Another woman had the blank, haunted look of a shell-shocked soldier. Before Michael Westerman’s death, she said, white rancor toward blacks was contained. “We were living with it. I felt like they respected us.” But now she wondered if she’d been fooling herself her whole life. “That flag opens up a racial door we’ve been keeping closed for so many years. It’s a way of saying what white people have kept bottled up.” She paused as the sound of chanting—“equal rights for whites!”—drifted through the open gym door. The woman shook her head. “They’ve gone loco on us,” she said.
