Americans long mislocated racism in the South while ignoring northern segregation

Evidence

MOST AMERICANS DID not consider assimilationists to be racists. They did not consider northern segregation and racial disparities to be indicative of racist policies, and the avalanche of antiracist protests for jobs, housing, education, and justice from Boston to Los Angeles in 1963 hardly changed their views on the matter. The eyes of the nation, the world, and American history remained on the supposedly really racist region, the South. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 947

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the reader’s goal of applying Kendi’s three-way scheme — this is the mechanism by which assimilationist northern racism stays invisible while segregationist southern racism dominates the national story.
• QUESTION: Worth testing: does the South-as-real-racism frame persist in how Americans talk about racism today, masking de facto segregationists?