Michael Alvear writes a very concise, clear and understandable essay. His title, “Confederate Flag—so un-Southern,” is interesting enough to get the reader curious, but it lacks real pizzazz. Also the assuming and all-knowing tone the essay takes on in the first paragraph can be a real turn off to interested readers. “The answer to the Confederate flag controversy is so obvious – and so Southern – even Southerners sometimes can’t see it.” The phrase “so obvious” distances the writer from all of the politicians, lawyer’s, judges, and other people trying to find a solution to the problem, and can give the reader the sense that the writer is no more than highly opinionated, arrogant, and

better of the two warriors of persuasion, by use of superior imagery and diction, believable evidence, and critical analysis.

To people of color, the Confederacy was an evil Empire. No retrofitting makes it anything less—not to those whose bodies were bled, burned, yoked, abused; who were bought and sold, worked from cain’t-see in the morning to cain’t-see at night, snatched from their families, for centuries on end undergoing what James Baldwin called “the unspeakable blasphemy, in order to make [the slaveholding class] money.”

The strongest point of Alvear’s essay however, may have been his analysis and resolution of the flag dilemma. He argues that Confederate flag supporters are so lost in their fight to fly the flag that they can’t see that “the solution lies in the heart of the South’s values.” He maintains that the cherished ideals of honor, civility, and politeness are what separated the people of the Old South from their Northern brothers. And also that flying the Confederate flag is a violation of these values and a strike against one’s own “Southernness.” Kindness and consideration of another’s feelings is what must be remembered by Southerner’s today lest they become like the Yankees that lacked the social graces

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