Many - perhaps most - of those in the MS Legislature (and in county governments) are the sons and daughters of those who publicly opposed segregation and Civil Rights in the 1960's.

I can never live in MS again, for two reasons. First is my Asian family - I can't allow them to be subjected to the kind of racism my own family there showed them in visits in the 1990's. Second is that having become aware of my family's - and my own - racism beginning in the 1980's, whenever I go there, every time I hear one of my fellow whites speak, I can hear the racism and white privilege that most of them don't even recognize in themselves. Mississippi - and the Delta in particular - is indeed ground zero for racism in America. Someone I spoke to compared me to an ex-smoker who can detect (and gets sickened by) even a whiff of cigarette smoke. I think that's an accurate statement, because it does make me sick to think I was once a part of that.