AJC
What? White Southerners don’t care about the Confederate flag?
This July 8, 2017, photo shows a member of the Ku Klux Klan holding a Confederate flag over his face during a rally, calling for the protection of Southern Confederate monuments, in Charlottesville, Va. On Sept. 1, 2017, wearing the Confederate flag became a violation of the Lapel (Ind.) High School dress code after students wore the flag two days in a row.
Republicans and Democrats. Black Lives Matter. White supremacists. As part of their recent poll of Southern blacks and whites, Winthrop University researchers introduced respondents to the "Feeling Thermometer," and asked them to say how warm or cool they feel toward a person or thing.
The higher the rating, the more warmly the person felt about the subject. So 100 was hot love, and 0 was intense dislike. Fifty was neither supportive or opposed.
The Confederate flag picked up an unsurprising mean score of 16.5 (deep dislike) from black respondents. But the mean score among whites was 49.9, meaning white Southerners are mostly indifferent to the battle emblem.
