Slavery's over, its bias lingers. (Commentary).

I saw a cartoon once that purported to illustrate how America's largest city views the rest of the nation. It showed the continental United States, but with a disproportionately large NEW YORK on one end and LOS ANGELES on the other. The rest of the country was an amorphous, featureless region that was designated "flyover states."

You could use a similar drawing to capture the nation's rather myopic view of African-American history. At one end, you'd have a sign reading SLAVERY, at the other, another reading CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT. And between them, an unknowable expanse. Flyover history.

At least, that's how it feels whenever you assay a serious discussion of, say, affirmative action, the lagging performance of black schoolchildren or the overrepresentation of black males in the criminal justice system. Mention racial bias as a factor in any of those things and invariably some white person -- we're talking decent people, not the idiots with the bed sheets on their heads -- will look up in confusion and say, "But slavery ended a long time ago."

If I could, I'd buy each of those people a copy of the new "Remembering Jim Crow," edited by William Henry Chafe and several others. "Remembering" is a book and, more important, a two-CD set, of oral history straight from the mouths of those who came of age in the segregation era. Eyewitness testimony from men and women reared in the days when drinking water came in black and white.

They talk about Iynchings, of course, the bestial mob murders to which whole families flocked as entertainment. And they discuss the registrars who conspired tomb black people of their right to vote, the mendacity of sharecrop bosses, the facilities that were separate, yet never equal.

But what always gets me as much as any of that is the little cruelties, the tiny insults by which white Americans daily sought to rob black ones of simple personhood. For example, a man on one of the discs relates how, in mentioning a black woman to a white one, he made the mistake of calling the black woman "Miss So-and-so."

The white woman inquired as to what race Miss So-and-so was. When told that she was black, the white woman snapped: "Don't "Miss' her to me, then." Because white people didn't allow the use of that honorific in connection with black women and men.

Some of us like to pretend that there's tremendous distance between those days and these. But listening to the discs, thumbing through the book, I was struck by how little distance there was.

Indeed, those days are as close to me as my mother and father, both born in Mississippi in the middle 1920s. As close as my own birthday, a month after federal troops were called out to quell the integration crisis in Little Rock, Ark. As close as 35 years ago, when there were still laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

So why do some of us treat it as if it were so far removed as to be irrelevant? I think they do so precisely because it is not. Because, somewhere deep, they recognize that it is as near as grandparents, parents and self. Which makes it hard to face without justification, rationalization, defensiveness, guilt. Better to sweep it away.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist with the Miami Herald.