Confederate flag not a states' rights issue

When I was 21 years old, I realized how little I knew about anything other than my own sheltered background.

I went to work as a bank teller in Washington, D.C., at a branch bank about a dozen blocks north of the Capitol building on North Capitol St. We were across the street from the Government Printing Office, and about 50 percent of our customers were African-American.

I hadn't gone to school with anyone other than suburban white kids until my senior year, when Fairfax County, Va., closed its black high school and 300 kids were added to our student body of about 3,000.

I had reached the age of 21 without ever really having a conversation with a black person, and now my window at the bank was in between two black women. One was a college student about my own age, home from Boston for the summer.

She was cool, and we spent a lot of time talking.

I wasn't quite so stupid as to ask her if she knew Sammy Davis JrSammy Davis Jr. or Marvin Gaye (I swear I knew people in that summer of 1971 who thought all black people knew each other), but I was pretty callow.

I remember several times asking Cecilia, "What do black people think about ..." She cured me of it quickly by asking me what white people thought about the same things. That was when I realized I was treating her as a representative of her race and not as a person in her own right.

We didn't talk about serious issues. The wounds were still too raw in Washington just three years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King JrMartin Luther King Jr. and the riots that had burned entire neighborhoods in the city.

Mostly we just talked and sort of became friends. Later that summer, she invited me to bring a date to a party she and some friends of hers were having.

It was a fascinating experience. My date and I were the only white people at the party. I heard some great music that was more than the usual Motown stuff so many of us grew up on, and I realized that the cooking of chitterlings might have been the worst food smell I had ever encountered.

Things have changed some since then for me. I've had black friends since then, and I've learned a lot more about treating people as individuals instead of symbols.

I've learned some other things too. I've learned that if you're going to take a stand that makes you look racist, you had better have a damn good reason. There were some decent, non-racist senators who voted against the Civil Rights Bill in 1964 because they thought someone who owned a restaurant or a hotel should be allowed to serve whoever they want.

They were wrong then, and the folks who defend South Carolina flying the Confederate flag on the basis of states' rights and historical tradition are wrong now.

It would be the same as if people somewhere in Germany wanted to display the swastika out of respect for tradition. To too many black South Carolinians -- and indeed other black Americans -- the tradition the Stars and Bars represents is about people in shackles kept in line by bullwhips.

There are certain things in our country that we don't allow the majority to do to the minority, and rubbing their faces in the history of slavery ought to be one of those things.

Yes, to some people the flag represents the great lost cause and the South of "Gone With the Wind," and if some unenlightened people want to fly the flag on private property, there's nothing we can do.

But flying the Confederate flag on the grounds of the state capitol says something to black people that we shouldn't be saying. It's telling them that hey, those Yankees forced us to free the slaves, but we still don't like you much.

I know that much without asking any of my friends what black people think about it.