Albany should adopt a new flag. Here’s why.

“Albany has a flag ?”

This was the most frequent response when I asked my friends what they thought of the Albany flag, and it’s hard to blame them.

There’s a reason you don’t see Albany ’s flag around much. It’s a racist, poorly designed symbol that isn’t instilling pride in our residents.

Adopted 111 years ago, the flag features the city ’s seal on the tri-color design of the Prince’s Flag of the Netherlands, which was flown by the slave-trading Dutch East India Company during the 17th century. This flag, discontinued by the Netherlands in 1795, later became the basis for the similar-looking apartheid-era flag of South Africa and was used by the Dutch Nazi Party during World War II. Since then, it’s been co-opted by far-right white supremacist groups and used by racists like Charleston shooter Dylann Roof.

It’s also poorly designed.

Vexillologists (flag experts) have five rules of good design: A flag should be simple, use no more than three basic colors, contain no lettering or seals, have meaningful symbolism, and be distinctive from other flags. Albany ’s flag fails on four counts.

Why does this matter? Flags are powerful symbols that people can rally around. In cities with good flags, like Chicago, they ’re everywhere: flying on people’s porches, printed on clothing, draped over police officers’ caskets at funerals.

They create civic pride, and we could use a bit more of that. A poorly designed flag fails to do that, and in this case can even be detrimental.

It’s time for Albany to adopt a flag its people can be proud of. To this end, I have, after a long design process, created a proposal to replace the current flag, which you can read about at www.albanyflag.com. There, you can also sign a petition calling on the Common Council and Mayor Kathy Sheehan to replace the existing design.

This isn’t a revolutionary concept — the state of Mississippi thankfully just voted to transition away from its Confederate flag; and many cities, including Provo, Utah, and Pocatello, Idaho, have successfully changed their bad flags. We can, too.

Let’s make a bold change and choose to promote unity and commonality instead of keeping this unknown, intolerant eyesore.