As senators and representatives in South Carolina begin debating whether to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state capitol grounds, a newspaper in Mississippi is attempting to shame its lawmakers into confessing their position on whether to remove the controversial icon from the canton of its state flag. The Clarion-Ledger contacted every member of the state house and senate and asked them a simple, unambiguous question: “Do you support legislative action to remove the Confederate symbol from the Mississippi flag?”

As a native Mississippian and recovering racist, I finally discovered why a seemingly innocuous thing like a state flag can bring out the absolute worst in us. It took a group of 11-year-old students to teach me that lesson. After reading about my most recent novel dealing with race in Jim Crow Mississippi, the principal of a private school in Minneapolis invited me to speak with his fifth-grade students. All the classes had been studying the civil rights movement. He said, “I read an interview with you in the newspaper and you said you were a recovering racist. Would you come talk to our kids about your experiences?”

At every graduation ceremony, some official requests that the audience hold applause until every student has made their way across the stage. Reliably, everyone ignores this plea. However at Mississippi’s Senatobia High School’s graduation, there were consequences for one family who couldn’t wait to cheer on their graduate. Linda Miller was one of four people asked to leave the graduation ceremony after she cheered for her daughter, Lanarcia, as she was handed her diploma.

The last standing abortion clinic in Mississippi was vandalized over the weekend, when a lone assailant attempted to destroy the center’s security cameras and power lines in the middle of the night Sunday. Staffers at the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, also known as “the Pink House,” arrived at the center on Monday morning to discover alarms sounding off over the mess, as well as video footage revealing a single man in a hoodie attacking one camera after the other with a blunt object.