I would say that this country is still enormously segregated. Wasn't self-segregation the reason for housing randomization at Harvard? Of course, in most places, we can say that it's self-segregation and people could move to a different neighborhood if they wanted to. I would venture to say that that is not the case in Mississippi, at least not in Trent Lott's hometown. From my brief experiences in rural Florida (which was not, by the way, the deep South), racism was just sort of expected. There were areas where black people knew not to go, and there were areas where white people never went. (We sent a bunch of white Washington staffers into some of the black areas to get out the vote, and they were probably some of the only white people who've been to these places in a long time.) Race wasn't talked about too much, but when it was, there were a lot of off-the-cuff comments that I would call racist. One of my co-workers had been invited to a Klan meeting by a girlfriend's father. So I'm sure things are much better now than they were in the 50s, but that doesn't mean they're gone.