of one shirt says, "Machine-wash warm, inside out, with like colors." But it also says, "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." Like Evans and Quintero, the shirts are a little bit high-minded politics and a good bit low-down capitalism.Even as they discover how fragmented their audience is - buppies going to work, civil rights graybeards, white suburban hip-hop wanna-bes, urban professionals - they are also finding that the different strata have created their own meeting place: the license plate. it's the flag design without words or comment, and it has been selling briskly. Even the town's infamous police chief bought one. Reuben Greenberg is a one-man multicultural band. He is a practicing Jew, and he is black. One day he pulled over Quintero on the pretext of warning him about some minor problem with his truck, got the address of the store and later stopped in to buy a license plate."It's a big thing now in town to honk when you see someone else who's got a NuSouth plate," Evans said. "Or sometimes they flash lights," Quintero said. "When you see the Nike swoosh," Evans said, "you don't flash. It doesn't mean anything. Our clothes are about meaning, about a new identity, a respect for self." The duo is staking its business on the proposition that the next generation will halve the difference between the '60s generation's loathing of all corporate emblems and the '80s generation's mindless acceptance of empty corporate symbology. They hope that the next demographic bulge will want a little meaning to go along with its purchases.It's impossible to listen to Evans and Quintero without simultaneously hearing the politics of principle and the profits of business, the twin currents that have always driven the black debate as to how to better the race. The year 1910 brought the political movement of W.E.B. Du Bois (who founded the NAACP) and the economic self- improvement of Booker T. Washington (who founded the Tuskegee Institute) . Since the end of Reconstruction, the world of black Americans has been shaped by these two forces, accommodation versus agitation. And each generation has produced people who embody one side of this divide or the other. There were the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X; Thurgood Marshall and Angela Davis. Today we have Jesse Jackson, who's still organizing outsider protests, and Clarence Thomas, who's lecturing affirmative-action babies to suck it up and get a real job.It's hard to locate Evans and Quintero on this old and troubled map. Are they part of the old black paradox, or have they resolved it? They seem to have sold out but with all deliberate speed. "The fall line will have three themes, three facets of life," Evans said. "The 'urban' look, the 'Desert Storm' look, and what we call 'nine-to-five'. The urban gear is for hip-hop kids just kickin' in a regular way - that's your bubble fleece, leather jackets, ball caps. The Desert Storm look is camouflage army fatigues dyed in red. The cammies are for those who still think they are at war over something we should be far beyond - the war with ourselves. Then the nine-to-five is apparel with the button-down look for the corporate types who want to make a social statement but are fearful that if they come out too boldly they will lose their jobs for having an opinion. So we enable these guys who wear suits to have a shirt or tie that says it. it's very discreet, very tasteful, like Polo."Is this the politics of the new black middle class? These days 25 per cent of blacks live in the suburbs, twice the percentage that lived there three decades ago. This nine-to-five line is political fashion tailored directly to them. it's not a Malcolm X cap (ironically, now an empty symbol - what buppie supports Molotov cocktail-tossing revolution?). But it's not the sellout of khakis and a blue blazer, either. It is the Confederate flag, after all - but tastefully rendered and still possessing enough troublesome meaning for the workaday advertising rep or accountant who is eager to say "Fuck you" to old-school racism while sailing into the economic mainstream."See, our marketing is not what I call 'fool's marketing' - selling Michael Jordan to a guy who's five-five," Evans said. "We're telling the guy the truth. We're not telling anybody to be like us; we're telling people to be themselves. That's what the NuSouth is all about. Nike has a slogan, 'Just do it.' Well, our slogan goes off from that: 'Doin' it.' We put that slogan on the back of the shirt because you're moving forward with it."Evans and Quintero are now completing plans to open an outlet in the Atlanta airport this February."After Atlanta," Evans said, "we are considering Montgomery, Alabama. We have a three-year strategy to open one NuSouth store in each of the states of the Confederacy. Each store will open in February, Black History Month. We have a good business plan and a great accountant working with us. We ain't just whistling 'Dixie'."Jack Hitt is a GQ writer-at-large.
