Tracy Thompson is the author of "The New Mind of the South."
This excerpt comes from a longer excerpt of her book posted at
Salon. In the course of our conversation, Yacine Kout mentioned
something else—an incident that had happened the previous spring
at Eastern Randolph High School just outside Asheboro. On Cinco
de Mayo, the annual celebration of Mexico’s defeat of French
forces at the Battle of Puebla in 1862, a lot of Hispanic
students brought Mexican flags to school. The next day, Kout
said, white students brought Confederate flags to school as a
message: This is our heritage. The Civil War is like a mountain
range that guards all roads into the South: you can’t go there
without encountering it. Specifically, you can’t go there
without addressing a question that may seem as if it shouldn’t
even be a question—to wit: what caused the war? One hundred and
fifty years after the event, Americans—at least the vast
majority who toil outside academia—still can’t agree. Evidence
of this crops up all the time, of