There's a big, messy conversation unfolding across the U.S. about removing Confederate monuments from public spaces. The North Country is kind of on the margin of that debate. But here in our region, the Confederate battle flag has become a complicated and fiercely debated symbol.

It's a flag of an army that was in open treason against the U.S. government, fighting to defend slavery in the Civil War. Historians say it was later embraced by racists and politicians fighting against civil rights for African-Americans.

So why do people fly Confederate flags so far north, or put Confederate decals on their trucks or T-shirts? Zach Hirsch talked with one Plattsburgh family about why they embrace the controversial symbol.

This year, a neighbor on my street in Plattsburgh put a Confederate battle flag in his window. I was curious and kind of troubled by it for months. Then, one day, the flag was gone and that made me even more curious. Maybe they had second thoughts.

So I decided to knock on my neighbor’s door and ask.

“I’m originally from Hazelhurst, Georgia,” said 28-year-old Ricky Barber. He’s worked in warehouses and auto mechanic shops – but he’s out of work right now. He said he had the flag in the window because he needed a curtain, and he took it down only because he’s moving. Now it’s hanging at his fiancé Becca Lee’s house across town on their bedroom wall.

Becca is 30 and she's from Kansas. She has a lot of family in the South and describes herself as a southern belle.

“We are not a racist couple and we own the flag. It’s no big deal to us,” Becca said. “I don’t judge people, I don’t care what color skin they are. If they need defending I’m going to defend them, that’s what a southern belle does.”

We talked in Becca's backyard. People were grilling, and kids were playing nearby. Ricky wore glasses, earrings, a T-shirt and cargo shorts. Becca was wearing sunglasses and a summer dress, and she sat in a camping chair.

Ricky and Becca said they're not hateful people. Barber said he believes “everybody should… have equal rights no matter what color their skin is.”

“Technically everybody is the same race. Some people have darker pigment-ism to the skin, some people don’t,” he said. “Everybody still bleeds the same color blood.”

But the way Ricky talks about race, the words he chooses – sometimes it was jarring.

“I don’t care who you are, you could be black – blacker than the ace of spades, I mean you’re going to bleed red if you get, you know – the blood’s going to be red no matter what.”

He repeated that phrase, “blacker than the ace of spades,” a few times. Ricky also said he thinks President Barack Obama – America's first and only black president – worsened racial tensions in the U.S. And as we talked, Ricky argued against basic, well-documented facts about the experience of people of color in the America.

“Equal rights is out there for everybody but, it all depends on what you do to end up in prison,” he said. “It’s life choices that put you there.”

“I think we might agree to disagree on that one,” I said.

On average, black people are incarcerated in state prisons at a rate that’s more than five times the rate of whites. In some states, that ratio is more than ten to one. That’s according to a 2016 study from The Sentencing Project, a nonpartisan group that advocates for prison reform in America.

(Clarification: this text has been updated to clarify how The Sentencing Project measured racial disparities in state prisons. The key measurement was the incarceration rate, which refers to “the concentration of prisoners by race and ethnicity as a proportion of their representation in the state’s overall general population.” )

It’s just one of a catalogue of studies showing that African Americans are not treated the same as whites in the U.S.

“That’s actually not true because I see more white people that get arrested for drugs than black people,” Ricky said. “So I don’t see how somebody’s going to sit there and say that a black man gets more prison time.”

Our conversation went on like this. Becca said it is sometimes appropriate for white people to use the n-word. Ricky didn’t accept the idea that black people are more likely to be shot by police than white people.*

And a lot of words and phrases that make many Americans uncomfortable or angry just didn’t bother Ricky and Becca. They seemed to build their assumptions from a different read of American history and culture. The same goes for the Confederate flag they fly.

Why take the thing that was from the Civil War that was defending slavery?

“Yes, granted, they used it in the Civil War to defend the southern states’ slavery,” Ricky said. “The reason I display the flag is because of my heritage. Where I come from. Like I said, I’m originally from the southern end of Georgia. Which makes that my flag.

