I understand this may be controversial. The rebel flag or dixie flag was never an official flag of the Confederacy and some states have lowkey made their state flags resemble ones that were. My question is why do so many southerners and even northerners fly one and never the other? From my experience those I ask can't even identify the actual Confederate flag and yet their reasons are always heritage? Saying they are racist or confused seems like too easy an answer so why do they this?
First, the historians of this subreddit rallied here to answer a similar question about the origins and history of the battle flag.
The "stars and bars" was not that popular: waving, it looked a good bit too much like the US Flag., and so there were calls for something better within a year, The next couple of flags incorporated the now-familiar Battle Flag into their design. But even those were used for perhaps four years, while the Battle Flag would go on to be used for decades, unfurled at meetings of Confederate veterans. Adherents to the Lost Cause made much of noble and gallant Confederate soldiers and their commanders heroically fighting under the Battle Flag. The Battle Flag symbolized the valiant narrative that white Southerners preferred to tell. It would have been much harder to extol the gallantry of the Confederacy bureaucrats going to work in Richmond in the vicinity of the "stars and bars" or the later "Srainless Banner", doing things that were much less happy to have remembered, like assessing the property taxes due on slaves.