Full disclosure: the flag doesn’t bother me at all and never has. I, frankly, never associated the flag with slavery (as in, Confederate Flag = Slavery) until the news media made that association for me. Over the years, when I saw the Confederate flag, I thought “redneck,” not “racist.” Not every racist is a redneck, and not every redneck is a racist. I’ve known many rednecks and good ol’ boys who were never, in my presence or reported to me outside of it, seen behaving in any way racist. They didn’t care what color you were so long as you brought the beer. These guys loved their Confederate flag more as symbolic of the south than as a symbol of hatred. The redneck boys I knew thought the Ku Klux Klan were a bunch of idiots.

I agree the flag should never have been flown over the SC capitol dome (mainly as an F-U to civil rights efforts), nor did I think it should have been flown at the war memorial. But I’d have been perfectly okay with the flag displayed in a glass case at the memorial while the U.S. flag was flown overhead.

Taking that flag down will not bring back a single one of the nine victims of the Emanuel AME shooting, nor will it in any way ease the suffering of their families. Taking down the flag won’t repair the Voting Rights Act the Supreme Court gutted in 2013, won’t bring justice for the growing numbers of African Americans seemingly shot at-will by law enforcement, won’t provide access to health care or solve any of the dozens of public policy issues dividing this nation. Even worse, taking down the flag will provide some in White America with an inappropriate sense of closure, which may cause some to respond to these public policy issues, “We gave up our flag, that’s all you get,” as if taking the flag down actually accomplished anything. Taking down the flag only breeds resentment and suppresses racist attitudes such that, while not openly displayed, they smolder beneath the surface. The worst part about this non-plan is stigmatizing the flag makes real racial problems that much harder to see. I’d much rather they left the flag alone; at least then I could see ‘em coming.

If we really wanted to strip the Confederate flag of power, we’d just stop talking about it. We’d let it fade into obscurity as what it factually is: an icon of southern antiquity. By using the Confederate flag as a prop to avoid actually talking to each other and engaging on serious problems of society, we shame not only that flag but our own.