A shift in the wind, Part Deux

And now I want to see the confrontation.

I want to see, now that NASCAR has officially banned the Confederate battle flag from its premises after taking a weak run at it in 2015, what happens the first time some GI Jethro shows up at Talladega with his army gun and his army suit and the Stars and Bars fluttering in the breeze from his SUV or pickup truck.

I want to see what happens when he's told he has to take the flag down. I want to see what happens when someone wearing the Stars and Bars on a T-shirt is told he can't come onto the premises wearing that thing. I want to hear the words come out of their mouths.

"I'm a proud American and I'll proudly fly the flag of my country's enemies if I want!"

Because that's essentially thelogic here, no matter how it would be phrased. And this from a demographic which likely polls high in the belief Colin Kaepernick was disrespecting the American flag simply by kneeling with his head bowed.

And, yes, I get it, it was Americans fighting Americans in that dark time, but I'm not going to re-plow that overworked piece of ground. Nor am I going to engage the "Heritage Not Hate" line of neo-Confederate thought. That ideology got its legs taken out the moment some coward in a white sheet and hood raised the Stars and Bars and went marching off behind it.

The Klan and the white supremacists, see, they know what that flag represents. So do the people of color they've terrorized, beaten and lynched lo these many decades. It's why no gathering of racists is complete without the Stars and Bars, and why people of color see it the way Jews see a swastika.

It represents slavery, repression and wholesale murder to them. And to the racists, it represents an America that was better when people of color could be enslaved, repressed and murdered wholesale. Not everyone who flies that flag would regard himself as a racist, but every racist is proud to fly it.

There's your "heritage," boys and girls. You can scream about it all you want, but the racists stole a march on you. It belongs to them now, as it always really has.

But not to NASCAR anymore. And that's because NASCAR is not NASCAR anymore.

It's no longer a regional curiosity thick with Lost Cause wistfulness, and it hasn't been for some time. It's a thoroughly corporate entity now, and it goes to California and Illinois and New Hampshire as readily as it does to the heart of the old Confederacy.

Its commercial appeal has been deliberately steered away from all that, because people in Fontana and Joliet buy Martin Truex Jr. gear, too. And of course its top series has an African-American driver now.

Can't really abide the Stars and Bars as a backdrop, given that. As Bubba Wallace himself pointed out this week.

The gist of his argument was "Really, NASCAR?", and NASCAR immediately responded. Would it have done this if it didn't now employ an African-American driver and others of color? Probably not with such alacrity. Which is the value of diversity writ large.

You hire a diverse workforce not because it's "politically correct," whatever that means, but because in theory it makes you a more agile and accessible business. It doesn't always happen that way, because prejudices are stubborn things and good intentions are frequently soured by them. And businesses are always going to hew to the bottom line first and everything else second.

But occasionally, the whole thing works the way it's supposed to. And that happened this week.

Of course, how NASCAR intends to enforce its ban is another matter, and that remains to be seen. I'm guessing there will be a fair number of confrontations, because Americans are Americans and don't like being told what to do, even if it's the right thing. So it's naïve to think there won't still be a few Confederate battle flags fluttering in the breeze among the motorhomes outside Talladega or Darlington or Bristol.

But they will be outliers now, not the semi-official wallpaper of an entire sport. And the people who fly them will mark themselves by doing so.

Scream to the contrary all they want.