Rich, if Lott’s remarks today imply that class, not race, was the defining social fact in his upbringing, he’s full of it. I’m from the same general neighborhood as Trent Lott, though of the generation below his. Race was the defining social fact of my upbringing, though it’s so ubiquitous that you don’t notice it until you grow up, move away, and observe your native culture from afar. And the South I grew up in was much more humane and just than Trent Lott’s. I remember being shocked one day, wandering around behind an abandoned building in my hometown, and finding old signs identifying bathrooms for “MEN,” “WOMEN” and “COLORED.” I was just a kid, and God knows not a liberal-minded one, but it shocked me that that sort of thing existed in my hometown — though that building hadn’t been abandoned for all that long. In my first job, at the Baton Rouge Advocate, a black reporter kept on her desk a photocopy of a story from a 1940s edition of the paper. The headline read something like: “BOAT CAPSIZES: Four Men, Two Negroes, Drown.” Trent Lott would have been a child in the era of that newspaper. That’s the mentality he grew up with. All of us are capable of change, and I know many white Southerners of that generation (and my generation, including myself), who are much more enlightened and repentant today than in the past, and grateful for the life-changing lessons along the way. But let’s not falsify history to exonerate ourselves.