Confederate image hides NASCAR diversity programs

	For all the gains Brian France's NASCAR has made in trying to diversify, the image of the Confederate flag still hangs over the sport. Streeter Lecka/Getty Images for NASCAR

"I can't tell people what flag to fly."
 -- Brian France, NASCAR Chairman and CEO

Brian France, the venerable third-generation leader of NASCAR, is in a bit of a conundrum. His sport is on a high. Since breaking out of its Southern borders in the late 1990s, the stock car circuit has become one of the nation's favorite sports and one of Madison Avenue's most shameless marketing machines. Yet NASCAR has a niggling problem: That dadgum flag.

France can't amble through the infield at almost any NASCAR race without seeing one waving from atop a motor home belonging to one of the sport's good-ol' die-hards, or silk-screened across a tee shirt, or slapped onto a bumper.

Last week, during an interview for a 60 Minutes segment on NASCAR, correspondent Lesley Stahl asked France to "be honest" when she asked him what he was doing to convince African Americans (as if we are the only people concerned with racist imagery, but I digress) that NASCAR isn't a "good ol' boy, southern, Confederate flag sport." France stumbled just a tad. "Well, look. I can't -- these are massive facilities," he said. "I can't tell people what flag to fly."

Then France did a little flag waving himself. "I can tell you the flag we get behind," he said. "It's the American flag."

It was a bit over the top, but no harm intended or taken.

The "Southern Cross," best known as the Confederate flag, isn't an easy topic to address on national TV. It's been the source of pain and rancor for generations of citizens of all colors, and the cause of angry debates nationwide, particularly in the South, for nearly a quarter century. Politicians across the South fought 'til spit flew for the right to hang that dadgum flag atop their statehouses. Some even incorporated it into their own state flag, expecting their populace to salute a symbol that would later be embraced and utilized by more than 500 extremist hate groups nationwide, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center

No wonder France bumbled a bit before offering this slight recovery: "It's not a flag I look at with anything favorable. That's for sure."

The knee-jerk challenge would be to implore NASCAR to simply ban the flag from being displayed by anyone attending a NASCAR event. Doing so would unleash enough first-amendment goblins to scare the bejeezus out of Harry Potter.