“Not because I’m racist, or because I don’t like black people – that’s not the case. I have black family; I have black friends.”

Ricky does have black family. There was an African American teenager playing in the backyard while we talked.

Ricky said the flag is his way of remembering the southern soldiers who died in the Civil War. But scholars say it means a lot more than that. Political scientists who have studied the Confederate battle flag say it mostly disappeared right after the Civil War.

And an historian – W. Fitzhugh Brundage at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – said the flag made a comeback almost a century later as a symbol of racism, even violence.

“And so during the 1950s and 1960s it was routine for the Ku Klux Klan to hold rallies with the Confederate battle flag as well as the cross,” Brundage said, “and for just random white protesters against Civil Rights activism to display the Confederate battle flag.”

Ricky and Becca said they don’t care about that modern history. They said the Confederate flag is the flag of the South. Their flag. And a symbol of their pride in the south, their identity. (Note: an earlier version of this story attributed the phrase "white pride" to Ricky. That is not an accurate quote.) But they also said it's becoming something more.

“You look at all these people that gather down in the south that are blacks,” Ricky said. “What about their Black Lives Matter flags and stuff like that? That’s pushing back on the white people. Us white people, we retaliate by – hey, we got Confederate flag and whatnot, you know?”

So is that retaliation?

“It’s not retaliation exactly. It’s more of – look this is our flag, this is what we stand for. You guys have the Black Lives Matter flags; that’s what you guys stand for.”

Then the conversation got even more complicated. “Can you come here for a second, please?” Ricky said, calling over the young, teenage family member who’s black.

“Are you opposed to the Confederate flag at all? Do you have a problem with that flag as a black person?”

(We can’t use the family member’s voice. The person is underage and we don’t have permission from the parents.)

The teenager looked uncomfortable. Ricky and Becca kept pushing for an answer. “What does that mean to you, is what he’s trying to say,” Becca said.

The response was kind of stunning. The black teenager told Ricky and Becca that the Confederate flag is flown by people who want to have slavery happen again in America. This wasn't coming from the media or an historian or a liberal professor. It came from a black member of their family. There was a long pause.

Doesn’t that make you reconsider what it means?

“We would just have to have a long talk explaining why we do it ourselves,” Becca said. “Have I ever disrespected you in any way? To show that I was racist?”

The teenager, still standing with us, said no.

“To me it’s a southern flag," Becca said. "It means more, and respect for – yes, some of our ancestors are a bunch of a*****es as everyone puts it. And we grown to not be a racist type, and that’s what I hang up the flag, is to show what the flag was in the past and now we get to bring that to our children saying 'hey, this is what the flag meant back in the day, now this is what it means now to us.'”

While you fight this fight to kind of redefine what the flag means, in the meantime, are you comfortable with the fact that most people will see that as a symbol of hate and maybe be afraid of you?

“I’ve never had once anybody come to me and ask me to take that flag down,” Ricky said.

What if they’re afraid? I mean, I was a little scared to talk to you. I’m also a minority in this country because I’m Jewish.

“It all goes back to a person’s choice. If they choose to be afraid then it’s on them. I mean, you came up to me the other day when I was at my house getting ready to leave and you asked me to do an interview. Was I rude about it? No. I gave you the utmost respect that you deserved,” Ricky said.

“It’s my choice of what I want to hang in my house or my window or outside my house. It’s my choice.”

We talked a while longer – about Charlottesville, Virginia; and about Dylan Roof, the white supremacist who photographed himself with that same flag before murdering nine black people in a church.

The couple said that’s just not how they see the Confederate flag. They’ve clearly thought a lot about this, and their feelings are pretty nuanced. They said they would take down the flag temporarily if it made friends or family uncomfortable. But then they would hang it again as a symbol of pride and identity.

Becca told me that no one will ever convince her to permanently take down her flag. In fact, she said, when she hears people telling her it’s offensive, her instinct is to hang on to it even tighter.

*A report from October 2014 by ProPublica about young black males killed by police was widely publicized. But a range of other research shows the picture is much more complicated.