It took Evans and Quintero a little while to hit upon the right look for the flag. "We kept saying, 'Keep it simple, keep it simple,'" said Quintero. "The essence of the flag was the stars and bars, so we had to keep those. Then we changed the blue to black and the white stars to green."
"And we both were like, 'That's it, that's it,'" said Evans. "See, we all know the Confederate flag is a negative image. So we figured we would take the opposition's worst image and wear it with pride. It's the strategy of going right into the fear and claiming it. By wearing it, you look at it, you pronounce it, taste it, chew it, digest it. You embrace it and make it mean something else."Not long afterward, a simple line of T-shirts appeared. This earliest incarnation was a classic in-your-face rap device. On the front was a big red-black-and-green flag and the words THE FUTURE IS DA PHLAYVA. And on the back, THE PAST IS THE PAST.
"We were claiming our territory," Evans said. "The South - that's our Ellis Island; that's how we came into this country. But that's why we had that name, Da Phlayva. it's a hip-hop expression; 'phlayva' is your talent, your skill. You say, 'You got phlayva,' it means you have something."The shirt, once you understand it, is a simple message of work, self-improvement, independence and, by using the Confederate flag, a complete rejection of the lingering rhetoric of victimization."What we were saying," Evans continued, "was that all that talk about the past is just that. It's past. This is where it's happening; it's da phlayva. It's what you can do."Listening to Evans and Quintero discuss the ideas from which their novel image was born, I was stunned to hear what is essentially the American ideal surfacing in the thicket of rap ideology in the South. The Jeffersonian idea of happiness is based on the Greek notion that the good life is spent uncovering one's natural talents. Thomas Jefferson and his generation firmly believed that each person had to be free of the history of government oppression to properly carry out that search, that pursuit. A fairly slangy translation of Jefferson's most famous sentence - "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" - might well be "The past is the past, and the future is Da Phlayva."And yet the T-shirt and Evans' marketing theories might have easily slipped into Kress's two-for-a-dollar bin had it not been for a local high school student named Shellmira Green. In 1994 she wore one of the shirts to class at Stratford High School in nearby Berkeley County. At the time, the white students there had certainly caught the attention of their black peers with some novel T-shirts. One read, 100 PERCENT COTTON. AND YOU PICKED IT. Another shirt popular among the white students said, THE ORIGINAL BOYZ IN THE HOOD, next to an image of a Klansman. Green's donning of her T-shirt amounted to vintage Madisonian First Amendment theory in action: bad speech countered by more speech. The clash of the T-shirts could not have been more constitutionally American.So what did the white principal, George McCrackin, do? Like any oppressive tyrant, he shut down the conversation at once and in the most ham-fisted way. He suspended Green on the grounds that her shirt was "disruptive," because some un-named white students had taken offense. Many people suspect it was McCrackin himself who was upset at seeing the battle flag of the Confederacy Mandelized. When Green wore the shirt again, McCrackin expelled her. A media storm forced him to reconsider that decision and to form a board to review the dress code.Meanwhile, Green and others mounted a First Amendment class-action suit
against the school board. Last July a federal judge dismissed the case. The issue is now on its way to the Supreme Court."I can't wait for the Supreme Court opinion," Evans said. "So we can run an ad that says, 'NuSouth apparel: approved by the Supreme Court.' And if they don't approve it, we have these." He pulled out a NuSouth poster whose flag had a stamp on it that read, PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT LOGO.The controversial nature of the image extends even to those most politically attuned to its message. "What's interesting," Evans said, "is that some of the liberals come in here and tell me they are uncomfortable with this. And I say, 'Why, because you realize how uncomfortable we've been, because you recognize the future will be a little different?' We are all uncomfortable with crossing borders. When you see a world that's no longer black and white but the melting pot in motion, you get nervous about whether you should represent that."I've bought one of the shirts, and I admit I feel awkward wearing it. Many people - black and white - look at the image and still see a Confederate flag; others are merely baffled by the slightly altered image and clearly don't get the anti-racist message. Until people do, it is audacious to wear these shirts.But that edginess is precisely what Evans and Quintero are selling and why people buy their clothes. For