[RedBean]

I live in Mississippi, and I see just about as many blacks flying or displaying the flag as I do whites. It is displayed on state buildings, post offices, police cars, virtually everywhere, and even made it's appearance in Iraq this summer emblazoned on every armored vehicle in the 155th Regimental Battalion from Camp Shelby, Miss.

Many native mississippi blacks will tell you that the flag is not a symbol of racism at all in their eyes, and they find it more troubling when the northern suits who talk long and hard about how much they loathe racist symbolism then turn around and refuse to hire someone to work with them based on their skin color.

Southern Blacks get real tired of hearing white people from the north come tell us what is and isn't racist about our flag.

Mississippi is also the blackest state in the nation, with 36% of the population being black, three times the national average. In fact, until about 1950, blacks outnumbered whites.

When they had northern outsiders come in a few years back and hold a referendum to oust the flag from the official state flag designation, it was voted against handily, with blacks and whites alike asking outsiders from the NAACP and the David Dukes of the world to get the heck out of our state with their racism mumbo jumbo and leave our history be.

Of course, it is actually a heritage thing here, considering the prescence of a large Confederate Memorial, the Confederate Veterans Home (now vacant, obviously), and the Confederate "White House", and the large lineage of native Mississippians who can trace ancestors who fought and died in the war, black and white alike.