My father always pointed to the urban shitholes black people in the Midwest are likely to reside in as an example of what a waste it has been to spend taxpayer money on housing in these communities. "They don't want it (a middle class life)," he told me when pointing to some of the most segregated communities in the country, like Chicago's South Side, Detroit, or East St. Louis, Illinois. My father was expressing a sentiment popular among many white people: "See what happens when you give them money. They riot." Of course, the reality is that white communities were never faced with the systematic denial of bank loans and insurance necessary to build a middle class life in a community. They were never faced with the systematic denial of essential services, like fire service. In the minds of my father and other Dittoheads, it's a sign of the moral failure of the black community, not racism.

However, I didn't see any lack of desire for a middle class life among the black community of Milwaukee when I participated in a bike race in the redlined area of the city during the Summer of 1995. The neighborhood the race took place in was filled with well-maintained World War II-era homes, not much different from, say, Seattle's Fremont neighborhood, or any area in the small town-turned-suburb I was born in. Yet the nearby business district was a virtual ghost town, filled with empty store fronts, because this community simply can't get its hands on the capital it needs to have a vibrant business district.

White folks in the North and West don't need to be reminded of the 1948 independent presidential campaign of retiring South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond to know of the resistance white people have to granting full citizenship to black people. They didn't need to hear Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott's now famous "slip of the tongue." Lott said basically the same thing about Thurmond 22 years ago during a campaign event for Ronald Reagan. Lott's apologies aside, I don't doubt for a second he really meant what he said when he praised his state's vote for Thurmond in '48 and said the nation would be better off today if Thurmond had been elected president. I don't doubt for a second Lott is expressing the sentiment of a lot of white Southerners. White Southerners certainly can't be called hypocrites for their honesty on the issue of race.

White folks in the Midwest only need to look at themselves in the mirror if they want to find racism in action. Last week President Bush gave Lott a tongue lashing, saying that any suggestion that a return to our nation's segregated past was offensive and wrong. But have we really desegregated ourselves along color lines as a society? I don't think so. If you're looking for a visual metaphor that best describes our nation's racial divide, forget about Atlanta, Memphis, or New Orleans. Take a drive south on the Interstate past the edge of downtown Chicago. While heading southeast, to your left you'll see Manhattan Midwest, home of the new headquarters for Boeing and CEO Phil Condit's $2 million condo. Look over your shoulder to your right and you'll see a Third World society known as Chicago's South Side. It's challenging to find a public housing tower on the South Side that doesn't have a burnt-out section from a previous fire.

The Census Bureau's statistics on race show some of the most segregated cities in the nation are in the Midwest. Topping the list of cities with 100,000 or more residents and the highest percentage of black residents is Gary, Indiana, which is 84 percent black, and Detroit, which is 82 percent black. Cleveland and St. Louis are both 51 percent black. Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio are both about 43 percent black. In my home state of Wisconsin Milwaukee is 37 percent black; 74 percent of Wisconsin's 300,000 black residents reside there. Chicago is about 37 percent black.

These statistics are no accident. They are the product of systematic racism. We don't need to look much further than Seattle and Washington state. Twenty-two percent of Washington state's prison population is black, while blacks make up only three percent of the state's overall population. As with redlining policies that create segregated communities, the black community's disproportionate representation in the prison population is no accident, but a product of blatant racism as well. Well-off white people, like drug addled starlet Winona Ryder or Florida Governor Jeb Bush's daughter Noelle, get wrist slaps, or not even prosecuted at all, for their substance abuse. Yet almost any black person in Ryder's or Noelle Bush's shoes would have had the book thrown at her a long time ago and would be well into a long prison sentence by now.

There are a lot fewer Strom Thurmonds today than there were in 1948. This nation has undergone a social revolution over the past half century, but our governing institutions, our banks, our police departments, and our polling stations have not changed that much. They are as racist as they have ever been and the nicest white person in the world working in them alone isn't going to change them. Only the continued growth of popular movements, like the civil rights movement Thurmond's 1948 campaign was formed in reaction to, will lead to the changes necessary for healing the nation's racial divide.

The issue of race is an occasional unbidden guest at the dinner table in white America. We don't like to even bring up the topic, much less actively advocate for the specific and difficult political decisions that could do a lot to heal the racial divide in this country -- like changing the 100-to-one sentencing disparities for crack and powder cocaine possession, or simply ending the "War On Drugs" altogether.

However, most of white America assumes that the best way to heal the racial divide in this country is to not talk about it. To pretend it doesn't exist. Most of us in white America excuse ourselves from the dinner table the second the nasty "R" word gets brought up. These issues aren't going to go away if we keep pretending they don't exist. A willingness to talk about these issues would at least be a start at trying to resolve them.