The basic absence of public discussion about it is proof of that. To be sure, the place and time that Lott and Thurmond personified featured overt American apartheid for black people, who suffered economically, educationally, and legally.

Then in the South, if your were white, you were all right. If you were black, you better step back.

There is much truth in this view of the past. But it also blurs the class lines then and now between white people.

This sleight of hand continues. Consider Rush Limbaugh and his largely white audience.

What do they have in common with him when it comes to income? Nevertheless, their common skin color unites them against their nonwhite foes, real and imagined.

Returning to Lott, the prevailing view is that those days of the South’s black/white divide that he supported with Thurmond are history. Moreover, the ideology that justified such oppression is also past, with Lott’s remarks a kind of regrettable slip of the tongue.

But as the great Malcolm X said, when you’re talking about the South, if you’re south of Canada you’re in the South. Lott’s remarks are but the proverbial tip of the national iceberg.

White supremacy, in other words, is central to the nation’s history, from “sea to shining sea.” From the genocide of the indigenous residents to the forced immigration of the African continent’s people, white supremacy was/is the national mythology.

When my grandfather was a child, the ideology of the dominant pigmentation was the “white man’s burden,” with the U.S. military civilizing the brown-skinned residents of the Philippines. They learned about U.S. democracy from the barrel of a gun, the first of many foreign people to receive such violent lessons.

Cut to our current crisis in the Persian Gulf. A revamped supremacist view can be found in the U.S. government’s crusade to bring their idea of democracy to the people of Iraq.

Yes, U.S. foreign policy is partly expressed by Secretary of State Colin Powell, a person of color. This shows what a high priority the Bush administration places on countering the image of white supremacy at home and abroad.

Lott’s remark’s on the spurned glories of the South threatened to partly alter the administration’s orchestration of a benevolent U.S. imperialism in oil-rich Iraq. He had to go, and did depart as Senate leader of the Republican Party.

Seth Sandronsky is an editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento's progressive newspaper. Email: ssandron@hotmail.com

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