NOEMIE EMERY: "What is it that South Carolinians know that people in Maryland, New York and Missouri do not?"

The claim is that the [Confederate] flag stands for racism and rage, and as such may have inspired the killer, and this may have substance. But the fact is that while the Confederate flag flew over the capitol, the state underneath it has become one of the most diverse and least polarized states of the union, and perhaps the most tolerant.

Of the many cases of white-on-black deaths that have roiled the country in the past year, the massacre in South Carolina has been one example in which death united, and did not divide, the whole population. South Carolina has been the one state in the union in which black people seem to feel they have found justice. If what's in a flag is what one sees in it, what some people saw may be wrong.

In 2010, the first Tea Party election, South Carolina chose 38-year-old Nikki Haley to become one of only six female governors, and the second governor descended from Indian immigrants (the first was Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, another southern conservative state). In the same year, Tim Scott, then 44 years old, defeated a son of Strom Thurmond in a primary election for Thurmond's old seat in Congress, becoming the first black Republican elected to the House from the Deep South since Reconstruction.

In 2013, Jim DeMint left the Senate, and Governor Haley appointed Scott to replace him. In 2014, Scott won a special election, making him the first black person elected to the Senate from the old Confederacy since 1881. His margin of victory was 23 points. South Carolina is now the one state in the union whose top three elected officials include two racial and ethnic minorities and only one white male.

It is also the one state in which killings of black men by whites did not lead to violence.

Maybe, just maybe, the flag doesn't stand for what the racists on the Left think it does. They might think about asking, not assuming, sometime....