In the South, there is much pride in ancestry. “Who your people are” matters to many. Who a person is today is very often defined by the past: the way one was raised, what church or school a family attended, what roles ancestors played in the history of a community. It creates a sense of place and a sense of continuity from one generation to the next, a connection to the past that can’t be broken.

This week, one connection to the past has been challenged across many states — the Confederate battle flag. The challenge comes in direct response to the massacre of nine people participating in Bible study at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, a massacre perpetrated by a white supremacist who admittedly set out to kill Black people. His online rants, pre-massacre, included images of himself waving the Confederate battle flag, often with gun in hand. His purpose in killing people in a house of God, he said, was to start a race war.

One could argue that this incident was perpetrated by an obviously mentally unstable person; that the Confederate flag does not represent anything but a connection to the past, a sense of continuity. But that’s not really true: not for millions of Americans, and not for millions overseas.

In the years after the Civil War, Confederate General Robert E. Lee advocated that the battle flag of his Army of Northern Virginia be put away. Why? He said flying it worked to “keep open the sores of war.” So it was put away.

Who revived its use? The Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia, as those hate organizations went on lynching and cross- and church-burning sprees in the 1930s and 1940s. The flag was taken up again by the White Citizens Councils of the segregationist era, an organization that has evolved into the Council of Conservative Citizens, now the largest white-supremacist group in the nation.

But that’s not all. In Germany, it’s illegal to fly the swastika — a sacred symbol in eastern religions, one whose meaning to the Western mind changed completely with the rise the Nazi party and its campaign for racial purity. Neo-Nazis and skinheads in Germany can’t fly the flag of the Nazi party, so what do they fly instead?

The Confederate battle flag.

In Europe, flying the flag of the Confederacy is synonymous with the mores and agenda of the Nazi party.

With those associations in mind, is it any wonder that the Confederate battle flag is considered a symbol of separatism and hatred by so many Americans?

Saturday, another symbol of the South, NASCAR driver and North Carolina native Dale Earnhardt Jr., spoke out: “I think it’s offensive to an entire race … It belongs in the history books and that’s about it.”