The editorial "Confederate Flags Must Vanish" by David W. Brown (Mar. 4) was characteristic of the prejudice shown against white Southerners by many who oppose the Confederate flag. In it, white Southerners were accused of murder, rape and general oppression of Blacks. While some whites in the South committed these acts, the statements must be qualified in order to reflect reality.

I find it surprising how easily liberals can see the racism in sentences such as, "Black men in South Central Los Angeles are criminals," while they will often overlook and occasionally, as in the case of this editorial, make statements such as, "The white Southern man remained consumed by one overriding passion--a paranoid fear of black men." Both statements are racist, and it saddens me that people seem so willing to make generalizations such as these, and that such statements have become acceptable if targeted at white Southerners.

Mr. Brown ends his editorial by assaulting America's First Amendment rights with his statement, "Furthermore, the Confederate Flag should be torn down wherever it is raised." To tear down a flag someone has raised on their own property smacks of the Nazism Brown rightfully decried in his editorial.

Unfortunately, he and the majority of anti-Confederate Flag militants have yet to realize that modern Southerners view the Rebel Flag not as "a symbolic middle finger cast at those who supported justice and equal rights," but as a symbolic middle finger cast at those who hold so many racist stereotypes of the white Southerner. --Randy Karger '98