instance, the tag inside the collar of one shirt says, "Machine-wash warm, inside out, with like colors." But it also says, "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." Like Evans and Quintero, the shirts are a little bit high-minded politics and a good bit low-down capitalism.Even as they discover how fragmented their audience is - buppies going to work, civil rights graybeards, white suburban hip-hop wanna-bes, urban professionals - they are also finding that the different strata have created their own meeting place: the license plate. it's the flag design without words or comment, and it has been selling briskly. Even the town's infamous police chief bought one. Reuben Greenberg is a one-man multicultural band. He is a practicing Jew, and he is black. One day he pulled over Quintero on the pretext of warning him about some minor problem with his truck, got the address of the store and later stopped in to buy a license plate."It's a big thing now in town to honk when you see someone else who's got a NuSouth plate," Evans said. "Or sometimes they flash lights," Quintero said. "When you see the Nike swoosh," Evans said, "you don't flash. It doesn't mean anything. Our clothes are about meaning, about a new identity, a respect for self." The duo is staking its business on the proposition that the next generation will halve the difference between the '60s generation's loathing of all corporate emblems and the '80s generation's mindless acceptance of empty corporate symbology. They hope that the next demographic bulge will want a little meaning to go along with its purchases.It's impossible to listen to Evans and Quintero without simultaneously hearing the politics of principle and the profits of business, the twin currents that have always driven the black debate as to how to better the race. The year 1910 brought the political movement of W.E.B. Du Bois (who founded the NAACP) and the economic self- improvement of Booker T. Washington (who founded the Tuskegee Institute) . Since the end of Reconstruction, the world of black Americans has been shaped by these two forces, accommodation versus agitation. And each generation has produced people who embody one side of this divide or the other. There were the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X; Thurgood Marshall and Angela Davis. Today we have Jesse Jackson, who's still organizing outsider protests, and Clarence Thomas, who's lecturing affirmative-action babies to suck it up and get a real job.It's hard to locate Evans and Quintero on this old and troubled map. Are they part of the old black paradox, or have they resolved it? They seem to have sold out but with all deliberate speed. "The fall line will have three themes, three facets of life," Evans said. "The 'urban' look, the 'Desert Storm' look, and what we call 'nine-to-five'. The urban gear is for hip-hop kids just kickin' in a regular way - that's your bubble fleece, leather jackets, ball caps. The Desert Storm look is camouflage army fatigues dyed in red. The cammies are for those who still think they are at war over something we should be far beyond - the war with ourselves. Then the nine-to-five is apparel with the button-down look for the corporate types who want to make a social statement but are fearful that if they come out too boldly they will lose their jobs for having an opinion. So we enable these guys who wear suits to have a shirt or tie that says it. it's very discreet, very tasteful, like Polo."Is this the politics of the new black middle class? These days 25 per cent of blacks live in the suburbs, twice the percentage that lived there three decades ago. This nine-to-five line is political fashion tailored directly to them. it's not a Malcolm X cap (ironically, now an empty symbol - what buppie supports Molotov cocktail-tossing revolution?). But it's not the sellout of khakis and a blue blazer, either. It is the Confederate flag, after all - but tastefully rendered and still possessing enough troublesome meaning for the workaday advertising rep or accountant who is eager to say "Fuck you" to old-school racism while sailing into the economic mainstream."See, our marketing is not what I call 'fool's marketing' - selling Michael Jordan to a guy who's five-five," Evans said. "We're telling the guy the truth. We're not telling anybody to be like us; we're telling people to be themselves. That's what the NuSouth is all about. Nike has a slogan, 'Just do it.' Well, our slogan goes off from that: 'Doin' it.' We put that slogan on the back of the shirt because you're moving forward with it."Evans and Quintero are now completing plans to open an outlet in the Atlanta airport this February."After Atlanta," Evans said, "we are considering Montgomery, Alabama. We have a three-year strategy to open one NuSouth store in each of the states of the Confederacy. Each store will open in February, Black History Month. We have a good business plan and a great accountant working with us. We ain't just whistling 'Dixie'."Jack Hitt is a GQ writer-at-large.
