A Confederate flag flying in Carmel prompts an anti-hate resolution.

Historian and writer Carol McKibben has spent the past 15-plus years teaching courses on California history, urban history and immigration history at Stanford University, while also using the cities of Monterey County as her living lab and center of research. She’s written books on the Sicilian women of Monterey, starting when Cannery Row was an actual row of canneries, and on how Seaside’s development as a military town brought middle-class Black, white, Latino and Asian families together to create “a local politics of inclusion” that showed integration can change ideas about race. And on the day we spoke the week of June 14, she was working through edits on her next book, this one to be released in the fall, on Salinas and its history of race as an agricultural town.

In other words, McKibben has dedicated her life’s work to thinking about how people of different races live together, often successfully, throughout Monterey County. And in a recent essay, she wrote about her adopted hometown – Carmel, where she’s lived for 20 years – and how its history as an artists colony and haven for writers and artists helped create a place where the LGBTQ+ community found refuge.

If the public thinks of Carmel as a city dominated by white elites, she thinks, it’s only recently in history that connection has been made. “Those of us who live here,” she writes, “know that the community of independent thinkers remains very much a part of life here.”

It was especially jarring for her, then, the day she stepped out of her house in late May for a walk and found one of her neighbors was flying a Confederate flag outside his home. It’s an act that twists Carmel’s “spirit of nonconformity” in a way she hadn’t seen before, she writes in the essay, and it stopped her in her tracks.

This particular neighbor, she tells me, has embraced a spirit of nonconformity in the past, in a mostly harmless way. He’s decorated his yard with pink flamingos, for example. The hanging of this flag was in no way harmless – it was provocative and awful.

“I was really stunned. I was really appalled. I stopped and went, ‘Oh my God, am I really seeing this? Is this really happening?’” she says.

McKibben had exchanged pleasantries with the man in the past, although she doesn’t know him well. When she delivered to him a letter expressing her dismay at the symbol he had hanging from his house, he took that symbol down.

And a day or so later, he put it back up.

McKibben says while she supports his First Amendment rights to express even this misguided opinion, this goes beyond mere expression and enters the realm of hate.

“This isn’t about what people do on private property,” she says. “It’s about symbols meant to afflict an ideology of hatred to showcase that hatred. It’s a far cry from general bad taste or free speech – it’s a different animal altogether,” she says.

That different animal, for the first time in history, made it all the way into the U.S. Capitol, carried by rioters who breached the center of our republic; some of those rioters were there to hunt humans, those elected officials whose politics didn’t align with their own. It was carried by marchers in Charlotte in 2016, after protests began following the police killing of Keith Lamont Scott. It’s a symbol, maybe the ultimate symbol, of white supremacy – funny in a grim way when you consider that it’s also the symbol of the losing side of a particular war.

“It’s not benign. This is a purposeful statement of hate and discrimination and it failed in the 19th century to achieve its ends, but that doesn’t mean it’s not supported today and we need to guard against it,” McKibben says. “It represents an effort to destroy democracy, which is based on freedom, not slavery.”

The city of Carmel can’t force the neighbor to take down his flag, nor should they. It’s not, after all, a planned community with particular rules. But what they can do – and what Councilmember Karen Ferlito is doing – is to bring forth an anti-hate resolution for the city to consider and pass.

Ferlito sent a draft of it to City Hall last week and expects to have the resolution considered at the council’s July 6 meeting.

MARY DUAN writes Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com