I agree GregF. You know, basketball player Charles Barkley was on the Daily Show last night, and he is a pretty articulate guy (and no, I'm not suggesting he didn't fit the image of the stereotype of the dumb jock). Jon Stewart immediately asked him about the Lott thing, because Barkley was there promoting his book (can't remember the title), in which he talks quite a bit about race issues. He is a Southerner. He said going back home (Alabama I think) is like going back to the 1960s or 1970s, and if he didn't have family there, he would never go back, because so little has changed for blacks and the old racist codes (from both races, he noted, not just whites) of Southern segregationist culture, still strongly exists.

Stewart asked him specifically if he was treated better in other parts of the country, and he said it wasn't so much a matter of how is treated anywhere, because now he is wealthy so he is treated better than poor people are anywhere. He said comparisons of how he was treated as a black man in the North, the coasts, the West didn't compare to how blacks in South still are treated today, because the South is the only place where this sort of backward looking racist society still exists. He said it was just shocking that in 2002, there could even be a case before the Supreme Court claiming cross burning by whites in a black family's yard was free speech, or whether or not one of the highest ranking leaders in the US Congress should stay or go after making the remark that Lott did.

But I don't need Southerners themselves to confirm what I already know from visiting family in the South (Georgia), which is that the argument that the world should no longer view the Deep South as the Old South in racial terms, is disingenous.